The Forma Urbis Romae before Nolli: Antiquarian Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries William Stenhouse

The fate of the fragments of the forma urbis Romae, the marble plan of Rome commissioned between 203 and 211 CE in the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus, presents an awkward problem for anyone trying to understand early modern antiquarian scholarship. 1 Most of the fragments were discovered in excavations in the Roman Forum in 1562, at a time when scholars were increasingly looking towards non-textual evidence in their efforts to understand the ancient world. Agents of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, then the most distinguished patron of scholarship on classical remains in Rome, removed the fragments to his collection, where some of the most prominent antiquarians of the day recorded them. But then, they more or less disappeared. Little is known of their whereabouts until shortly before 1655, when some were used in the construction of a giardino segreto at the back of the Palazzo Farnese at Rome. Giovanni Pietro Bellori printed engravings of some fragments in 1673, but even then it took until 1741 for the government of the city of Rome to persuade the Farnese family to hand them over so that they could be exhibited publicly on the Campidoglio. Only then did Giambattista Nolli arrange the fragments for display, and observe at first hand evidence of the ancient ichnographic plan that he was to study and surpass. 2 Why is it that such a puzzling and unusual relic from antiquity was ignored and discarded before Bellori? One reason is probably the sheer unwieldiness of the material, comprising well over a hundred large fragments, but only representing just over ten percent of the whole map. But there are other reasons as well. This
1

The recent electronic publication of the fragments, with photographs and three-dimensional models,

by the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project (http://formaurbis.stanford.edu), is now a fundamental starting point for any discussion. The fragments were edited in print most recently in 1960: see Gianfilippo Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea di Roma antica: Forma Urbis Romae, 2 vols (Rome: Ripartizione del Comune di Roma, 1960), with the additions in Emilio Rodrguez Almeida, Forma Urbis Marmorea. Aggiornamento Generale 1980 (Rome: Quasar, 1981). A version of this paper was first presented at the Studium Urbis conference, Giambattista Nolli, Imago Urbis and Rome. I am grateful for the comments of the audience there, and especially to M. H. Crawford and Tanya Pollard for their comments on the written version.
2

On Nolli and the plan, see Allan Ceen, Introductory essay, in La Pianta Grande di Roma di

Giambattista Nolli in Facsimile, ed. J.H. Aronson (Highmount NY: Aronson, 1991), 3-4 and Idem, Roma Nolliana (Rome: Studium Urbis, 2003), 22-31.

essay attempts to answer the question by examining the scholarly context of the fragments discovery, and argues that practical barriers and intellectual frameworks prevented any widespread investigation of their function or value as evidence for ancient Rome. If they had been displayed more publicly, or if scholars had had more comparative material against which to judge them, perhaps they would not have been forgotten. But they were, and their story presents a salutary reminder of the tenuousness of the survival of material remains, as well as of the distance that separates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars from their successors in departments of ancient history or Latin and Greek today. The fragments rediscovery and early modern fortuna The date and place of the discovery of the fragments, and the early uses to which they were put, are relatively well documented. 3 They were found in May 1562, in excavations behind the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in the Forum, on the site of the classical Roman templum pacis, which was dedicated by the Roman emperor Vespasian in 75 CE. The map had originally been mounted on the wall of a building added to the temple, probably in the course of repairs after a severe fire of 192 CE. Torquato Conti, a condottiere and Duke of Poli, sponsored the dig. Its circumstances are rather murky, but eventually his wifes uncle, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, acquired the fragments. 4 Some were most likely discarded, 5 and Farneses men took the others to his palace, so denying any

For the history of the fragments, see Antonio Maria Colini, Scoperta e vicende dei frammenti della pianta,

in La pianta marmorea, ed. Carettoni et al., i:25-37. For a valuable recent survey, looking especially at Belloris contribution, see Maria Pia Muzzioli, Bellori e la pubblicazione dei frammenti della pianta marmorea di Roma antica, in LIdea del Bello: Viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, 2 vols (Rome: Edizioni de Luca, 2000), ii:580-3.
4

For a general account of the main sources, see Colini, Scoperta e vicende, 25-28; Christina

Riebesell, Die Sammlung des Kardinal Alessandro Farnese. Ein Studio fr Knstler und Gelehrte (Weinheim: VCH, Acta humaniora, 1989), 26-7 discusses Contis role, and prints the relevant sections of the letters he wrote to Farnese at 177-8. See also Lon Dorez, Nouveaux documents sur la dcouverte de la Forma Urbis Romae, Acadmie des inscriptions & belles-lettres. Comptes-rendus des sances de lanne (1910): 499-508.
5

See Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Distruzione e dispersione della Forma Urbis severiana alla luce dei dati

archeologici, in Formae Urbis Romae: Nuovi frammenti di piante marmoree dallo scavo dei fori imperiali, ed. Roberto Meneghini and Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani, Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica comunale di Roma. Supplementi 15 (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 2006), 53-61 (54), building on Daniele Manacorda, Un

interested scholars the opportunity to work on the pieces in situ, in a typical Renaissance example of plunder-archaeology. 6 In the Palazzo Farnese, however, antiquarians got their chance. Onofrio Panvinio, a member of the cardinals familia, wrote that he was appointed as their curator, 7 and Bernardo Gamucci, a contemporary observer, claimed that Farnese has not failed to assign to this antiquity learned men, who are looking for the truth. 8 Whatever Gamucci thought that truth would be, it did not turn up quickly. Panvinio wrote that he was curator in 1565, when he also claimed that he would shortly use the fragments in his topographia of Rome. But there is no evidence that he did, and in fact the first datable scholarly use of the fragments is Fulvio Orsinis Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditorum, of 1570. Panvinio had died in 1568, and Orsini seems to have assumed curatorial responsibilities for the whole Farnese collection. A work on famous and learned men is certainly a surprising place for a fragment of the forma urbis to appear, and Orsini made no real attempt to hide the fact. In his section on Roman doctors, he noted that two doctors were connected in inscriptions with the ludus magnus and ludus matutinus, two gladiatorial schools. One fragment of the forma urbis happened to show the ludus magnus. Orsini noted this, and illustrated the fragment beneath (Fig. 1). 9
nuovo frammento della Forma Urbis e le calcare romane del Cinquecento nellarea della Crypta Balbi, Mlanges de l'cole franaise de Rome, Antiquit 114.2 (2002): 693-715 (711-12).
6

See the complaints of Rodolfo Lanciani, I nuovi frammenti della Forma Urbis, Bullettino della Jean-Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquits romaines. Collection de lcole franaise de Rome ...non ha mancato di mettere a questa antichit huomini dotti, i quali cerchino il vero. Bernardo Publius Victor and Sextus Rufus mention the Ludus Matutinus and the Ludus Magnus, doctors of

commissione archeologica comunale di Roma s.5, 27 (1899): 7-8.

214 (Rome: cole franaise de Rome, 1996), 51.

Gamucci, Le antichit della citt di Roma, 2nd ed (Venice: Giovanni Varisco, 1569), fol.32v.
9

which Eutychus, freedman of Nero, and Calpurnius Hilarus are named in inscriptions... I have seen the plan of the Ludus Magnus represented thus in the recently discovered remains [of the plan] of ancient Rome. (Ludi vero Matutini & Ludi Magni, quorum medici in lapidibus nominantur Eutychus Neronis Libertus, & Calpurnius Hilarus, mentionem faciunt P. Victor, & Sex Rufus... Ludi autem magni ichnographiam in vetustae Romae nuper repertis reliquiis ita notatam animadvertimus. Fulvio Orsini, Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditor[um] ex antiquis lapidibus et nomismatib[us] expressa (Rome: Antonio Lafrry, 1570), 96. On the work, see Giuseppina Alessandra Cellini, Il contributo di Fulvio Orsini alla ricerca antiquaria. Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 2004, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, Memorie s.IX, v.XVIII, fasc.2 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2004).

The next datable record is the map of the ancient city that Etienne Duprac engraved in 1574. In the notes to the map, Duprac wrote that in creating his reconstruction of classical Rome, he had used the fragments of the forma urbis, and he acknowledged Farnese for allowing him to do so. 10 Unlike the forma urbis, an ichnographic plan, Dupracs map was a birds-eye view of the city, and so he was unable simply to copy fragments of the marble. But it is possible to identify areas where Duprac used the evidence of the ancient plan to recreate buildings. One is in his reconstruction of the ludus magnus, where he engraved a three-dimensional building closely based on the forma urbis fragment of the structure (Figs. 2 and 3): it is no coincidence, I would suggest, that he used the same piece as Orsini. Here, because of the lack of surviving remains for the building where Duprac thought it was (modern scholars have placed it in a completely different part of the city, by the Colosseum and south-east from Dupracs site), it is clear that Duprac used the stone fragment. In other cases, the direct connection cannot be proved, but it is likely. For example, Dupracs reconstruction of the Theatre of Pompey probably also was based on the fragment of this edifice from the forma urbis. The work of Orsini and Duprac can be dated because it was printed; in addition, two sets of drawings of the fragments survive, which probably also come from the period soon after the fragments discovery. 11 One set consists of only three fragments drawn on one folio, now in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris. Because this folio is included in a codex (MS franais 382) with other material that belonged to Duprac, it probably represents copies made when he was preparing his map. 12 When Gianfilippo Carettoni examined these drawings, he argued that they in fact derived from the other, far more extensive set from this period, contained in a codex in the Biblioteca
10

Amato P. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), i:67-8 (commentary)

and ii:tav.45 (illustration of the text). See Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio, 35 n.99. On Duprac see Emmanuel Lurin, Un homme entre deux mondes: tienne Duprac, peintre, graveur et architecte, en Italie et en France (c.1535?-1604), in Renaissance en France, renaissance franaise, ed. Henri Zerner and Marc Bayard (Rome: Acadmie de France Rome, 2009), 37-59.
11

For general details of these two sets (and of the third set from the Barberini fondo, which I will argue

below probably date from the seventeenth century), and an analysis of individual fragments, see Gianfilippo Carettoni, Frammenti riprodotti nei disegni del Rinascimento, in La pianta marmorea, ed. Carettoni et al., i:4352.
12

Paris, Bibliothque nationale, MS franais 382, fol. 84r. See Carettoni, Frammenti riprodotti, 52 and

the illustrations in Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea, i:tav.B, fig.6.

