In 1571 Michele Tramezzino published a short, lavish book on the classical Roman triumph by Onofrio Panvinio, a prominent antiquary. It consisted of eleven large pages of text describing the origins, route and related aspects of the ceremony, together with five densely illustrated sheets: a single depiction of a columna rostrata (awarded to recipients of a naval triumph); and four scenes, including verbal labels, that together provided a visual reconstruction of a triumphal procession through ancient Rome (Figs 1–4). Neither the subject, nor the way in which Panvinio approached it, are particularly striking, at least at first sight. The triumph fascinated Renaissance scholars, artists and rulers. Flavio Biondo gave a detailed textual account of its workings in the conclusion to his Roma Triumphans (1459), which subsequent antiquaries built upon; Andrea Mantegna is the most famous of several artists who envisaged aspects of the procession; and various princes, kings and emperors paraded and entered cities in recreations of the ancient ceremony. Panvinio's work appears to respond to this widespread fascination: the fact that Tramezzino published the work in Italian and Latin editions simultaneously suggests that he had a varied audience in mind.Footnote 2
Tramezzino's publication is worth further investigation, however, as it provides an unusually suggestive insight into mid-sixteenth-century conceptions of the role of images in presenting classical history. In the work Panvinio paired textual and artistic responses to antiquity, but suggested that they offered independent, rather than complementary, accounts of the triumph. The book therefore made the case that a visual reconstruction could be just as compelling a work of historical scholarship as a textual narrative. Panvinio was not a particularly original scholar. He built on, and occasionally stole, the ideas of others, particularly his one-time friend Pirro Ligorio. Because he designed his work to be published, though, it was more coherent, better known and more widely cited than Ligorio's, most of which did not see print. By using Panvinio and his work as an entry into Renaissance antiquarianism, and especially developments in the Italian peninsula from 1550 to 1575, this essay aims to advance our understanding of the methods of Panvinio and his colleagues, and in particular to show why and how antiquaries turned to images for exposition.
PANVINIO AND PREVIOUS RESPONSES TO ANTIQUITY AT ROME
In the century following Biondo, and particularly from the beginning of the sixteenth century, antiquaries and artists at Rome and beyond devoted enormous energies to gathering and synthesizing information about the ancient world. Panvinio built on the results of their work, and in order to understand his contribution, it is worth briefly surveying their achievements. Classicizing architects and artists eagerly sketched architectural details, the façades of buildings, or sculptures and the collections in which they were housed. The early sixteenth-century drawings of the Sangallo circle, for example, include many detailed renderings of antiquities; Maarten van Heemskerck's sketches of Roman collections from the 1530s provide some of our best evidence for their contents and arrangement. Artists adapted both the forms and the motifs of what they found. Particularly interesting for their interpretations of ancient bas-reliefs' subject-matter and flattened style are Jacopo Ripanda and Polidoro da Caravaggio (Polidoro Caldara).Footnote 3 Ripanda (d. 1516) made copies of the sculpture on Trajan's Column by arranging to be suspended in a basket from the top of the monument, and decorated the house of Cardinal Riario in Ostia with monochrome scenes of ancient warfare.Footnote 4 Da Caravaggio (d. 1543) was well-known as a painter of palace façades in the years before the Sack of Rome in 1527: these paintings did not last long in the Roman climate, but seem to have imitated low classical reliefs in grisaille.Footnote 5
Others aimed to restore fragments to their original condition, by comparing them with other examples of surviving material.Footnote 6 Faced with the city of Rome itself, Raphael (da Caravaggio's teacher) presents a striking example of their confidence. In his famous and much-studied letter of around 1519 to Pope Leo X, devised in collaboration with Baldassare Castiglione, he wrote,
I record that Your Holiness commanded me to make a drawing of ancient Rome — at least as far as can be understood from that which can be seen today — with those buildings that are sufficiently well preserved such that they can be drawn out exactly as they were, without error, using true principles, and making those members that are entirely ruined and have completely disappeared correspond with those that are still standing and can be seen.Footnote 7
Raphael's project involved surveying, comparing and then producing a visual reconstruction; his claim that he could rely on ‘true principles’ shows his belief that he could get his version right. The physical remains were not enough for this undertaking, however: ‘I took that which I intend to show from many Latin authors’, Raphael went on, and he singled out the regionary catalogue attributed to Publius Victor as especially important.Footnote 8 For a project of this sort, Raphael's knowledge of Roman buildings and techniques required the supplement of whatever topographical and other information could be derived from textual sources.
