Tolomei’s Project for a Planned Renaissance of Roman Architecture—Unfinished?

Abstract

THE FAMOUS LETTER WRITTEN BY THE SIENESE HUMANIST , philologist, politician, and—later—bishop Claudio Tolomei in 1542 and published in 1547 contains a vast program of at least twenty-four books to be published by a network of learned men in Rome dealing with ancient Roman architecture and its contexts andmeanings. While this letter has been reprinted several times and referenced often, few have taken seriously what Tolomei originally wrote. For instance, he claims that the entire program could be finished in less than three years. However, modern research has accepted only one book and two related groups of archaeological drawings after tombstones and sarcophagi as resulting from the work of Tolomei’s network. Recent research instead suggests that Tolomei was right and that not only can large numbers of still understudied sources be traced to his network but also many of the famous early printed books on Roman antiquity can be as well. Following the systematic order of Tolomei’s letter, this article will give a preliminary overview of those sources and books which can be attributed—even still somewhat hypothetically—to Tolomei’s network of artists and scholars, given that they fit so well into the program’s descriptions. They should therefore be seen as concrete re-