Apostolica Vaticana (Vat. lat. 3439). This collection of material is known as the Codex Ursinianus, named after Fulvio Orsini, because it was assumed in the seventeenth century he had owned the drawings in the manuscript. In the Codex Ursinianus there are illustrations of ninety-one fragments on eleven folios (Fig. 3). 13 If Carrettoni is right to argue that the Duprac drawings are based on the Codex Ursinianus, and not on the stones themselves, it is likely that both Dupracs drawings and those of the Codex Ursinianus predate Dupracs map of 1574. Even if that dating is wrong, it is important to note that both these sets of drawings are probably connected with the same two men who used the evidence of the forma urbis in print. Alessandro Farnese died in 1589 and Orsini in 1600. After Orsinis death the collection lacked a curator competent to work with its contents and to develop its holdings of antiquities. Odoardo Farnese, Alessandros successor and Orsinis pupil, started his tenure by working to maintain the collection (for example by obtaining the Cesarini collection of antiquities in 1593), and reorganized its holdings some time in the 1590s or early seventeenth century. In general, however, he had a narrower interest in antiquities, and less money for their acquisition, than Alessandro, focusing on monumental sculpture and its arrangement alongside the modern art he commissioned. 14 When he died, in 1626, the palace was no longer regularly inhabited, and the collection had lost its preeminent position in the city, surpassed in the early seventeenth century by the collections of the Giustiniani, Borghese and Barberini families. 15 While the major statues in the collection, like the Farnese bull, remained on the tourist trail for educated visitors, the less accessible material seems to

13

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 3439, fols. 13r-23r. See Carettoni, Frammenti See Christina Riebesell, Die Antikensammlung Farnese zur Caracci-Zeit, in Les Carrache et les dcors

riprodotti, 43 and the illustrations in Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea, ii:tav.I-XIV.

profanes. Actes du Colloque organis par lcole franaise de Rome (Rome, 2-4 octobre 1986). Collection de lcole franaise de Rome 106 (Rome: cole franaise de Rome, 1988), 373-417; Federico Rausa, Le collezioni farnesiane di sculture antiche: storia e formazione, in Le sculture farnese: storia e documenti, ed. Carlo Gasparri (Naples: Electa, 2007), 15-80, esp. 30-33; Clare Robertson, The Invention of Annibale Carracci Studi della Biblioteca Hertziana 4 (Milan: Silvana, 2008), 131-32.
15

See Bertrand Jestaz, Le collezioni Farnese di Roma, in I Farnese: Arte e collezionismo, eds Lucia

Fornari Schianchi and Nicola Spinosa (Milan: Electa, 1995), 49-67, and esp. 58-61. On other collections, see Beatrice Palma, Il collezionismo e gli studi antiquari, in Dopo Sisto V. La transizione al Barocco (1590-1630) (Rome: Istituto nazionale di studi romani, 1997), 267-83.

have been forgotten. 16 This included the forma urbis fragments. There are a few exceptions: Giacomo Lauro, who included a map of the city in a guide he wrote in 1612, referred to them as a useful topographical aid; 17 similarly, when Giangiacomo de Rossi reprinted Etienne Dupracs map in the second half of the seventeenth century, he implied that Duprac had used the fragments, and wrote that he had been helped by Fulvio Orsini when he did so, something Duprac himself had not explicitly acknowledged in his original map. 18
16

It is clear from seventeenth-century accounts that antiquities from the palaces collection were

accessible to visitors, although not necessarily without permission: John Evelyn, an English visitor who came to Rome in 1644-5, saw the Farnese Hercules and Flora on his first visit to the palace, and then returned later, to be accompanied by the majordomo to see other statues, and the guardarobba (John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), ii:214-6 and 308-10). Anne Brookes, Richard Symonds and the Palazzo Farnese, 1649-50, Journal of the History of Collections 10 (1998): 139-157, demonstrates that Richard Symonds saw less than Evelyn and did not have such privileged access. See also William Stenhouse, Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of Late-Renaissance Rome, Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005), 397-434.
17

... and I have annotated the maps and ruins, for which that marble stone found in the time of Pope

