FAUNO, Lucio. [with] LIGORIO, Pirro.

Description

Excellent copies of these early, understudied guides to ancient Rome. This genre originated in the late C15, when printers like Stephan Plannck and Sigismund Mayr issued regular ‘indulgentiae’ or short pamphlets on Roman churches and relics, interspersed with historical accounts, for pilgrims visiting the stations marked by the indulgence they had purchased (Schudt, ‘Guide di Roma’, 19-26). The present guides added to this model the antiquarian influence of Flavio Biondo’s C15 ‘Roma instaurata’—a reconstruction of ancient Roman topography before Christianity. Lucio Fauno (d. c.1552) was an Italian antiquary and translator. His ‘Delle antichità’, of which the ‘Compendio’ is an abridgement, begins with an account of the origins of Rome from Romulus; it proceeds with an examination of the city gates and the roads that cross them, the Campidoglio, Aventino and Esquilino hills, whilst lingering on the most important surrounding ancient monuments, and historical narratives connected to the area, from the Foro Traiano to the Pantheon, the Baths of Caracalla and Augustus’s Mauseoleum. Fauno also mentioned an amulet with invocations to the angelic tetrarchy, found in 1544 in the tomb of Maria, wife to Onorius, Emperor of the West, discovered in the Vatican chapel of St Petronilla. Pirro Ligorio (1512/13-83) was an Italian painter, antiquarian and architect. Written in an informal and engaging tone, his ‘Libro delle antichità’ is organised in very short sections devoted to a gate, a hill or a monument. Each is devised to challenge, in anecdotical form—with incipits like ‘Strange and utterly false is the idea that…’, ‘How wrong are people who believe that…’—received historical information which has proven incorrect, asking visitors to think critically. For instance, concerning the traditional belief that the Mausoleum of Augustus has 12 doors, Ligorio writes: ‘Why following authorities blindly, if we see with our own eyes that the Mausoleum has only one, not sundry, doors?’ A remarkably fresh and clean collection of three important works for the development of the early modern fascination with Roman ruins.