It is hard to assess how significant the immediate impact of Raphael's ideas about reconstruction was (the drawings of his contemporaries offer evidence for the probable effect of his views about surveying and representing buildings, and not about reconstructing sections of the city as a whole). His death in 1520 put an end to his project, and the letter introducing it was not published. Fabio Calvo, who worked with Raphael, published an Antiquae Urbis Romae cum Regionibus Simulachrum (A Likeness of Ancient Rome, with its Regions) in 1527, a series of reconstructed city-views that have a clear connection with Raphael's project. But as Philip Jacks showed, his work is relatively crude, and in many cases his illustrations of buildings owe more to coin reverses than careful surveys.Footnote 9 In the years after the Sack, the work of Pirro Ligorio provides better evidence for the persistence of ideas about reconstruction.Footnote 10 Ligorio first worked at Rome in the 1530s as a painter of house façades in the tradition of da Caravaggio, and copied some of Ripanda's friezes: like them, he used the form of relief sculpture to create something new. He imitated Roman sculptors, eschewing, for example, contemporary perspectival techniques, and creating densely-figured scenes, a practice that may have convinced viewers of their verisimilitude. When he started to reconstruct scenes from antiquity on paper, he used a similar technique.Footnote 11 To supplement his knowledge of Roman visual material, he collected information about all sorts of classical texts, and, as he created his visual reconstructions, he wrote entries for an encyclopaedia of the ancient world. He was able to publish only a small proportion of his work, but what he did made a large impact. It included a book on topography and circuses in 1553, reconstructed views of the circus and other ancient scenes, and, most striking of all, a famous, free-standing map of ancient Rome, the Anteiquae Urbis Imago Accuratissime ex Vetusteis Monumenteis Formata (A Depiction of the Ancient City, Created Most Accurately from Very Old Monuments).Footnote 12 This, printed by the Tramezzini brothers on six sheets in 1561, could be interpreted as a realization of Raphael's plan, just over 40 years after the master's death.
For their reconstructions, Raphael and Ligorio had access to the efforts of Biondo and his followers, who had tried to gather and organize textual evidence for the Roman past. These scholars' work took various forms. Some edited texts or catalogued inscriptions; others wrote short essays on individual passages and questions; others compiled longer, more comprehensive studies of particular phenomena.Footnote 13 Initially, their ostensible aim was to illuminate terms and concepts in classical texts, although in time their fervour started to develop its own momentum, something particularly true of a burgeoning group of topographical studies of Rome. In general these scholars aimed to document their subjects as thoroughly as possible, usually at the expense of interpreting them (although it is striking how frequently antiquaries invited their readers to visualize what they described, following Biondo's lead)Footnote 14 — hence the modern image of antiquarian scholarship as dry and unfocused.Footnote 15 Thomas Greene identified ‘[t]he instinct to recreate the original whole out of the fragment’ as central to the humanist imagination, but the sixteenth-century antiquaries' fervent accumulation of information about antiquity usually is assumed to have subdued this imaginative response.Footnote 16 The more information scholars had about the ancient world, the less easy it was to speculate freely.
