Special Collections- Vatican Film Library : Archaeology

RR, Plate 72: Giovanni de Matociis (aka Mansionario) wrote the Historia imperialis, a biographical compilation of Roman emperors that began with Augustus. He shows a real interest in trying to recreate ancient Roman life in three dimensions, as is clear from his stiff but fascinating marginal drawings of emperors' heads and a Roman circus.

RR, Plate 73: Cristoforo Buondelmonti dedicated this treatise on his adventurous exploration of the islands of the Aegean to Cardinal Giordano Orsini in 1420. The illustrations suggest the nostalgic and obsessive love for the classical past.

RR, Plate 74: In his view of Chios and Mytilene, Buondelmonti shows the site where he saw "the tomb of the bard Homer" and where, as he knew, Sappho, Theophrastus, and other distinguished ancients had lived.

RR, Plate 75: This splendid miniature of Poggio represents one of the most adventurous of all the 15th century explorers of the classical past. In this book he makes the theme of fortune's power to destroy the pretext for a detailed firsthand survey of Rome's ruins.

RR, Plate 76: Poggio copied down in notebooks inscriptions from the dozens of Roman monuments which survived. In time, the inscriptions would prove to be among the richest sources of information for many areas of Roman history, from social life and funeral customs to religious beliefs and political propaganda. He was very proud of his firsthand record of these materials, of which this manuscript preserves fragments.

RR, Plate 77: Pomponio Leto lectured in Rome on many classical texts. The student who copied this manuscript had a lively talent for drawing, seen here in his sketches of the Baths of Diocletian. As a whole the lectures show the rich way in which Roman texts and antiquities illuminated each other in the interdisciplinary scholarship of the Roman humanists.

RR, Plate 78: These fragments of what seems to have been Leto's field notebook contain his notes on an inscription including an ancient Roman calendar on stone. This calendar depicted the signs of the zodiac through which the sun passed, gave the lengths of days and nights, listed the agricultural tasks and religious festivals appropriate to each month, and provided other important information, like the dates of the solstices and equinoxes.

RR, Plate 79: The Menologium was printed, in a little brochure issued without a colophon or other indication of date, in Rome early in the 16th century. The printer drew his text from a manuscript collection of inscriptions compiled by one of the most expert specialist antiquaries of the late fifteenth century. Printing made these texts accessible to a far larger circle of scholars than scribal efforts could.

RR, Plate 80: This is the first published collection of Roman inscriptions. It received a papal privilege in 1517 and was printed in 1521. It includes elaborate woodblock illustrations of prominent ancient monuments. Both illustrations and texts were marred by many errors, and another scholar drew up a long list of errata which appeared with the text.

RR, Plate 94: In this copy a Roman scholar gives a firsthand account of how the remains of Augustus's huge sundial were discovered early in the sixteenth century, by a baker digging a latrine.

RR, Plate 95: This romantic, pseudo-Egyptian image was widely reused in the sixteenth century. The book it came from, the Hypnerotomachia, was a fanciful, romantic text, in a strange mixture of Italian, Latin, scrambled Hebrew, and imaginary hieroglyphs. Its illustrations, drawn in a skillful, austere style that seemed authentically classical to many readers, incorporated genuine Roman ruins and reliefs. The book did much to spread a taste for Egyptian relics and to heighten scholars' and artists' interest in the decipherment of hieroglyphs.

RR, Plate 96: Pierio Valeriano, one of the most cultivated Roman scholars, studied and edited Egyptian hieroglyphic lore exhaustively. His book, derived from late Greek sources, tries to argue that the symbolic wisdom of the Egyptians basically agrees with the fundamental teachings of Christian theology and that the hieroglyphs were relics of a separate Revelation. On display is a portrait of Valeriano.

RR, Plate 97: Monjosieu, a French antiquary who spent time in Rome late in the 16th century, here reproduced a view of the Vatican obelisk in its original position, tot he side of Saint Peter's.

RR, Plate 98:

RR, Plate 99: Another obelisk, found outside the city on the Appian Way, became the centerpiece of Baroque Rome's most spectacular space--the Piazza Navona. Borromini's lovely but plain design was rejected in favor of the splendid one by Bernini, one of his most astonishing creations.

RR, Plate 100: The book presented Kircher's interpretation of the hieroglyphs of the obelisk found in Appian Way, with rich, but necessarily fantastic, documentation.

RR, Plate 81:Flavio's compilation Roma instaurata, displayed here, provided the first systematic and well-documented guide to the ruins of the city. The pages shown describe the Baths of Diocletian.

RR, Plate 82: This book offered a wealth of information, practical instruction, and aesthetic principles to the patrons and architects who would rear the city palaces, country villas, and domed churches of the 16th century.

RR, Plate 83: A short treatise written by Alberti describing how to use a mathematical instrument to measure the distances between the most important Roman buildings and to plot them on a circular map.

RR, Plate 84: This panoramic view of Rome may have been the first to use Alberti's method. It was centered on the Monte Mario, behind the Vatican, and locates principally such Christian monuments as Ara Coeli.

RR, Plate 85: Plans like this one, along with the maps that naturally accompanied the Geography, helped to make the book one of the best-sellers of 15th century Europe. In this plan the Castel Sant'Angelo, the Borgo, and Saint Peter's appear at bottom right, separated from the city by the Tiber. Within the city proper, the ancient monuments rise, without modern buildings and urban sprawl. The Pantheon, the Forum, the Capitoline and Palatine hills, and the Colosseum dominate the central space.

RR, Plate 86: This is an image of the earliest stage in the development of Rome. Though the unknown artist tried to represent the small compass and exact contours of the early city, and labeled the Forum and other places of note, the crenelated walls and towers reveal the limits of his imagination. Unfortunately the text he illustrated was even less accurate; it was a forgery by the papal theologian Giovanni Nanni of Viterbo.

RR, Plate 87: Here Ligorio took details from surviving classical reliefs and worked them up into a comprehensive, imaginative picture of a pagan sacrifice, consistently classical in both its style of representation and the clothing and objects shown.

RR, Plate 88: This image shows the ancient city not as a bare stage decorated by the great ruins and buildings that survived into modern times, but as a living community, its public spaces, columns, and colonnades separated by block on block of private residences. This is a 12 part map.

RR, Plate 89: Printed collections like this one by Bartolomeo Marliani presented the chief antiquities of Rome to a European public. In this case we see the Laocoon, a famous group of sculptures discovered early in the sixteenth century and displayed in the Vatican gardens.

RR, Plate 90: The many views of Rome published by Etienne Dupérac late in the sixteenth century, like this splendid, nostalgic view of the Circus Maximus and the Palatine, both provided newly accurate visual information and conveyed a rich sense of the decayed state in which Rome's antiquities lay.

RR, Plate 91: This document is one of the monuments of historical criticism. Lorenzo Valla here attacks the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery which supported the papacy's claim to supreme political authority in Europe. Valla shows that the text could not have been written in the fourth century, the age of Constantine the Great, by revealing many anachronisms in form and content.

RR, Plate 92: Ambrogio Traversari, the great expert on Christian Greek among the early humanists, produced this new Latin translation of the Greek original. Pope Nicholas V was delighted by it. In his colophon, Traversari thanks God for helping him complete his translation.

RR, Plate 93: This notebook was made by no fewer than five artists working under the direction of an expert on early Christianity, Alfonso Chacon, in the late sixteenth century. Inspired by the need to defend Catholicism against Protestant attacks, Roman scholars studied the early Christian art of the catacombs. They identified some basic themes and conventions of early Christian art, such as the frequent representation of Christ as a shepherd.