Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe

ISBN-13: 9781107149861 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 320 str.

Victor Plahte Tschudi

Opis

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 pioneering study uncovers an antiquity born with print culture itself and from the need to accommodate competitive publishers, ambitious patrons and powerful popes. By analysing 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.

Recenzje

'One of the many virtues of Victor Plahte Tschudi's book is that it takes Kircher's efforts in Christian archaeology seriously, and integrates them into a larger story: the story of what the author calls 'baroque archaeology', which flourished in Rome from around 1580 to 1680.' Anthony Grafton, London Review of Books

Spis treści

Introduction; 1. The archaeology of prints; 2. Custom-made Rome; 3. Moral monuments; 4. Peter versus Jupiter; 5. Father Kircher's retreats; 6. Christ in Tivoli.