Most of Panvinio's work fits readily into this antiquarian stereotype. Panvinio was born in 1530, arrived in Rome at the age of nineteen, and died only nineteen years later. In his short life he published over 3,000 pages of scholarship, and he left behind various notes and uncompleted projects that fuelled a posthumous industry for the 30 or so years after his death.Footnote 17 He was a great compiler, which explains in part his productivity. He was very good at gathering sources, including thousands of inscriptions, and combining them quickly. He wrote about chronology, the development of pagan Roman institutions, and Christian history, ranging from burial practices to biographies of the popes. His Reipublicae Romanae Commentariorum Libri Tres (Three Books of Commentaries on the Roman Republic), published in 1558, was typical: a loosely-organized chronological account of the emergence of Roman institutions, it included pages of documentation for particular examples, pages that continued long after he had established his point. On his death he was planning a vast encyclopaedia called the Antiquitates Romanae (Roman Antiquities), building on his previous books, which was to include further details of Roman religion and entertainments. For most of his life Panvinio was fundamentally interested in writing, rather than in drawing or carving, as the basis for his historical research and for the form that the results of that research took. Most of his published work included very few references to visual evidence, and he showed little interest there in the efforts of the architects and artists around him drawing the remains of Rome.Footnote 18
PANVINIO'S RENDITIONS OF THE TRIUMPH
Panvinio's textual explanation of the procession was a thoroughly antiquarian production, copious in detail. It was relatively straightforward, and not very different methodologically from Biondo's, of over a century before. Panvinio examined the ritual's etymology, origins and historical development. He then gave a fairly lengthy, but lively, account of the triumphal procession — here, as Biondo had done before him, referring to the Arch of Titus for the appearance of the triumph.Footnote 19 After this, he listed variations on the standard triumphal ceremony, including triumphs awarded for naval victories, the lesser triumph known as the ovatio, and later developments in Byzantium. To compile his account, Panvinio used a wide range of textual sources (in this regard making a large advance on Biondo), from classical narrative historians like Livy to grammarians and commentators on poems.Footnote 20 The account as a whole seems self-contained; in fact — although Tramezzino made no mention of this in the 1571 book — it is extracted straight from a book Panvinio published in 1558, Fastorum Libri V (Five Books on the Fasti), in which he tried to reconstruct the chronology of all those generals who were awarded a triumph, and offered the explanation of the triumphal ceremony as an appendix.Footnote 21
The engravings of the triumphal procession were new to Tramezzino's publication, however. In their unwieldy title Panvinio made his claim for the range of sources that he used (Fig. 5):
A most accurate descriptio of a truly elaborate triumph, such as Lucius Paullus celebrated after the capture of Perseus, king of Macedon, Publius Africanus Aemilianus held after the slaughter of the Carthaginians, Pompey held over the east, and Julius, Augustus, Vespasian, Trajan and other emperors enjoyed, from the ancient testimony of stones, coins and books.Footnote 22
No previous visual representation of a classical triumph had made so direct a claim for its accuracy, or so explicit a claim for its sources, which is borne out by a cursory comparison of Panvinio's reconstruction with readily available material. For example, Panvinio seems to have used coin reverses of the Roman Republican period (for example, for the built-up appearance of the triumphal general's chariot, mentioned in an epitome of Cassius Dio),Footnote 23 as well as those of emperors, adapting images of sacrifice and military equipment as well as those related specifically to the triumph. Most important, though, were the evidence and form of well-known bas-reliefs in Rome: Panvinio supplemented the triumphal scenes from the Arch of Titus with details from Trajan's Column, the reliefs detached from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, and another image of sacrifice later known as the Casali relief.Footnote 24 Bas-reliefs provided a model for the appearance of Panvinio's figures and his narrative techniques: the triumphant general, for example, appears once outside Rome and once parading inside the walls in Panvinio's representation, just as Roman relief series presented one figure in several scenes.Footnote 25
One point of comparison for Panvinio's illustrations is Mantegna's series of paintings; but whereas, as Charles Hope argued, Mantegna, although informed by textual accounts of the triumph and material remains, ‘did not start with the intention of producing an archaeologically correct reconstruction of an ancient triumph’, that is precisely what Panvinio was trying to do.Footnote 26 A closer parallel are twelve woodcuts made by Jacobus Argentoratensis and published by Benedetto Bordone in 1504, which enjoyed considerable influence in the first half of the century.Footnote 27 These showed the triumph of Caesar, presenting a procession of figures carrying spoils. They were based fundamentally on ancient literary sources and Biondo's account: in one impression, fairly lengthy texts were added beneath the procession to reveal the designer's sources.Footnote 28 The difference between Argentoratensis's and Panvinio's versions is marked in various details. As a simple example, where the former shows a chariot bearing spoils drawn by two horses, in the Panvinio version there are four, following the triumphal quadriga represented in various reliefs and coins.
