Baroque antiquity: archaeological imagination in early modern Europe

Abstract

"Why were seventeenth-century antiquarians so spectacularly wrong? Even if they knew what ancient monuments looked like, they deliberately distorted the representation of them in print. Deciphering the printed reconstructions of Giacomo Lauro and Athanasius Kircher, this pioneer study uncovers an antiquity born with print culture itself and from the need to accommodate competitive publishers, ambitious patrons, and powerful popes. By analyzing the elements of fantasy in Lauro and Kircher's archaeological visions, new levels of meaning appear. Instead of being testimonies of failed archaeology, they emerge as complex architectural messages responding to moral, political, and religious issues of the day. This book combines several histories--print, archaeology, and architecture--in the attempt to identify early modern strategies of recovering lost Rome. Many books have been written on antiquity in the Renaissance, but this book defines an antiquity that is particularly Baroque"--Page i.

Contents

Introduction. Lauro and Kircher -- Ancient Rome's thin lines -- Print antiquarianism -- Seventeenth-century pasts -- Reconstructions and allegory -- Baroque antiquity -- The archaeology of prints. The Print antiquarian -- Palimpsest monuments -- Protected property -- Antiquities without a past -- Custom-made Rome. Customers of printed Rome -- Tourists in a vanished past -- Collectors' Rome -- Prints for princes -- Antiquity in future's guise -- Moral monuments. A moral monument -- Antiquity in emblems -- Temples at the crossroad -- Allegory in architecture -- S. Maria della Pace reconsidered -- The making of a type -- Peter versus Jupiter. God's antiquarians -- The theology of ruins -- S. Peter's on the Capitol -- Peter versus Jupiter -- Father Kircher's retreats. Athanasius Kircher and architectural prints -- Kircher restaurator -- Kircher's Villa of Maecenas -- Viri doctissimi -- A house of scholars -- Christ in Tivoli. Resurrecting Varus's villa -- The Sibyl's shrine -- The architectural history of the Baroque -- Time rebuilt -- As if in a bright mirror -- Conclusion.