Page - 801 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 2

801Student of Antiquity But this is a very specific use of the term. The very fact that several individuals such as Strada were proud to consider themselves ‘antiquaries’, show that such a negative connotation was in fact rare.4 The second significance given by Stephanus is much more general: ‘Anti- quaries are also called those who are assiduous students and experts of Antiq- uity’. So the word antiquarian, used both as a noun and as an adjective, could very generally indicate someone interested and, or knowledgeable in ancient things, including the writings of the past. In this sense the Renaissance human- ists all were ‘antiquarians’: Stephanus did not distinguish between students of the texts and students of the material remains, and that distinction would have made no sense to a Renaissance antiquary. Though doubtless there were many scholars exclusively devoting themselves to literary testimonials of the past, there were no antiquaries exclusively studying its material remains. After all their interest in such objects was kindled by what they had read in the ancient historians; they needed the texts to identify and explain the objects, and used the objects to interpret or even correct the textual traditions. When Antonio Agustín speaks of Lazius as ‘Volfango è molto antiquario, et buona persona et dotta’, he used it in this general sense—perhaps even implying some of the positive moral qualities the term also could denote, as ‘representing the simple virtues of the Ancients’. Yet we will see by the very example of Wolfgang Lazius and Jacopo Strada that in the sixteenth century the study of the material remains did develop into a specialized field of expertise. In the Renaissance the term ‘Antiquity’ most often implied ‘classical’ Antiq- uity, the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome; but that is not self-evident from Stephanus’ lemma. In fact many antiquaries followed the precept of the classical study of ‘antiquitates’ in also devoting attention to other civilizations and epochs, in particular to the past of their own home towns, fatherlands or peoples. One example is the self-styled antiquarius John Leland, who laid the foundations of British historiography under the aegis of Henry viii. Certainly interest in the one did not exclude a lively interest in the other, witness the various references to Spanish history in Antonio Agustín’s correspondence.5 That Leland styled himself ‘antiquarius’ implies that he must have had a clear concept of its meaning and that he expected others to share this—an 4 S.v. in: Robertus Stephanus, Dictionarium seu latinae linguae thesaurus non singulas modo dictiones continens sed integras quoque latine et loquendi et scribendi formulas (etc.), Editio secunda, Tomus 1, Parisiis (Robertus Stephanus), 1543. For other examples of the use of the word, see Momigliano 1950, p. 290, n. 1. 5 Cf. his discussion of the origin of the title of grandee of Spain in his letters to Onufrio Pan- vinio of 14 and 28 August 1557: Agustín 1980, nrs. 185–186.