Roman Antiquities in Renaissance France, 1515–65

Richard Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367882204
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317061861
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Making use of new and original material based on firsthand sources, this book interrogates the vogue for collecting, discussing, depicting, and putting to political and cultural use Roman antiquities in the French Renaissance. It surveys a range of activity from the labours of collectors and patrons to royal entries, considers attacks on the craze for the antique, and sets literary instances among a much wider spectrum of artistic endeavour. While Renaissance collecting and antiquarianism have certainly been the object of critical scrutiny, this study brings disparate fields into a single focus; and it examines not only areas of antiquarian expertise and interest (such as statues, coins, and books), but also important individual historical figures. The opening chapters deal with the role played in Rome by French ambassadors, who sent back antiques to collectors at court, who in the person of Jean Du Bellay, undertook excavations, and assembled a major personal collection, which was housed in a new villa in the ruined Baths of Diocletian. The volume includes a valuable appendix, which presents in transcription catalogues of the collections of Cardinal Jean du Bellay.

Chapter 1
Early Antiquarian Taste, 1500–1530

1. Foreign Humanists in France

Before the French took an interest in the antiquities of Italy, foreigners were already aware of classical remains in France, and were recording inscriptions and monuments. Two travel journals survive, which are contemporary with the Italian campaign of Charles VIII. The first is that of the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo, who travelled in the south of France during 1494–96, accompanying cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, and making drawings of the monuments he saw, which are preserved in three notebooks.1 He visited Arles, ‘edove è uno belisimo Guliseo’ [where there is a most beautiful amphitheatre], of which he sketched an elevation of the facade;2 in Orange he did both a plan and a reconstructed elevation of the theatre,3 and made several drawings of the triumphal arch (which he imagines freed from its mediæval accretions), including one of an attic relief;4 in Aix-en-Provence he deduced that the Palais des Comtes, of which he gives a plan and a restored elevation, was of Roman origin, and that it had been both a temple and a fortress.5 He is also one of the few visitors to have described and drawn the remains of the Roman baths at Cimiez behind Nice.6

The second traveller is a Bavarian doctor, Hieronymus Münzer, who had already made a journey to Italy in 1484, when the plague broke out in Nüremberg; a fresh outbreak gave the brave physician the excuse for another journey during 1494–95, this time through France and into Spain and Portugal.7 In Lyon he noted the ‘vetustissime ruine antiquorum’ [very old ruins of the ancients] on the hill of Fourvière, and also reported that the monastery of Saint-Irénée contained marbles and other monuments, which bore witness to its antiquity.8 Passing through Vienne, Valence, Aix and Marseille, he recorded no antiquities; but arriving in Arles he observed ‘sepulturas innumeras’ [countless tombs], that is, the rows of burials in the Alyscamps, including some very large sarcophagi:

Sunt autem urne quadro et durissimo lapide sculpte, ita quod corpora X aut 14 in unam includi possent et lapideis ostiis obdurate; sunt urne innumere ac si perpetuari vellent, non curantes tempori nihil posse resistere quod omnia rodat.9

[There are also tombs carved in hard square stone, which can hold ten to fourteen bodies, secured with stone lids; the tombs are numberless, and though they seek to be eternal, out of neglect nothing can resist time, which devours everything.]

He also visited and described the amphitheatre, which he called

theatrum olim a Romanis exquisitissime fabrefactum. Est planicies magna in girum et circulum 62 arcubus ex maximo et durissimo quadraque lapide circumdata, plena testudinibus et fornicibus, ut theatrum Verone et Collosseus Rome constructus; inestimabiles sine dubio opes pro hoc tam stupendo opere sunt exposite …10

[the theatre once exquisitely fashioned by the Romans. It is a large space surrounded by a circle of 62 (in fact, 60) arches made of large very hard stones and blocks, full of vaults and archways, built like the theatre in Verona or the Coliseum in Rome; huge sums were undoubtedly spent on this stupendous construction …].

He also provided interesting testimony of the contemporary use of the monument for slum habitation: ‘hodie autem pauperes homines hunc theatrum inhabitant, in fornicibus et planicie casulas habentes’11 [but today poor people live in this theatre, having their little homes in the arches and the arena]. Passing through Narbonne, Münzer observed the massive city walls, which he astutely identified, on the basis of parallels seen in Italy, as of Roman workmanship: ‘adeo fortis, adeo spissus est de maximis quadratis lapidibus, ut quasi similem theatro Verone Italie crederes’ [it is so strong and solid, built from huge square stones, that it seems almost like the theatre at Verona in Italy]. Excavation has confirmed Münzer’s testimony, revealing walls 3m thick, and built of huge blocks of stone.

A later traveller in France at this period was J. Lopis Stunica, a Spaniard who journeyed to Rome in 1521. Passing through Arles, he visited the amphitheatre, which ‘arenas hodie vulgus vocat’ [the people today call the arena], and he viewed in more detail the Alyscamps, which contained not only early Christian burials but also ‘nonnulla gentilium sepulchra cum latinis inscriptionibus maiori ex parte vetustate consumptis’ [some pagan tombs with Latin inscriptions largely eroded by age], of which he quoted one on a marble urn, the first record of this epitaph.12 At Aix he noticed nothing classical, but in Fréjus he made one of the earliest recorded observations of the amphitheatre and of the aqueduct: ‘ingens theatrum maxima ex parte collapsum habens: ab oriente vero aquæ ductum longissimi tractus pluribus extantibus adhuc fornicibus pro loci qualitate nunc celsis nunc etiam depressis’13 [there is an enormous largely collapsed theatre: to the East long stretches of aqueduct with many arches still standing, some high some low depending on the contour]. At Antibes he saw various antiquities, ‘et in primis theatrum ad occidentalem oppidi partem penitus iam collapsum’ [especially a theatre to the west of the town, almost wholly collapsed], again a valuable testimony of this now-vanished amphitheatre. After passing through Nice, he visited La Turbie, whose name he correctly identified as a deformation of the word tropæum: there are few records in this period of observation of the ruined monument, hence the significance of this testimony, which is accompanied by the text of the long inscription it bore, quoted from Pliny rather than from the by then probably unreadable original.14

For a number of classical sites in France, there are entries in Italian and German syllogai of inscriptions to be found there before any record is made of them by French scholars. For Lyon we find eight inscriptions in the sylloge of Michele Ferrarini (ob. c. 1492), and the astonishing number of forty-six in the third sylloge of Fra Giocondo (c. 1502), both earlier than Champier’s collection of 1507.15 For Nîmes we find a couple in Giocondo’s collection, thirty-five in the papers of Mariangelo Accursio (1489–1546), and a large number in those of Bonifacius Amerbach, who copied them in the city in 1524.16 Fra Giocondo included other French inscriptions in his third recension, one in Nevers, two in Vienne and one in Grenoble, the last having already been published by Pomponio Leto in 1500, whilst Accursio gave eight in Vienne.17 Hubert-Thomas Leodius (1495/7–1555/56), in company with his master the future Elector Palatine Frederick II, visited Bordeaux in 1526,18 when he admired the ruins of the Palais Tutelle,19 and recorded nine inscription...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Early Antiquarian Taste, 1500–1530
• 2 French Diplomats in Italy, 1530–50
• 3 French Diplomats in Italy, 1550–60
• 4 Collections at Court
• 5 French Artists in Italy, 1530–65
• 6 Antiquarian Art
• 7 Triumphal Entries, 1531–65
• 8 Fiction and the Antique
• 9 The Poetry of Ruins
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Catalogues of Jean Du Bellay’s Collection
• Bibliography
• Index