Paul III in the Forum, in the temple of Romulus and Remus, was helpful: it was kept by the Illustrious and Reverend Alessandro Farnese, of blessed memory, among the riches of his most illustrious family. It included an inscribed map of the ancient city, which our two antiquarians, Pirro Ligorio and Benardo Gamucci scrutinized and copied down, securely and accurately, their own tracings[?] (...plantasque & ruinas annotavimus, quibus adiumento fuit marmor illud repertum Paulo III Pont. Max. apud Forum Romanum, in Romuli, Remique templo per Illust. & Reverendiss. D. fel. mem. Alexandrum Farnesium inter opes Illustriss. eius Familiae conservatum, quod incisam antiquae Urbis plantam continebat, quam Antiquarii diu [sic for duo?, as translated above] nostri Pirrus Ligorius, & Bernardus Gamutius observantes poligraphias tuto, & accurate suas conscripsere.) Giacomo Lauro, Antiquae Urbis splendor (Rome: n.p., 1612), fol.5r. See Thomas Ashby, Un incisore antiquario del Seicento, La Bibliofilia 28 (1926-7): 454. It is interesting that both Ligorio and Gamucci are invoked here for the first time; it is doubtful that the latter would have made copies and not informed his readers about them, but that Ligorio copied the drawings is not unlikely. If so, they have not survived, unless the copies in the Codex Ursinianus are by him. The codex does contain other Ligorio material; but the hand of the forma urbis copies does not seem to me to be his.
18

De Rossi reprinted the map some time between 1649 and 1691 (Frutaz, Le piante, i:67). He included a

key (Ibid. ii:tav.50) in order that users could find various buildings, and underneath, he wrote, The Ichnographia of the city of Rome which the architect Etienne Duprac designed from the era of the emperor Septimius Severus, under the influence and advide of some great men, and especially Fulvio Orsini

Apart from Lauro, there is only one other indication that scholars might have been using the fragments independently: another set of drawings of the forma urbis from the early modern period, collected in a manuscript in the Barberini fondo (Barb. lat. 4423), now also in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. 19 There are four folios, depicting six fragments. These drawings are hard to date: they were made after the Ursinianus set and seem to be independent of it, as they include two fragments in a more damaged state than the Ursinianus. 20 Given this fact, they may be from the seventeenth century. They are collected with material from the Barberini circle of antiquarians. This material can be dated from the 1620s until the 1650s, 21 and so it is likely, but not provable, that these drawings were collected or made then. Three have numbers 16, 17 and 18 and so they seem to have been part of a series. But without further information, we cannot know when exactly they were drawn. Whatever the origins of the drawings, no one in the Palazzo Farnese in the seventeenth century seems to have recognized the potential value of the fragments. Bertrand Jestaz suggests that they are among the one hundred and eleven pieces of marble and travertine, large and small, of one entry in the otherwise very detailed 1644 inventory of the Farnese collection. 22 Soon, probably before 1655, came what one modern scholar of the fragments called the brutto giorno, the day on which builders used some of the fragments to make the palaces hidden garden. 23 This meant that
he abandoned in obscurity for a long time by leaving out the title and names of the noble buildings. (Urbis Romae Ichnographia, quam Stephanus Duperacus Architectus, ex summorum virorum, ac praecipue Fulvii Ursini sententia, atque auctoritate, Septimii Severi Imperatoris aetate, descripserat, perobscure diu, absque titulis, ac nominibus nobiliorum aedificiorum detulit.) Duprac had originally referred to the help he had received from learned antiquarians (hominibus antiquitatis studiosis, Frutaz, Le piante, ii:tav.45). See Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio, 36 n.100. The rather awkward Latin of De Rossis key suggests that he had misunderstood Dupracs original dedication, or that his engraver had failed to include all the words.
19

On Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. lat. 4423 see Marco Buonocore, Miscellanea Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. lat. 4423, fols.45r-48r. See Carettoni, Frammenti One drawing is dated to 1656 on fol.29r; material on fols. 9 and 10 was probably sent to Giovanni

epigraphica e Codicibus Bibliothecae Vaticanae VI, Epigraphica 53 (1991): 233-34.

riprodotti, 51-2, and the illustrations in Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea, i:tav.A, figs.1-5.
21

Battista Doni in the 1620s or 1630s. See William Stenhouse, Ancient Inscriptions, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo series A, part 7 (London: The Royal Collection, 2002), 274.
22

Bertrand Jestaz, Le Palais Farnse III,3: L'inventaire du Palais et des proprits Farnse Rome en 1644 Colini, Scoperta e vicende, 28.

(Rome: cole franaise de Rome, 1994), 198 no.4826.

when Giovanni Pietro Bellori came to print his edition of the forma urbis, he worked using the drawings and those fragments that were not adapted as construction material: the remainder of the fragments were found only in the late nineteenth century. This account of the fragments discovery and conservation shows how they were ignored, and deposited in storage somewhere: in the remainder of the article I will explain why this happened. Sixteenth-century contexts and the reception of the fragments Torquato Conti was in no doubt of the significance of his discovery: as he wrote to Farnese shortly after the map was found, he described it as a rare and beautiful thing. 24 His enthusiasm is reflected in various antiquarian sources from shortly after 1562. The existence of the fragments was certainly not hushed up. For example, we know some of the details of their discovery thanks to two letters written in May and June 1562 to Pier Vettori, who was in Florence. Bernardo Gamucci wrote about them in his guidebook of 1565, which was printed, and the information was certainly known in 1594 to Flaminio Vacca, who included it in his list of various recent excavations undertaken at Rome. Panvinio included the record of his curatorship in his 1565 essay entitled De his qui Romanas antiquitates scripto comprehenderunt (On those who wrote examined Roman antiquities in writing): this was never published, but there is no reason to believe that Panvinio would not have tried to gain a wider audience for his work, had he not died in 1568. 25 While this is an impressive range of testimony, though, it is not unusual for a notable discovery at Rome from this period. A reasonable, but not unusually large scholarly audience, therefore, would have known about the forma urbis. Once knowledge of the fragments had spread, the next task would have been to arrange for them to be drawn and then printed. The drawings from the Codex Ursinianus and from the Duprac collection could have been preliminary copies for this process. Both sets seem to be fairly accurate renditions of the fragments, and suitable for copying by an engraver; two hands produced the former, which suggests that some checking may have gone on. 26 But the fragments were not printed and published. The primary reason for this is probably cost. Then, as now, the
24 25

