Monuments and Texts: Antiquarianism and the Beauty of Antiquity

Maria Grazia Lolla has published articles in English and Italian on various aspects of antiquarianism, aesthetics and eighteenth–century culture, as well as on Caribbean poetry and literature. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, has been awarded fellowships from the British Council and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has held research fellowships at the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. Now at work on Rivers Unknown to Song: Antiquarian Explorations of the East and West Indies , she is an adjunct professor at New York University. From the beginning of the Renaissance antiquaries had been publishing monuments at such a pace that publishing as much as collecting or studying monuments could be counted amongst the defining features of antiquarianism. However widely and routinely practised, the publication of monuments revealed substantial divisions within the world of antiquarianism. Antiquaries were faced with the choice of either textualizing monuments – turning monuments from visual or tactile objects into reading material – or attempting to reproduce their materiality – even if the monument was a text. The paper analyses Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Monumenti antichi inediti (1767) as a significant example of the former and the discussion concerning the publication of Domesday Book that took place in the rooms of the London Society of Antiquaries in 1768 as a compelling example of the latter. Juxtaposed to one another, Monumenti antichi inediti and the projected facsimile of the Domesday Book provide mutually revealing accounts of the aesthetic and intellectual complexities of eighteenth–century antiquarian practice. Where Winckelmann patently sought to rid monuments of their materiality in an effort, perhaps, to nobilitate antiquarianism – while nevertheless keeping it in a suitably ancillary position to literature – the fellows of the Society of Antiquaries chose the facsimile as the vehicle of preservation and transmission best suited to conveying their admiration of texts as material objects, indeed, as non–representational art. As necessarily (and self–consciously) imperfect attempts to reproduce original monuments, facsimiles provide both a marker of deep scepticism about the possibility of ever really knowing the past and a precious trace of past versions of the past – of what could be seen and deemed worthy of preservation, scholarly investigation and aesthetic appreciation.