Panvinio's selection of sources for the engravings thus marked an important stage in the way the ancient triumph was represented. Given Panvinio's background, and the fact that his book was published posthumously, one might suspect that the engravings were not Panvinio's work at all, despite the proud claim that he was their ‘inventor’ (Fig. 5). It is clear, though, that he was involved closely in their production.Footnote 29 The earliest impressions (Figs 1–4) include the date 1565, and letters and documents from 1564 show that he had begun to conceive of them then.Footnote 30 A large codex of representations of reliefs and other antiquities is preserved in the Vatican: Panvinio did not draw these but is very likely to have owned them, and they would have provided easily accessible source material.Footnote 31 Most importantly, the illustrations of the triumph accompanied other images engraved in the same year: a map of Rome and a series of 30 illustrations to complement a treatise on ancient circus games (not published, though, until 1600 by Giovanni Battista Ciotto, together with a reprinting of the De Triumpho Commentarius).Footnote 32 Together, the map, circus illustrations and images for the triumph provide an impressive index of the range of sources available to antiquarians in the second half of the sixteenth century and the inventiveness with which they put them to use. The map, entitled Anteiquae Urbis Imago Accuratissime ex Vetustis Monumentis … Delineata (A Depiction of the Ancient City, Drawn Most Accurately from Very Old Remains) shows the roads and aqueducts serving the city, and then within the walls selected classical buildings and sites, 89 of which are identified in a key below. The circus illustrations include representations of coins and bas-reliefs, ground plans and contemporary views of the ruined sites, and reconstructions of the circus buildings with the games and processions that took place within them. Here, therefore, Panvinio included the raw materials from which he created his reconstructions, as well as the reconstructions themselves. Of particular relevance to the illustration of the triumph is a four-page depiction of the initial circus parade, snaking around the Circus Maximus.Footnote 33 The appearance of the parade is closely parallel to the depiction of the triumph, and in both a strong case is made for accuracy and a range of sources.
PANVINIO'S INSPIRATION
This fairly extensive collection of visual material, conceived in the early 1560s, marked a real shift in Panvinio's scholarly output, and shows the clear influence of work along the lines of that proposed by Raphael and achieved by Ligorio. How can we account for that change? Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Panvinio's patron, had involved him in discussions of the iconography for his villa in Caprarola, which presumably would have stimulated Panvinio's interest in visual representation.Footnote 34 Other roughly contemporary developments might well have played a background role. Discussions in the Council of Trent, including the reaffirmation of the rousing effects of images, could have informed Panvinio's decision (for in a collection of papal portraits published in 1568, but also conceived early in the 1560s, Panvinio referred to the desire and delight the contemplation of images might provide).Footnote 35 In general, antiquaries often had referred to their work as providing verbal images of what they described.Footnote 36 More specifically, by the 1560s, they had begun to accept the power of printed images to record objects, whereas previously they had viewed them with some suspicion; images had started to be included in didactic books in a variety of fields, and in Rome, the work of the printmakers Antonio Salamanca and then especially Antoine Lafréry had revealed the power of etching and engraving to preserve antiquities.Footnote 37 Antiquaries and collectors known to Panvinio had collaborated with Lafréry (who had begun to publish his Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae albums in the late 1550s), and the Tramezzini were the latter's commercial rivals.Footnote 38 Panvinio also may have been responding to one contemporary theorist of historical criticism in particular. In 1560, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso wrote Della historia diece dialoghi (Ten Dialogues on History), set in Venice, in which he investigated contemporary historical practice, including the media that historians could use. ‘What are carved on the columns of Trajan and Antoninus, and on the arches of Constantine and Severus, if not the histories of their victories and triumphs?’, he asked. ‘I would add that history may not only be written, but also sculpted and painted, and these are more properly istorie, for they are objects of sight’.Footnote 39 He went on to add that they are also, ‘truly narrations of events’.Footnote 40 Just as Patrizi knew of developments in antiquarianism, Panvinio certainly could have known Patrizi's book, if not the author.
