This is a substantial book that brings together a wide range of scholarship. Rather than stitching a single narrative in chronological order, the author divides his material into several studies that fold back in time. Chapter 1 traces the early forays by French artists and humanists into Rome up to 1530. Apart from Giuliano da Sangallo’s drawings of the Augustan ruins in Provence, Cooper notes the syllogae of Fra Giovanni Giocondo, a guest of Louis XII in Paris from 1496 to 1499. But he does not speculate on Giocondo’s contact with Guillaume Budé, who penned notes on a manuscript of Vitruvius well before Giocondo’s illustrated edition of De architectura in 1511. Of those early visitors, the most fascinating is Geoffroy Tory, whose study of orthography in Champfleury (1529) took inspiration from Mazzocchio’s Epigrammata Antique Urbis of 1521. Chapter 2 focuses on three French diplomats who converged on Rome after 1530, following the accession of François I. Georges d’Armagnac brought the antiquarian Guillaume du Choul and the Vitruvian commentator Guillaume Philandrier into his household, while Lazare de Baïf culled classical manuscripts on behalf of the king during his residencies in Venice and Rome.

Cardinal Jean Du Bellay first arrived in Rome in 1547, ironically banished in disrepute by the newly crowned Henri II. Years earlier Du Bellay had befriended Budé, author of the first treatise on numismatics, De Asse et Partibus Eius (1514), and a target of Erasmus’s derision, who considered such dusty artifacts as coins and inscriptions unworthy of the studium antiquitatis. François Rabelais, who had edited Marliani’s Topographia Antiquae Romae in 1534, served as physician and cicerone to the cardinal on his explorations around the city. Following his Italian counterparts — Cardinals Cesi, D’Este, and Del Monte — Du Bellay’s archaeological curiosities soon turned to appropriation for his own tastes as a collector. He undertook excavations beneath the titular church of Sant’Adriano and transported cartloads of statues from the Roman Forum to decorate his estate at Saint-Maur (the appendix includes an unpublished inventory of this collection from 1560). The story of Du Bellay takes up again in chapter 3 when he returned to Rome and began laying out his vast gardens amid the cavernous ruins of the Baths of Diocletian.

In Chapter 4, Cooper points to the role of the Italians sent to Fontainebleau, notably Niccolò dell’Abbate and Francesco Primaticcio, who created molds from the Vatican collections — the Tiber, Cleopatra, Laocoön, and Venus ex Balneo — and then recast them in bronze. Sebastiano Serlio’s Salle du Bal gave them a setting to rival the Cortile di Belvedere. More tenuous is the collaboration between French antiquarians and architects, similar to Bernardo Gamucci and Giovan Antonio Dosio, or, a generation earlier, Raphael and Andrea Fulvio. Philibert de l’Orme undertook his investigations of Roman architecture largely on his own; and although it is tempting to think the reconstructions of ancient baths by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau were to illustrate Du Choul’s Des Bains et antiques exercitations, there is no direct evidence. What drove the success of the printmakers Antoine Lafréry and Étienne du Pérac had much to do with the fact that they practiced in Rome and knew how to capitalize on the new genre of landscapes populated by fictive ruins, the so-called capricci that came into fashion after mid-century.

What is most curious is how French sensibilities toward the antique were conditioned by moral judgments about Rome itself. No doubt there was also an element of chauvinism. Even as antiquarians such as Lemaire de Belges could adduce evidence to prove that their cities — Lyon, Toulouse, Metz, or Poitiers — went back to the Greeks, Trojans, or Celts, long before the Romans, many of these same scholars based their researches on the Chaldean chronicler Berosus, himself the creation of that prolific Renaissance forger Annio da Viterbo. Similarly, to read the Antiquitez and Regrets of Joachim Du Bellay reveals a poet who cannot resist the nostalgia for Rome as a city that lives through its dilapidated monumenta, “as its statues breathe life, and as a tree that has been severely pruned regrows” (“Elegy to D’Avanson,” 351). At the same time, the Eternal City is also one of irreparable decay, whose venalities in the eyes of Protestant critics had brought its own devastation. For the chancellor Michel de l’Hospital, who beckoned Cardinal Du Bellay back to France, there was nothing left of Rome’s antiquae stirpis, its ancient lineage. What could be preserved of her spirit in the form of statuary was better shipped off to the great estates at Saint-Maur, Chantilly, Ecouen, and Meudon.