The Art of Discovery: Digging into the Past in Renaissance Europe by Maren Elisabeth Schwab and Anthony Grafton

Abstract

Renaissance and early modern antiquarians, such as the baroque polymath Athenaeus Kircher, the figure with which this eloquent book opens, would today be deemed highly interdisciplinary in their approaches. They studied texts, including manuscripts, printed books, and inscriptions. They scrutinized images as well as all kinds of objects from carvings to altarpieces. They examined bones, skulls, and other human remains, and investigated ancient buildings, both intact and ruined. They carried out excavations and experiments. Early antiquarianism was “not a profession but a pursuit” that required knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines (11).This book investigates antiquarian exploration through a series of case studies, most from around 1500. Each begins with digging into the ground or opening a concealed container. These near-contemporary but sometimes geographically distant studies allow consideration of the techniques, practices, and assumptions of early modern antiquarians. Schwab and Grafton cogently argue the interconnectedness of the study of secular antiquities to the study and veneration of ancient relics, both of which “shared focus on tangible objects” and were similar in their methodologies and many of their assumptions (27).This is a book full of bones and corpses. One of the most notable was the uncorrupted body of a young girl exhumed from its resting place on the Appian Way in March 1485 c.e. and then displayed on the Capitoline Hill where throngs of Romans lined up to see it. The problem was that uncorrupted bodies were associated with sainthood, and this ancient corpse clearly was taken from an ancient—pagan—Roman gravesite. Schwab and Grafton’s discussion centers on contemporary deliberations on her possible identity, including the analysis of both inscriptions and classical Latin literature for clues. The crux of the matter is that her identity posed methodological as well as factual problems—how to “set standards for the valid assessment and use of evidence” (101).This concern for the ways in which sixteenth-century antiquarians and scholars struggled to evaluate textual and physical evidence is one of the book’s leitmotifs. One case study concerns the titulus, the inscribed wooden panel attached to the cross on which Jesus died declaring him king of the Jews—a relic preserved in a chest behind a wall in the Roman church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Another case study focuses on the famous statue dug up from a garden in January 1506 known as the Laocoon, now in the Vatican Museum, depicting a father’s anguished struggle to save himself and his sons from an attack by serpents. Debates arose concerning its origin, creation, and resemblance to the statue described by Pliny.Other controversies developed over fragments and wall paintings like those discovered in the underground Domus Aurea, Nero’s palace, explored from the 1470s. How were their colors produced and were such images, called “grotesques,” appropriate as models for then present-day artists? In England, a conflict over who possessed the bones of St. Dunstan led to exhumations by the Abbey of Glastonbury and Canterbury Cathedral, each institution attempting to demonstrate empirically through texts and physical evidence that it was the possessor of the true relics. Finally, in Trier in southwest Germany, the retrieval of the Seamless Robe—the tunic of Jesus, enclosed in the high altar of the cathedral—brought numerous questions concerning its authenticity, the fabric with which it was made, and its intriguing coloration. Investigations included consultations with skilled textile workers and dyers, who disagreed with each other about the nature of the fabric.Schwab and Grafton’s erudite analysis of these debates includes many quotations, meticulously translated with the original versions helpfully supplied in the footnotes. Their fine-grained study musters the same broad range of interdisciplinary sources and skills as that of their early modern subjects. And the kinds of questions asked—what is true and authentic and how can we know it—have particular relevance for our own contemporary world.