In practice, though, while Panvinio would have been aware of Tridentine emphases and antiquarian prints, and may well have read Patrizi, the most plausible reason for his change of direction is straightforward: he simply began to copy the techniques of his successful colleague Ligorio.Footnote 41 Ligorio and Panvinio seem to have been on friendly terms from Panvinio's arrival in Rome in 1549, and in 1558 Panvinio acknowledged Ligorio in the preface to his Reipublicae … Libri. Footnote 42 But even then their relationship was already souring, as Panvinio took advantage of Ligorio's work. Once he had left Rome, after Panvinio's death, Ligorio gave more of an insight into his impression of Panvinio, and made it clear the two disagreed over issues of intellectual property. He claimed that Panvinio had ‘stolen almost all his material from my work on antiquities, through his avaricious haste for profit’.Footnote 43 (This was not the only occasion: Georg Fabricius, too, accused Panvinio of having copied his work.Footnote 44) Silvia Tomasi Velli has shown that a comparison of Ligorio's studies of circuses with Panvinio's engravings related to games bears out Ligorio's complaint. Panvinio took some of his material from the published book and engravings, and some from Ligorio's notebooks. His debt is especially clear in the reconstruction of the Circus Maximus — Ligorio and Panvinio shared a publisher, so the plates used for Ligorio's books were probably available to Panvinio — and must have been clear to any interested observer.Footnote 45 Panvinio's map of the city of Rome, with its title (Anteiquae Urbis Imago Accuratissime ex Vetustis Monumentis … Delineata) echoing Ligorio's so closely, is actually different in scope and attention to detail (for Ligorio's map ends more or less at the city walls, but includes many more buildings within them); there Panvinio seems to acknowledge knowingly Ligorio's overall contribution.Footnote 46 But in the circus treatise, Panvinio did not mention Ligorio, and in the plates, as we have seen, Panvinio presented himself prominently as the ‘inventor’, or ‘auctor’. Indeed, Panvinio almost effaced his engraver, Etienne Dupérac, as well, who is mentioned on the first plate alone, and not at all in the engravings of the triumph.Footnote 47 Dupérac, who had worked with Ligorio, almost certainly provided Panvinio with the visual material from the manuscript in the Vatican mentioned above (p. 243), and is very likely to have played a part in the design of the scenes as well as their execution.Footnote 48 But because Panvinio paid for the plates — several include this information — he was able to present them as his own work.
