Invented Antiquities
Anthony Grafton, 27 July 2017
Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe
by Victor Plahte Tschudi.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £64.99, September 2016,978 1 107 14986 1 Show More
by Victor Plahte Tschudi.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £64.99, September 2016,
“... In 1661 Athanasius Kircher SJ made an archaeological discovery. He had gone to Tivoli, a town of villas and baths east of Rome, to restore his health and gather material for a book on the topography and history of the Lazio region. He was nearly sixty. Walking in the hills with a friend, he found a ruined church on a mountain. As he explored the ruin, he came upon a marble tablet with the inscription: ‘This is the holy place where St Eustachius was converted to Christianity ... ”