Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archaologie des 17. Jahrhunderts.

Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archaologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Romische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 28.) Munich: Hirmer, 1999. 226 pls. + 439 pp. DM 268. ISBN: 3-7774-7750-8.

This is an important book. In the last decade or so there has been renewed attention to the antiquarian culture of early modern Europe. Most of this work has been done by art historians. This is itself telling, reflecting the partly submerged genealogy that leads from early modern antiquaries to post-modern professors of the humanities. The images that the antiquaries collected to help study antiquity are now studied by moderns more interested in images than antiquity. This split is itself a consequence of the dissolution of antiquarian, pre-disciplinary, polymathy into its constitutive parts; to historians and classicists is delegated the study of content, to art historians that of form.

In the work of the last decade no one historical figure has occupied a more prominent place in the scholarship on antiquarianism than Cassiano dal Pozzo, Nicolas Poussin's Roman friend. Conferences, collections of essays (Quaderni Puteani), exhibitions, and an ambitious and lavish program to publish his "Paper Museum" testify to the importance now attached to him, and to the "type" he embodies. That so many scholars, from so many different disciplinary corners but predominantly from art history, are now working on antiquaries and antiquarianism suggests that times are changing, and some of those divisions between form and content are being overcome.

Ingo Herklorz's new book is in almost equal parts about Cassiano and about his world. It is the comprehensive monograph that those who have been following the Cassiano industry have long awaited. Its first part is about the man and his world, the second about the man and his work. There is, throughout, attention to the specificity of Cassiano in his Roman context. If the first half offers its charms to those wanting to know more about some of its lesser-known denizens, men like Girolamo Aleandro, Lelio Pasqualini or Lucas Holstenius, the second half of the book -- or rather the second part of the second half -- will be required reading for anyone interested in the history of antiquarianism.

There are, then, two books to be reviewed here. The first is about Cassiano and his social circle. Here one would want to emphasize the importance of both the narrow focus and the wide. Herklotz maps out the learned prosopography of Barberini Rome with great economy and deftness: the relationship of Cassiano to the Academia dei Lincei, to his patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and to his fellow (but socially inferior) scholars in the Barberini famiglia. Perhaps nowhere does Herklotz better delineate the specific character of learned life in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century than by way of an extended three-way comparison of Cassiano, his patron, and their mutual friend, the Provencal antiquary, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Observations about the difference between Barberini and Peiresc as patrons, and between Cassiano and Peiresc as scholars, reflect the author's deep immersion in the material. The strain -- but also the opportunities -- of being a courtier shaped learned life in Rome. To this was added the insistent imperative of demonstrating the vitality of the early Church by its Counter-Reformation descendents, among whose proponents few were louder than Cassiano's boss, who was also the Pope's nephew. This alone, even without the long hours these learned courtiers had to waste waiting in cold corridors for their masters to emerge, would have been enough to stifle wide-ranging inquiry.

The second part of the book offers a genealogy of Cassiano's focus on ancient manners and customs (mores et instituta). Those interested less in the book's hero than in his kind of heroism, namely the history of antiquarianism, must read these chapters (9-13). This book-within-a-book charts the strands -- ethnographic, epigraphic, monographic, jurisprudential and visual -- that fed Cassiano's project of "eine samtliche Lebensbereiche umfassende Zivilisationsgeschichte" (185). The "Zeugnisse der Sachkultur" -- he also refers to "Objektikonographie" (154) -- defines an approach to the study of the past that looked at things, and especially those things overlooked by historians typically more concerned with rhetorically-driven didactic discussions of politics and war, as evidence of what the past was really like. Herodotus and especially Varro were important ancient authorities. But Herklotz makes clear on several occasions that the decisive steps towards this new kind of cultural history (he refers always to " zivilisationsgeschichte") were taken in the sixteenth century, by the leading figures in the Farnese Circle, Pirro Ligorio, Onophrio Panvinio and Fulvio Orsini. Other important developments occurred in Padua and Paris. Herklotz presents Cassiano as the heir of these different intellectual practices. The leading accounts of this story in English are by Arnaldo Momigliano and, more recently, Francis Haskell. At several points and in small ways Herklotz distinguishes his account from theirs, But there is a certain hesitation here, as if the author realized that he was on to something even bigger than Cassiano, and drew back. This is only to say that a very good book could have been even better -- if there were two of them.