IMAGES AND THEIR ROLE
By co-opting Ligorio's techniques, then, Panvinio does indeed seem to have been profiting from his work. What was it that attracted him, and what function did he think that these images would fulfil? Panvinio's knowledge of the importance of preserving traces of the Roman past, his interest in ecclesiastical history, and his awareness of the potential importance of material remains to Catholic historical scholarship encouraged him, like his contemporaries, to think at the very least about the documentary power of images. In the preface to his 1568 collection of papal portraits, Panvinio argued that ‘a picture provides what is denied to us by nature, which allows nothing to last forever’.Footnote 49 His work on Christian history reveals that he was keenly aware of the relevance of Christian realia to current debates, and the importance of its preservation.Footnote 50 He added two other arguments. In the treatise on circus games, Panvinio discussed the site and appearance of various circuses at Rome, and introduced his illustrations as follows: ‘In order that these details can be more easily understood, and so that I should follow my habit of satisfying eager students of Roman antiquities, I have added on these two plates a ground-plan, reconstruction, and then the ruin as it is seen today’.Footnote 51 In this case, then, images facilitate understanding. In a survey of proposed works from 1567, he went further: ‘we have added to these books images engraved in bronze and in precise woodcuts, created from ancient monuments, stones and coins, so that whatever a careful reader reads in books, he might have expressed in a picture, and almost see the thing itself before his eyes’.Footnote 52 Here Panvinio used language reminiscent of classical writers when they discussed ekphrasis, but with a twist: it is not only his language that creates a picture, but his visual sources.Footnote 53 Both arguments, that images offer immediacy with a heightened impression of reality and facilitate understanding, are found in other illustrated books of the period on non-classical themes, particularly those on natural history.Footnote 54
We should be cautious, however, of assuming that the images of the circus games, which aid understanding, fulfilled exactly the same purpose as the representation of the triumph. The former are tied closely to the text: Panvinio referred to them, and claimed that they illustrated effectively the subjects that he was discussing. The treatise on circuses, then, falls within a tradition of antiquarian illustrated books, beginning at least in Italy with Fra Giovanni Giocondo's illustrated edition of Caesar, where images clarify text.Footnote 55 The work on the triumph is different. The engravings certainly appear to complement the careful description of the procession that is the centrepiece of the text: just as the engravings include plenty of detail about the appearance of figures that had no place in the text, some of the information in that description, which relied fundamentally on textual sources, is not reflected in the engravings.Footnote 56 But in at least one case, the visual sources had not been reconciled with the textual material: in his essay Panvinio quoted Tertullian's famous description of a slave standing behind the triumphant general, reminding him that he was human; but in the engravings he copied the winged victory that crowned the general in reliefs and coins (Fig. 6). And Panvinio made no reference to the images in his writing. This is probably because the essay on the triumph originally had appeared in a different context, and perhaps also because the work was not completed on Panvinio's death. In addition, it was very much more difficult to combine text and image on the same page when engravings, rather than woodcuts, were employed.Footnote 57 But in the absence of any direct statement about their function, Tramezzino's publication gives the sense that text and image existed independently. There is a useful parallel in Panvinio's topographical scholarship. In his Reipublicae … Libri Panvinio devoted an entire 300-page section, entitled ‘Antiquae Urbis imago’, to questions about the topography of Rome, and had included the texts of two regionary catalogues attributed to Sextus Rufus and Publius Victor. Panvinio's subsequent presentation of the city's topography on a single sheet, also entitled ‘Antiquae Urbis imago’, without commentary, offers a simple and effective summary of that research.
The subsequent fortuna of Panvinio's work on the triumph suggests that his audience was able to conceive of text and image as potentially independent entities. Ciotto printed text and image together when he published Panvinio's illustrated essay on circus games for the first time in 1600.Footnote 58 And in 1596, Cornelis de Jode published engravings, based on Panvinio's, that his father Gerard had made, together with Panvinio's text, introducing them as follows: ‘I thought that by adding the commentary of the author [to my father's plates], I would thus give full satisfaction to scholars, and that the work would be complete’.Footnote 59 But de Jode's belief does not seem to have been shared with his readers; text and images are often preserved separately now, and, more tellingly, his engravings were published on their own in Rome in 