...cosa rara e bella. Riebesell, Die Sammlung, 177-78. For the letters to Vettori, and details of Gamucci and Vacca, see Dorez, Nouveaux documents, and For an examination of the accuracy of the drawings, see David West Reynolds, Forma Urbis Romae:

for Panvinios involvement Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio, 51, as in n.6 above.

The Severan Marble Plan and the Urban Form of Ancient Rome (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1996), 107-114.

market among private buyers for scholarly, illustrated representations of classical remains was not large. Some types of books did sell, and the genre of portraits of famous men, whether living or dead, was one of them. The reason that Orsini inserted the ludus magnus fragment rather awkwardly in his 1570 Imagines et elogia was almost certainly because that was the only practical way he could get the illustration published. In general, a rich patron was needed for deluxe antiquarian books. Alessandro Farnese had subsidized the publication of the lists of the Capitoline Fasti, which were discovered in Rome in 1546 and 1547, but chose not to do the same for the forma urbis. 27 One reason for this could be that he thought it would have been unseemly for a prominent cardinal to promote scholarship on pagan remains as the new Council of Trent decrees for the behaviour of churchmen were coming into effect. As well as the probable lack of funds to support printing, there may be one other practical reason why more information about the fragments did not spread, a reason related to the scholarly ethics of Fulvio Orsini. Orsini was lucky to find an extremely sympathetic biographer at the end of the nineteenth century, in the person of Pierre de Nolhac. De Nolhac could not overlook the various accusations of plagiarism that circulated around his subject, but he resolutely denied them. 28 Although standards at the end of the sixteenth century should not be compared with those of today, Orsinis attitude to intellectual property was certainly loose. His one-time friend Girolamo Mercuriale, for example, pointed out quite reasonably that the treatise of Pedro Chacn on the triclinium (De triclinio, 1588), edited by Orsini, bore a close connection to the earlier treatment of the subject in his De arte gymnastica, although with no acknowledgement of that work. 29 In this case, the fault may have been Chacns Chacn may have been planning to revise the essay before he died in 1582; Orsini then edited the work for publication but if so, Orsini as editor should have been aware of the problem. Before the publication of that work, Orsini had been working on his friend Antonio Agustns De legibus et senatusconsultis, which was published in 1583. Here, Orsini seems to

27

For Farneses support of publishing in the context of his wider patronage of antiquarian scholarship,

see Christina Riebesell, Die Sammlung des Kardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) als Stellvertreterin fr das antike Rom, in Macrocosmos in Microcosmo: die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns, 1450 bis 1800, ed. Andreas Grote (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1994), 397-416, esp. 411-12.
28 29

Pierre de Nolhac, La bibliothque de Fulvio Orsini (Paris: E. Bouillon and F. Vieweg, 1887), 54-55. Jean-Michel Agasse, Entre antiquaria et archeologie moderne: le lapis rhamnusianus, Les Cahiers de

lHumanisme 2 (2001): 29-30.

have passed off the emendations and suggestions of the newly-deceased Chacn as his own. 30 Not surprisingly in someone so ready to ignore the provenance of some of his ideas, Orsini was jealous of his own material. A hint of this attitude comes in a letter written by Claude Dupuy to Pierre del Bene, when the latter was planning a visit to Rome. Dupuy informed his correspondent that he should not expect to see all of Orsinis manuscript collection on any one visit, and that Orsini would be sure to hold his visitor to any promises made in return. 31 Given Orsinis character, therefore, it would not be implausible to assume that in the final years of his life, alone in the Farnese collection, he planned some project involving the fragments of the marble plan, which meant that he was extremely unwilling to allow others access to them. Such an accusation cannot be proved, however. Beyond simple pragmatism the real cost of publication and Orsinis possible jealous possessiveness it is also possible to identify two other reasons why these fragments failed to reach a wider audience. First, and most important, the fragments did not really fit into the categories of evidence that sixteenth-century antiquarians expected the ancient world to provide. They were similar to inscriptions, but not exactly the same; they did not offer easy figures for interpretation like the iconographical representation of deities and other forces on ancient coins. The best parallel, which suggests that the fragments did not really fit in, is the fate of an ichnographic plan that seems to have been discovered in the mid-1540s, during building work undertaken for the Spinelli family. 32 This piece shows what is probably a tomb, and the buildings to house the tombs caretaker (Pl. IV). 33 The text on the plan gives the dedicators of the plan and the monuments, and the numerals indicate the length of the various walls. Pirro Ligorio recorded this monument in notes he made, but did not
Jean-Louis Ferrary, La gense du De legibus et senatus consultis, in Antonio Agustn between Renaissance and Gianvincenzo Pinelli and Claude Dupuy, Une correspondance entre deux humanistes, ed. Anna Maria For what follows, I am indebted to the account of Ginette Vagenheim, Pirro Ligorio et la

