Page - 800 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

Chapter 15800 ‘First of all we must ask ourselves who the antiquaries were. I wish I could sim- ply refer to a History of Antiquarian Studies. But none exists’.2 In Momigliano’s day the term antiquary referred to ‘a student of the past who was not quite an historian’. The historian provided a chronological narrative interpreting the course of events—often to do with war and politics—and based his account on a selection of sources relevant to his argument. The antiquary collected and presented systematically and synchronically as many data relevant to a cer- tain historical subject as he could find. His aim was erudition, not the writing of history. A second, related but distinct usage of the term contrasts historian and antiquary according to the type of source material they exploited. The his- torian tended to use mostly written and sometimes oral accounts of events, as well as archival materials; the antiquary concentrated on material remains of the past, such as inscriptions, coins, sculptures, paintings, buildings, arms, utensils and whatever other relics he dug up, sometimes literally, making him the precursor of the modern archaeologist; but he would occasionally also make use of archival material. The antiquary focused on the traditions of the distant past, studying religious and political institutions of earlier phases of a civilisation. He did this in part for their intrinsic interest, but also to stress their ‘antique’ dignity and value, and to serve as a moral example for posterity. The Renaissance rekindled the interest in such studies, which had never quite died out: the notion of the “antiquarius” as a lover, collector and student of ancient traditions and remains—though not an historian—is one of the most typical concepts of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanism.3 Such passionate interest in remnants of the past could easily lead to severe criticism from sceptical spirits. An example is the lemma Robertus Stephanus’ Thesaurus linguae Latinae of 1543 devoted to the term ‘Antiquarius’: here one meaning of the term is someone who is overly fond of ancient or old-fashioned formula’s of speech, i.e. habitually uses pretentious, tasteless or obsolete phrases. 2 Momigliano 1950, p. 286. Since Momigliano antiquarianism has developed into a flourishing specialism within the humanities: aspects have been treated by Eric Cochrane’s Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance: (Cochrane 1981), in particular Ch. 15; Francis Haskell’s History and its Images (Haskell 1993), Philip Jacks’ The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Jacks 1993), and in various collections of conference papers and collaborative studies, first of all many essays in the three volumes of Memoria dell’Antico nell’arte Italiano, edited by Salvatore Settis (Memoria Dell’Antico 1984– 1986) and further Crawford/Ligota 1995; Miller 2007 and Miller/Louis 2012. 3 Momigliano 1950, p. 290.