1618.Footnote 60 Also at Rome, for example, the engravings from Panvinio's work clearly influenced Antonio Tempesta's attempt at a single sheet engraving of a Roman triumphal procession, and an image of a triumph in Giacomo Lauro's Antiquae Urbis Splendor.Footnote 61 On the other hand, a new edition of the original source for the text, the Fastorum … Libri, was made in 1588, without illustrations. Similarly, Panvinio's text alone was included also in a 1601 study of triumphs by Jules Boulenger.Footnote 62 Panvinio's reputation as an interpreter of ancient Rome in general was high, on the Italian peninsula and beyond: Joseph Scaliger, for example, called him ‘pater historiae’, and Jacques-Auguste de Thou praised him as ‘a man born to dig out all antiquities, Roman and ecclesiastical, from the shadows’.Footnote 63 This was one reason for the ongoing popularity of his work. Whereas interested seventeenth-century antiquaries had to commission copies by hand of Ligorio's reconstructions (and Panvinio's Vatican codex), most of Panvinio's were readily available.Footnote 64 The work on circuses and triumphs was especially valued: Ciotti's edition of text and images was reprinted twice, in 1642 and 1681, with additions, and was included by Graevius in his Thesaurus Romanarum Antiquitatum at the end of the century.Footnote 65
THE DESCRIPTIO AND LATE RENAISSANCE CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP
Alongside evidence of the reception of the images, Panvinio's original terminology for his creations also invites the suggestion that the engravings and the textual content can be seen as parallel (as with the title ‘Antiquae Urbis imago’ above). Both text and images were called a descriptio, when other options existed: enarratio, in the case of the text, imago, expressio, or deformatio in the case of the plates, and historia for both.Footnote 66 The primary meaning of the verb describere in this period seems to have been ‘make a copy’. It was used by antiquaries in their accounts of making records of evidence, the practice that is most characteristic of antiquarian scholarship in this period.Footnote 67 But descriptio is also, of course, a Latin translation for ekphrasis, and so we would expect it to be used for vivid verbal description like Panvinio's descriptio of the triumph.Footnote 68 By the time Panvinio was writing about the triumph, though, antiquaries employed the noun descriptio to mean something rather more than simply a copy, but rather a rendition or reconstruction. It appears most frequently in the titles of sixteenth-century historical maps, including, for example, Nicolaus Sophianos's pioneering Totius Graeciae Descriptio (Descriptio of the Entirety of Greece, 1540), and subsequently various examples included in Abraham Ortelius's Parergon, a collection of historical maps. Descriptio was by no means the only title given to maps of this type (other examples include ichnographia, tabula or imago, as in Panvinio's map of Rome), and the word could be used also of contemporary maps, but it does seem to be the primary term scholars employed in their correspondence.Footnote 69 As Svetlana Alpers has shown, they used it for Ptolemy's geographical records, and so, ‘when the word description is used by Renaissance geographers it calls attention … not to the persuasive power of words but to a mode of pictorial representation. The graphic implication of the term is distinguished from the rhetorical one’.Footnote 70 Panvinio was thus playing with this distinction.
Indeed, historical maps with the title descriptio provide a very useful parallel to the engravings of the triumph: like the latter, which aimed to show a generic triumph as it took place from the Republican period through at least the reign of the Emperor Trajan, the maps tended to depict the land not at a particular moment, but across a period of years, compressing details and often including chronologically impossible juxtapositions.Footnote 71 Both types of reconstruction combine a variety of sources (in the case of the maps, geographical gazetteers and historical narratives alongside material remains on the ground). And both, crucially, require a degree of historical imagination and supposition, to fill in the gaps provided by a patchwork of evidence. As with the triumph, descriptio could apply to both verbal and visual geographical renditions: the Greek titles of Pausanias's and Strabo's gazetteers were both translated as descriptio in late sixteenth-century editions. Abraham Ortelius famously was to refer to geography as the eye of history — he was by no means the only thinker of this period to connect the two in terms of that sort — and a similar case could be made for the earlier reconstructions of Ligorio and his followers.Footnote 72 The technology involved in creating reproductions of elaborate scenes was the same as used for maps, and the same publishers, engravers and creators — including the Tramezzini, Lafréry and Ligorio — made both.Footnote 73 As scholars became interested in the testimony of the land and its material remains, they turned to visual genres to communicate their responses to them.Footnote 74 The term that they chose most commonly to denote the results of their work, descriptio, nicely encompasses the transcription, copying and reconstruction that such scholarship involved.
