History of Arts

Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum includes an astonishing number of images of small antiquities relative to contemporary books or to other collections of drawings. This peculiar feature reflects the extensive presence of such objects in private collections rather than an antiquarian tradition of studies, which didn’t yet exist in the 1620s. The drawings are of the greatest importance for our knowledge of 17th century collections. In fact small objects were rarely listed in inventories and, if mentioned, are now difficult to retrace in their present location. The essay aims to illustrate a case among the 17th century collections documented in the Paper Museum: the cabinet of curiosities of cardinal Flavio Chigi. Thanks to the original numbering of the sheets, it is possible to recognize a sequence of drawings made after the Cardinal’s objects and to compare them with the inventory of his collection. The Paper Museum drawings thus give the widest visual documentation of Flavio’s collection. Some of the objects can now be traced in their modern location, especially in the Museo Archeologico in Bologna.

Documentary sources reveal that ancient lamps have been widely collected by antiquarians, men of letters and curieux since the Cinquecento, but unlike antiquities such as coins or inscriptions, it was only in the following century that they began to be studied by scholars and represented in images. The pres- ent essay traces the history of the ‘discovery’ of ancient lamps by antiquarians, focusing on the earliest printed books in which they were published and discussed, and exploring the increasing importance of illustrations in these texts in the attempt to understand how they were interpreted. In a period spanning seventy years, from Liceti (1621) to Bellori (1691), lamps lost their magical, ritual and funerary mean- ings to become objects bearing scenes which provided a key to the myths, rituals, gods, and everyday life of antiquity, thus offering the new century an exceptional corpus of images and iconographies to be explored.

Cassiano's Antichità Diverse album survives almost intact in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. It is a compendium of pen-and-wash drawings of Roman antiquities, including jewellery, amulets, weights and measures, vases and lamps, tripods, statuettes and reliefs. Many of the drawings record the collection in which the objects were then to be found, for they were the subject of much antiquarian study and debate in the early seventeenth century.

Among the countless researches carried out by the French antiquarian Nicolas-Fabri de Peiresc, numismatics played a very important role; coins are one of the recurring topics in his correspondance and his papers are full of notes, drawings, inventories dealing with their iconography, weight, inscriptions, etc. Nonetheless, a general study devoted to this aspect of his activity is still lacking; this is probably due both to the great amount of material, still unpublished for the greatest part and divided into several institutions all over Europe, and to the apparently un-sistemathic method of Peiresc, which at a first sight makes it difficult to follow his investigations. This gap is neither going to be filled by this lecture of course, nor by the book I had the pleasure to publish together with Veronica Carpita, under the direction of Francesco Solinas, about the correspondance between Peiresc and the italian antiquarian Lelio Pasqualini; anyway, the chance to study in depth a single exchange of letters and to concentrate on a defined bulk of documents has proved an useful way to study his approach towards ancient coins and to follow closely and step-by-step the development of some of the researches of the most influential antiquarian of his time. In addition, the book has offered a chance to think about the value of the correspondance in itself, as a means of communication and for communicating coins in particular.