30

Counter-Reform, ed. M.H. Crawford (London: The Warburg Institute, 1993), 43-44.
31

Raugei. 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2001), ii:415.

dcouverte dun plan ichnographique grav sur marbre (CIL VI 9015 = 29847b), Mlanges de lcole franaise de Rome, Antiquit 103,2 (1991): 575-587.
33

See the analysis of Christian Hlsen, Piante icnografiche incise in marmo, Mittheilungen des Kaiserlich

Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Roemische Abtheilung/Bullettino dellimperiale istituto archeologico germanico 5 (1890): 46-52; Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea, i:207-210; Reynolds, Forma Urbis Romae, 35-6; and Emilio Rodrguez-Almeida, Formae Urbis Antiquae: Le mappe marmoree di Roma tra la Repubblica e Settimio Severo, Collection de lcole franaise de Rome 305 (Rome: cole franaise de Rome, 2002), 37-41.

10

recopy it, and our only other sixteenth-century representation is one among Panvinios epigraphic manuscripts, in which he transcribed only the text, and not the plan. 34 This method of representation was by no means unusual for Panvinio he regularly recorded inscriptions in lower case, and usually only chose to represent the verbal content of decorated funerary monuments but even so, there is no sense in his work that the plan was intriguing, or worth examining further. Even the words, in fact, were more or less forgotten. The plan was copied once in the seventeenth century from Ligorios notes, and not from the original, even though at some point the prominent Florentine collector Niccolo Gaddi acquired it. It was not published until the eighteenth century. This example, now in Perugia, was not the only one of these small-scale plans to be discovered in this period. Another simpler example is recorded in a manuscript dated to 1603 in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Christian Hlsen, although he thought on balance that this plan was probably a forgery, suggested that the architect and antiquarian Giovanni Antonio Dosio might have originally found it in Ameria. Dosio may well also have worked for Conti during the discovery of the forma urbis, and so details of the Ameria plan could well have reached men working at Rome. 35 But if that was the case, there is no proof, and this plan too seems to have remained unexamined until it was published in the nineteenth century. These other plans do not seem to have caught the attention of sixteenth-century scholars, interested primarily in coins and inscriptions. Despite the fact that they include words, Gruterus did not think to include either these plans or the fragments of the forma urbis in his huge collection of inscriptions that he compiled at the turn of the seventeenth century, and so they were easily forgotten. The second reason that sixteenth-century scholars did not explore the forma urbis further is connected to their approach to topographical problems. Identifying classical remains in the city and connecting them with references in literary texts had been a central concern of humanists for nearly

34 35

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 6036, fol.108v. For this example, see Hlsen, Piante icnografiche, 60; Idem, Miscellanea epigrafica, Mittheilungen

des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Roemische Abtheilung/Bullettino dellimperiale istituto archeologico germanico 5 (1890): 305; Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea, i:208-09; Reynolds, Forma Urbis Romae, 32-33 (who argues that it is genuine); Rodrguez-Almeida, Formae Urbis Antiquae, 51-56 (who also argues that it is genuine). For Dosio and the discovery, see Gamucci, Le antichit della citt di Roma, fol.32v. Like Dosio, however, Gamucci came from San Gimignano, so his account of the extent of Dosios involvement has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Lon Dorez disputed it: see Dorez, Nouveaux documents, 505.

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one hundred and fifty years before the fragments were found. 36 These humanists had done a good job of collating available information. The results of their work included serviceable written guides to the ancient city, such as Bartolomeo Marlianis Topographia and Georg Fabriciuss Roma. In some editions, guidebooks came with plans that showed the state of the city in different periods, and scholars also produced impressive stand-alone maps, most notably the 1551 ichnographic plan by Leonardo Bufalini, which included many ancient monuments, and Pirro Ligorios 1561 birds-eye map of the classical city. 37 Although the fragments could tell scholars about the structures of individual buildings and so Duprac was able to reconstruct the ludus magnus they could not offer much immediate information about how those buildings fitted together to supplement what had already been discovered. And even though the fragments showed how to represent the structures of individual buildings, enough of those buildings still stood to provide humanists with more than enough details for another favourite topic of inquiry, Roman building techniques and the evidence of Vitruvius. The concerns of modern scholars who use the fragments, which include building density, or the ideology of this form of representation of the city, were not ones that were shared by their sixteenth-century predecessors. The seventeenth century Sixteenth-century scholars were excited by the find, therefore, but didnt really know what to do with the fragments once they were safely installed in the Palazzo Farnese. Why did the situation not change for so long in the seventeenth century? If anything, seventeenth-century antiquarians
See Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity. The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought See Jessica Maier, Mapping Past and Present: Leonardo Bufalinis Plan of Rome (1551), Imago

