The first half of the fifteenth century witnessed a revolution in epigraphical practice at Rome. Over the few years between the revival of the ancient Roman majuscule in the epitaph of Pope Martin V (1417–31) and the self-consciously classicizing diction of the dedications of Pope Nicholas V (1447–55), the post-Avignon popes learned to employ monumental public lettering with all the authority and panache of their imperial predecessors (Iiro Kajanto, Papal Epigraphy in Renaissance Rome [1982], 31–63). By the end of the fifteenth century, the epigraphic art had entered a new golden age. The relatively quick transition from the crabbed phraseology and arbitrary lineation of medieval inscriptions to the sonorous cadences and impeccable layout of their sophisticated Renaissance successors was made possible by the exertions of the humanist scholars who pioneered the science of epigraphy. Perfected in Italy by antiquarians, ecclesiastical and aristocratic patrons, writing-masters, typographers, and stonecutters, the design and production of classicizing inscriptions for all manner of commemorative and celebratory purposes swiftly spread to the courts of Europe: not until the Versailles of Louis XIV — some two centuries after the revival of Latin epigraphy — was a local vernacular preferred to the Roman model.

Building on research conducted in the years since the seminal 1993 colloquium Vox Lapidum, Florence Vuilleumier Laurens and Pierre Laurens treat the epigraphy of early modern Europe through a series of studies that illuminate various facets of their theme. After an introductory chapter on the birth of modern epigraphy, three chapters treat the original use of epigraphic material in the tempietto (funerary chapel) of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna, and in the Emblemata of Andrea Alciato. The following three chapters explore the link between epigraphy and politics, at first in Rome and later throughout baroque Europe. A third grouping is concerned with the rise of a new literary genre, the elogium, and a fourth with the seventeenth-century debate over the proper material and linguistic form of inscriptions.

In the opening chapter, the authors select three figures from the fifteenth century whose work represents key aspects of early modern epigraphical studies: Poggio Bracciolini, whose sylloge constitutes a pioneering monument of the new science; Cyriac of Ancona, whose travels in Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt furnished material for the first general collection of inscriptions; and Felice Feliciano, author of the earliest modern treatise on Roman letterforms. With the introduction of printing in the second half of the fifteenth century, epigraphical collections proliferated, disseminating knowledge of ancient inscriptions to a broad public. The work of Gruter and Scaliger in the first two decades of the seventeenth century represented the capstone of humanist epigraphical erudition; its enlarged and corrected edition of 1707 was not superseded until the appearance of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.

A prominent theme in the first part of the book is the creative stimulus afforded by a field of research that might well have remained purely antiquarian. The tempietto built in 1492 by the Neapolitan poet and scholar Giovanni Gioviano Pontano was adorned with numerous inscriptions of his own composition. Imitating ancient examples, Pontano pioneered an epigraphic style in which the rhetorical structure of a prose infused with the power and pathos of poetry was rendered transparent by an axially symmetrical layout in cola of varying length. Arising in the same cultural ambience, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) features a number of original epigraphic texts based on ancient models. Though axially symmetrical, their layout nevertheless reflects the methods of the typographer and engraver rather than those of the stonecutter: justified within architectural frames, the splendid Aldine type is set without regard to rhetorical structure. Later, in the early sixteenth century, the genre of emblem introduced by Andrea Alciato revived the notional epigraphic or inscriptional character of the epigram that had been integral to its original Greek instantiation but subsequently lost in its Roman and modern phases.

The sheer range of the foregoing examples suffices to indicate both the extraordinary wealth of material to hand and the generous breadth of coverage in the present volume. The sections exploring the political use of inscriptions as well as the vogues of language, letterform, and layout that determined their fortunes over the subsequent century-and-a-half are equally rich in the scope of their subject-matter and the fullness of treatment and documentation. Venturing onto byways little explored and full of illuminating juxtapositions, this book will be of value to those interested in Neo-Latin studies, Renaissance and baroque literary culture, or more generally — as the title suggests — the rhetoric of the monument.