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An exciting new approach to understand the trade of antiquities in early modern Rome traces the journey of objects from discovery to display. Barbara Furlotti presents a dynamic interpretation of the early modern market for antiquities, relying on the innovative notion of archaeological finds as mobile items. She reconstructs the journey of ancient objects from digging sites to venues where they were sold, such as Roman marketplaces and antiquarians’ storage spaces; to sculptors’ workshops, where they were restored; and to Italian and other European collections, where they arrived after complicated and costly travel over land and sea. She shifts the attention away from collectors to peas...
Antiquity, as the term has been understood and used over the centuries by scholars, political and religious figures, and ordinary citizens, is far from a single, monolithic concept. Rather than reflecting a stable, shared understanding about the past and its meaning, the idea of antiquity is instead varying and multiple, taking on different meanings and deployed to different effects depending on the context in which it is being considered. In this volume, historians from a wide range of specialties offer a comparative assessment of the multiple perceptions of antiquity that have shaped modern European cultures and national identities, deploying a new methodological approach, histoire croisée, which considers these questions in light of the development of cultural diversity across Europe.
From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.