Baroque Antiquity
Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe

This book explains how Baroque antiquarians distorted images of Roman monuments and sacrificed archaeological truth to accommodate popes and princes.

Victor Plahte Tschudi (Author)

9781107149861, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 September 2016

320 pages, 100 b/w illus. 8 colour illus.
26.2 x 18.8 x 2 cm, 0.88 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], History of architecture [AMX], History of art: ancient & classical art,BCE to c 500 CE [ACG]