From one angle, these scholars were doing something radical, as their association with theorists such as Patrizi would suggest; but from the perspective of humanist historical practice and antiquarianism, there is something a little reactionary about the use of descriptiones, of visual representation as a means to create historical truth.Footnote 75 The visual descriptio allowed a creative, imaginative and vivid response to such evidence, reminiscent of the liberties and stylistic commitment required of humanist narrative historians. Panvinio's self-conscious language of accuracy and truth — itself at least partly a response to the importance of documentation and proof as separate confessional histories emerged — is not characteristic of earlier humanist history-writing, but the creative freedom with which he used his evidence is.Footnote 76
Illustrations that purported to represent ceremonies and scenes from antiquity became common in historical works from the last quarter of the sixteenth century. In Venice, Andrea Palladio published an edition of Caesar in 1575 illustrated with representations of military engines, soldiers and formations, and Francesco Patrizi himself followed him with a similar edition of Polybius in 1583, published in Ferrara.Footnote 77 North of the Alps, Blaise de Vigenère added various reconstructions and representations of buildings and scenes in his notes to Livy published in 1583 (he had met Ligorio in Rome, but also referred to Panvinio's published work).Footnote 78 Benito Arias Montano added at the end of his polyglot bible a survey of Jewish antiquities, including historical maps, representations of various objects and reconstructions of buildings.Footnote 79 When Justus Lipsius was working on Roman amphitheatres, Abraham Ortelius pointed him in the direction of Ligorio's printed book, and later sent him drawings of coins from his collection.Footnote 80 Lipsius included illustrations of a variety of types in his works, including representations of military machines from Trajan's Column. He drew the line at too free a reconstruction, however, complaining that the representations of gladiatorial games added by his publisher to his Saturnales Sermones owed more to the inventions of a ‘pictor’ (‘artist’) than to what he called historical truth.Footnote 81 Even if these works present reconstructions that are usually tied to the text, and are not complex, free-standing illustrations like maps or Panvinio's descriptio, they do suggest the pull of imaginative but avowedly accurate historical reconstruction for antiquarians of this period.
CONCLUSION
As sixteenth-century scholars showed an increasing awareness of the value of material objects as evidence for Roman history, therefore, Panvinio tried to adapt those objects for a visual, not textual, reconstruction; the engravings that he produced are indicative of a particular type of visual turn in sixteenth-century antiquarian scholarship, in which historians gathered visual evidence for Roman rituals and ceremonies, and then tried to create historical scholarship that resembled the bas-reliefs (in particular) that they observed. This adaptation of a classical type for a contemporary purpose is a typical Renaissance intellectual strategy, but it comes at a time when the antiquaries' devotion to the collection of evidence and precision in citing it had threatened to turn historical scholarship into the dry accumulation of facts. Panvinio's work, and that of other historians like Lipsius and de Vigenère, who also turned to reconstructed scenes for their historical exposition in the last quarter of the century, therefore also invites us to reassess the work of the antiquaries more generally. The imaginative response to the challenge of creating historical scholarship challenges a received view of sixteenth-century antiquarianism as a sterile undertaking divorced from history, which results from one reading of Momigliano. Take, for example, this statement of Carlo Ginzburg:
Like a lawyer, an historian is obliged to convince with the use of an efficacious argument involving to a point the creation of an illusion of reality and less with the production of proof or the evaluation of proof produced by others. These latter are the proper activities of antiquarians and scholars, but until the second half of the eighteenth century, history and antiquarianism constituted intellectual environments entirely independent of one another, populated by a different set of individuals.Footnote 82
According to Ginzburg, historians create the narrative, antiquarians amass the evidence.Footnote 83 Perhaps this is broadly true. It is certainly the case that most of the work of Panvinio and his colleagues ended up consisting of citation piled upon citation as testimony for a particular phenomenon. But antiquaries like Ligorio, Panvinio and their followers also wanted to create an ‘illusion of reality’. To do so, they turned not to words, but to images. Just as historians working today owe their critical apparatus of footnotes and citations to the methods of the sixteenth-century antiquarians, so they are in debt to these men for the reconstructions and illustrations that they used to make their vision of the past more vivid.