In April and May 1764 Edward Gibbon visited Turin. He admired the fertile plains of Piedmont, examined churches and palaces, reviewed the royal guards and was revolted by the servility of the courtiers. A long visit to the new Cabinet of Antiquities gave him the chance to appreciate sculptures and other antiquities, including a Roman shield, a wild boar carved from marble and a âfoudre de fer taillèè en zig zagâ. It also enabled him to savor the qualities of the genial antiquarian Giuseppe Bartoli, who was responsible for the fine design of the Cabinet. Gibbon found him âa bit of a charlatan, but very learnedâ. The most memorable hours of all were spent in the Treasury of the Archives. There Gibbon had the chance to see the Mensa Isiaca, the inlaid bronze tablets whose exotic decorations had obsessed generations of Egyptomaniac humanists. He compared it with the edition and commentary that Lorenzo Pignoria had issued in 1605. Like Bartoli, he found that Giacomo Francoâs engravings of the original were faulty. Gibbon also took the opportunity to examine the celebrated 4th-century manuscript of Lactantius, whose distinctive script he described with care. Yet his contact with these charismatic objects left him uninspired. He concluded that Egypt, âthough immensely curious, is too distant, too obscure and too enigmatic to interest me greatlyâ. And though he carefully noted the date of the codex of Lactantius, he misread its subscription.1
One set of texts, however, both fascinated Gibbon and fully engaged his attention: the thirty folio volumes of Pirro Ligorioâs manuscripts. The English traveler came to this dizzyingly rich collection of texts and images well equipped to study it critically. He had read Ezechiel Spanheimâs 1664 dissertation on coins, which drew on Ligorian âmonumentaâ that had since passed from the library of Christina of Sweden into the Vatican. His all-seeing eye took in everything: the blue paper, the quality of Ligorioâs handwriting, and the distinctiveness of his Italian, written in âun style qui nâest quâà luiâ. Gibbon also knew the conventional wisdom about Ligorio. Though not very learned, Ligorio âpreserved for us the memory of a great many things that were lost after his timeâ. Yet many reproached him for his lack of âfidelitéâ, and âfor inventing monuments that he did not really knowâ.
In the end, though, Gibbon trusted his own judgment, and he set out to apply it to the source before him. Unlike Muratori, one of his favorite authorities, and Cardinal Noris, he concluded that he viewed Ligorioâs immense compendium of Roman antiquities with approval. In the manuscripts he found âsigns of candor that predispose me in his favorâ:
I see a man who often doubts if he has read correctly; who leaves obvious errors in the manuscripts, only noting by a sic that he had noticed them; and who leaves blank spaces that it would have been very easy to fill.
Pressing his analysis further, Gibbon argued that as a âcompilerâ Ligorio had no system, to support which he might have invented or distorted individual monuments. Another sign of truthfulness was his custom of identifying the city, the house and even the âcabinetâ where he had seen a particular antiquity. True, Ligorio reproduced medals that he had not seen. But he had grasped the importance of ancient city medals long before the French antiquary Claude Gros de Boze. His preface, in which he thanked those who had helped him, showed that his friends had been âthe most learned Italians of his timeâ.2 Antiquarianism mattered to Gibbon: reading their work in print helped to make him a scholar, and their practices and conclusions provided him with the solid foundations on which he built his great history of Romeâs fall.3 Ligorio, in his view, was a distinguished practitioner of the antiquarianâs trade.
In this caseâas in the immeasurably larger one of the Roman EmpireâGibbon faced problems that still confront us now. How should Ligorio be understood? How can we set him into context? How should we assess his practices and conclusions? How far can we trust anything he wrote or drew? Scholars in many fields have addressed these questions in recent years. The studies that follow make the rich Ligorian scholarship created in the last generation, often in Italian and German, accessible for the first time. They trace Ligorioâs life and explicate his work with learning, precision and clarity. They recreate the many worlds Ligorio moved throughâfrom that of his little-studied Neapolitan youth to that of Roman antiquarianism and architecture in the high summer of the Roman Counter-Reformation. A number of them show himâas Gibbon saw himâreproducing monuments with that painstaking care for apparently insignificant details and amassing textual evidence with the combination of broad, original erudition and silent consultation of secondary sources characteristic of major antiquarians in the 16th century. Others evoke his powers of invention. A number of them sharpen our eye for his hand as a draftsman. All of them set Ligorio into the magnificently varied crowd of scholars and artists, antiquities dealers and architects who were his helpers, his advisers and his critics, and help to define the immense corpus of buildings, monuments and objects that he saw and texts that he read. Disagreements and difficulties of many kinds remain. These essays make clear just how difficult it is to work out exactly what Ligorio meant when he claimed that a monument or an antiquity was authentic and that he had reproduced it accurately. But they also reveal that Gibbon was right: Ligorio was a man of real learning and scholarly instinctsâeven if he was also, at times, less scrupulous than one might wish both in recording and in selling antiquities.
Georges Bonnard, ed., Gibbonâs Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 24 April to 2 October 1764 (London: 1961), pp. 11â44.
Bonnard, ed., Gibbonâs Journey, pp. 28â30.
Arnaldo Momigliano, âGibbonâs Contribution to Historical Method,â Historia 2, 4 (1954), 450â63; Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).