And I remembered a paper that Wright presented at the 30th Byzantine Studies Conference in Baltimore, "Was William of Moerbeke an Angevin Agent?"It's a fabulous piece of scholarship linking geopolitical agendas with antiquarianism. As far as I know, the paper is unpublished. I also wish I had been in Athens to see Wright's lecture, "Ottoman Venetian Cooperation in Post-War (1463-1478) Morea" (November 25, 2008). I'm also reminded of a paper that Siriol Davies gave a few years ago about a new discovery of a Venetian map in a Vienna. This map shows explicit classical antiquarian interests in the Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese. (I'll have to dig up the reference). Many thanks also to Guy Sanders and to Mary Lee Coulson, who have made Merbaka central to our scholarly concerns.
Going back to Cyriacus, I cannot help but share my favorite Cyriacus passage, where he describes the state of ancient cities as he rides by them. While visiting his fellow humanist Plethon at Mystras in 1448, Cyriacus inspected
"While contemplating en route from afar the ruins of once-famous Laconian towns, mulling this over in my mind, I thought, naturally, of that fact that, even though one must grieve to behold these noble, ancient, distinguished and richly adorned cities, now in our time in a state of utter collapse or demolition almost everywhere throughout the region, one must endure with an [even] heavier heart, in my opinion, the pitiable ruin of the human race, because the fact that the world’s outstanding towns, marvelous temples sacred to the gods, beautiful statues and other extraordinary trappings of human power and skill have fallen from the pristine grandeur seems not so serious as the fact that, throughout almost all the regions of the world, the pristine human virtue and renowned integrity of spirit has fallen into an [even] worse condition; and where they had once flourished most, there they had more and more departed."
The Renaissance antiquarian witnessed a landscape of devastation and abandonment, scarred by the neglect of time but also by wars, civil strife and plague. Seeing the ruins inspired lament for the loss of classical culture and the ideals it represented. Cyriacus’ countryside instructs in humility and virtue and offers a new interpretive paradigm. A. T. Grove and O. Rakcham have argued that Cyriacus' point of view was partially created by the perceptible difference between the Italian and Greek landscapes, see Mediterranean
The 2007 issue of Dumbarton Oaks Papers is a great issue for the archaeologist because it contains essays from the 2005 Symposium "Settlement Patterns in Anatolia and the Levant: New Evidence from Archaeology." In addition it contains a book-length article by Tassos Papacostas, "The History and Architecture of the Monastery of Saint John Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis, Cyprus," pp. 25-148 and the most recent excavation report from Amorium.
3 comments:
Cyriacus's sentiment appears to draw on Servius's unconsoling letter to Cicero after the death of his daughter Tullia in the mid-40s BCE -- text follows:
Ex Asia rediens cum ab Aegina Megaram versus navigarem, coepi regiones circumcirca prospicere: post me erat Aegina, ante me Megara, dextra Piraeeus, sinistra Corinthus, quae oppida quodam tempore florentissima fuerunt, nine prostrata et diruta ante oculos iacent. Coepi egomet mecum sic cogitare: "hem! nos homunculi indignamur, si quis nostrum interiit aut occisus est, quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot oppidum cadavera proiecta iacent? Visne tu te, Servi, cohibere et meminisse hominem te esse natum?"
oops -- read "nunc" for "nine" and "Piraeus" for "Piraeeus" in the quote above. Cut and pasted from a bad source.
Siriol Davies' reference to Vienna concerned, I think, a group of maps taken there from Venice during the Napoleonic Wars and now being edited by Olga Katsiardi-Hering. These are marvelous and large-scale, dating to 1700 more or less. Various scholars are contributing to the project of editing them, including Davies who is studying the map of Arkadia. The map of the Argolid indeed shows the walls of Mycenae. Also of interest to readers of this blog will be Alexis Malliaris's edition of the travelogue of Alessandro Pini, a Venetian physician who travelled the Morea with Pausanias in hand at the time of the 2nd Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese. On the Vienna maps see further: A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece (2005), p. 112, n. 8; also N. Yoffee, ed., Negotiating the Past in the Past, pp. 235-239, regarding Pini, Ciriaco, the Vienna map, and antiquities in the Argolid.
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