36

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Mundi 59 (2007), 1-23. On Ligorios map, and the range of sources he used to compile it, see Howard Burns, Pirro Ligorios Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: the Anteiqvae Vrbis Imago of 1561, in Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, ed. Robert Gaston. Villa I Tatti Studies 10 (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1988), 19-92. Antiquarian scholars of this period proved to be adept at producing ground plans and birds-eye views of particular monuments for which evidence survived: for the work of some Low Countries scholars on the Arx Britannica, see Tine Meganck, Abraham Ortelius, Hubertus Goltzius en Guido Laurinus en de studie van de Arx Brittanica, Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 98 no.5/6 (1999): 226-236. For the forma urbis in the tradition of urban mapping, see John Pinto, Forma Urbis Romae: Fragment and Fantasy, in Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, ed. Cecil L. Striker (Mainz: von Zabern, 1996), 143-6.

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interests were even less likely to embrace the forma urbis than their immediate predecessors. The fragments were not ignored quite as completely as some previous accounts have suggested as I said above, without necessarily having seen them, both Lauro and de Rossi referred to them in maps, and one set of drawings may come from this period but certainly they were very nearly forgotten. One immediate reason for this, very broadly speaking, was that the scholarly centre of gravity, at least as far as the study of the classical world was concerned, had shifted north from Rome, mainly to Venice and Padua, and to the Low Countries. Scholars still visited the city and examined her monuments, but the spirit of collaborative endeavour that marked the middle of the sixteenth century was absent. Shortly after the election of pope Urban VIII Barberini, however, the position changed. The cardinal-nephew, Francesco Barberini, supported scholars keenly, inviting both Italians and men from beyond the Alps to court. Other cardinals were slow to rediscover the sixteenth-century habit of giving out patronage to antiquarians, but at the same time, Cassiano dal Pozzo started to develop alongside his library a paper museum, which was to be a visual resource for scholars and artists and include images of antiquities and natural historical phenomena. 38 Despite a general increase in antiquarian scholarship during the 1630s, 40s and 50s, however, when we look at these scholars we see that their interests took them further from the forma urbis rather than closer to it. They tried to collect inscriptions, but in general they turned away from the more textual concerns of their predecessors towards the examination of small objects and iconography. Using these objects, they became more interested not in the city on Rome, but in what we would now call the everyday life and structures of ancient Rome, what Ingo Herklotz defines as the Varronian customs and institutions (mores et instituta.) Lorenzo Pignoria, for example, a scholar from Padua, wrote a work on Roman slaves in 1613; when he realized that the records dal Pozzo was collecting would help his work, he and dal Pozzo corresponded and prepared what would have been a much expanded and illustrated second edition. This did not actually appear, but the titles of the works that were published give some idea of where scholarly interest was headed: Giacomo Filippo Tomasinis De donariis ac tabellis votivis (1639), Fortunio Licetis De anulis antiquorum et eorum admirandis virtutibus (1645) and De lucernis antiquorum reconditis libri quatuor (1621; 2nd ed 1652), or Johann Rhodes De acia dissertatio (1639), which is really more about needles. 39 As well as looking to
38

For a comprehensive overview of this project, see Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo und die Archologie

des 17. Jahrhunderts. Rmische Forschungen der Biblioteca Hertziana 28 (Munich: Hirmer, 1999), and for the lack of support from cardinals other than Barberini see ibid. e.g. 41-2.
39

Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo, 153-164.

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small objects as sources, scholars also picked up on sixteenth-century interests in the value of relief sculpture and other pictorial representations of classical scenes or people; one project Cassiano dal Pozzo planned with Johann Faber was a third edition of Orsinis Imagines et elogia. 40 At Rome at least, scholars of the period had ready access to published work of the sixteenth century, and so where necessary they usually referred to books for details of topography and architecture. Birds-eye maps of the city produced in this period tended also to be heavily derivative from what had come before. It is important to note that had these mid-seventeenth century scholars seen a reference to the forma urbis in published work when, for example, dal Pozzo and Faber were working on Orsinis text and been inspired to follow it up, they would have been able to do so. Most importantly, Orsini had left books and papers to the Vatican Library, including the Codex Ursinianus, which was available for consultation. 41 Several of the drawings from this manuscript were copied for the dal Pozzo paper museum, as some of Cassianos first commissions, and so it seems highly likely that he would have been aware of the illustrations of the fragments. Dal Pozzo and his circle also had access to the Farnese collections they devoted much time to copying material from manuscripts drawn by Pirro Ligorio, which were in the Farnese library and so had they been interested in seeing the fragments as well as material from the library, at the very least they would probably have had access to whomever had responsibility for the antiquities. 42 But the only surviving traces of interest from this period are the drawings of six fragments in a Barberini codex, which I referred to above as the third set. Here a smaller piece, whose fortuna parallels that of the forma urbis fragments, is worth noting, the so-called Fasti Maffeiani. In the second half of the sixteenth century, this inscription was sufficiently famous for Antoine Lafrry to include engravings of it in his Speculum Romanae magnificentiae. Its text was used by scholarly luminaries such as Antonio Agustn and Joseph Scaliger, and was edited by Pedro Chacn in 1574. 43 Like the forma urbis fragments, it became part of the Farnese collection, but disappeared from scholarly view until it was rediscovered in 1704; like the

40

Francesco Solinas, Other Sources of Drawings in the Paper Museum, in The Paper Museum of Herklotz, Cassiano dal Pozzo, 254 n.86. For examples of drawings copied from the Ligorio manuscripts for the dal Pozzo collection, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol.2, Oxford-Warburg

Cassiano dal Pozzo, Quaderni Puteani 4 (Milan: Olivetti, 1993), 230.

Stenhouse, Ancient Inscriptions, 49-162.

Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 54-57.

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fragments, its recondite information, in this case connected with Roman chronology, was not immediately applicable to the work of seventeenth-century scholars.44 Given this apparent lack of interest, the final question, therefore, is what inspired Giovanni Pietro Bellori to produce his edition of the map in 1673. His preface is not very illuminating, and in it he even manages to misdate the discovery of the fragments to the reign of Pope Paul III (1534-49), presumably having muddled the two Alessandro Farneses. 45 We can, however, make some guesses. Bellori was engaged in a program to record various antiquities peculiar to Rome in order to supplement the less city-specific mores et instituta approach of the Barberini circle; for such a program, he believed that prints had a vital role. 46 He was appointed commissioner for antiquities in 1670, and as well as publishing the forma urbis fragments, he wrote a guidebook to the city, and collaborated with Pietro Santi Bartoli to produce illustrated accounts of major monuments like Trajans column. 47 In research on the papers of Camillo Massimi (to whom Belloris edition is dedicated) Massimo Pomponi has demonstrated that Massimi was largely responsible for paying for the volumes production, and Massimi also seems to have arranged for the copying of the fragments. 48 This explains how such an expensive publication was practicable. Massimi was Maestro di Camera to Pope Clement X (1670-76), and we know that in the reign of this pope the Codex Ursinianus was rebound; Belloris interest in the fragments may have prompted this rebinding, therefore, or the binder may have called Massimis or Belloris attention to the fragments, and hence spurred them to find out what had happened to the originals with the Farnese. In fact, the damage to

44

For an illustration and notes on this antiquity, see Agazio Di Somma, Dellorigine dellAnno Santo, ed. P. Bellori may, though, have been relying on the errroneous information in Giacomo Lauros Antiquae Evelina Borea, Giovan Pietro Bellori e la commodit delle stampe, in Documentary Culture: Florence

de Leo (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2000), no.8 [164-65].

Urbis splendor: see above, n.16.

and Rome from Grand Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII, ed. Elizabeth Cropper (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1990), 263-85.
47

On the programme, see Muzzioli, Bellori e la pubblicazione dei frammenti, 580-1; on Bellori as

commissioner, see Ronald T. Ridley, To Protect the Monuments: The Papal Antiquarian (1534-1870), Xenia antiqua 1 (1992): 132-33.
48

Massimo Pomponi, La collezione del cardinale Massimo e linventario del 1677, in Camillo Massimo

collezionista di antichit. Fonti e materiali, Xenia antiqua monografie 3 (Rome: LErma di Bretschneider, 1996), 104 no.70, 145 n.144 and 147 n.211.

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the fragments in the Farnese collection forced Bellori to rely on the Ursinianus drawings to supplement what could be seen of the originals. Belloris rather lackadaisical attitude to representation has invited criticism of his editions accuracy, especially in comparison with the Ursinianus drawings, but the book did at least remind scholars of the existence of these pieces. They were not yet safe though: when the pieces were rescued for the communal government in 1741, the surviving fragments suffered further damage on the way to the Campidoglio, and then even Nolli saw fit to trim some pieces in order that they would fit in his arrangement. 49 Conclusion The fate of the fragments of the forma urbis offers an important insight into the state of early modern antiquarianism, and in particular the variety of scholarly interests, practical problems and patrons resources that determined the form that antiquarianism would take. The plight of the pieces in the Farnese collection demonstrates the importance of individual collectors (and of the curators of their antiquities) to the antiquarian enterprise. More fundamentally, though, early modern antiquarians lacked the intellectual framework to understand and use the fragments. They did not offer much evidence that could helpfully supplement what was already known about the ancient city, and on their own, they were not enough to provoke sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars to ask different questions of the evidence. Even after the publication and display of the fragments, they remained a curio, and it was not until the late nineteenth century, that their potential value was really explored. It is tempting to see the cautious and diligent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians as the intellectual forebears of the cautious and diligent classical scholars of the twentyfirst century. The sidelining of the fragments discussed here is a useful corrective to that view, and proof that the river of scholarship rarely runs straight.

49

For details of the donation by the Farnese to the pope, see Olivier Michel, Les pripties dune

donation. La forma urbis en 1741 et 1742, Mlanges de lcole franaise de Rome, Antiquit 95,2 (1983): 997-1019.

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