Antiquities in Motion: From Excavation Sites to Renaissance Collections by Barbara Furlotti (review)

Engaging with new insights in material culture studies as well as a dazzling range of archival documents, Barbara Furlotti paints a refreshing picture of the antiquity trade in Cinquecento Rome by redirecting our attention from the humanist collectors to a vast network of actors occupying disparate social strata. Her book successfully brings economic and legal perspectives to bear upon the convoluted yet delightfully aleatory mechanism of the antique market, while attending also to theoretical questions of mobility and material circulation. Although unacknowledged by Furlotti herself, the book's commendable effort to track "ontological and economic transformations undergone by ancient finds" (3) vividly depicts what could be called a "cultural biography of ancient finds" in Renaissance Rome—an approach first advocated by Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopykoff some decades ago and later adopted with nuance by economic historians of early modern Italy such as Renata Ago. Furlotti's decision to take a bottom-up approach also has the welcomed effect of at once concretizing and expanding the localities and spatial parameters of the antique market. Readers are invited to travel with the objects and individual actors to the ever busy excavation sites, bustling streets and markets in urban Rome, to dealers' homes and artisans' shops, to port cities, meandering waterways and the open sea. This expanded view of collecting practice is both more inclusive of the disparate voices and actors enmeshed in the market dynamic and a much-needed corrective to dominant narratives of early modern collecting as a civilizing process.

Furlotti is especially adept at describing how pragmatically minded participants in the antiquity trade—peasants, artisans, dealers and collectors—astutely negotiated with and deftly worked around the complex legal and administrative apparatus mounted by papal and civic authorities to regulate the circulation and appropriation of ancient finds. Throughout the book, we are introduced to a variegated set of licenses, bans, and regulatory practices that were constantly breached and reinstated: the patti di riserva established between landowners and tenants to settle disputes regarding the ownership of chance finds; licenses issued for excavating and exporting antiques in and out of Rome; bans on destruction and spoliation of ancient monuments; and attempts at wider surveillance on actual excavations and discoveries ongoing in the papal capital. Detailed analysis of trial records further depicts a nuanced picture of how individual actors worked with or against these legal prescriptions, often borne out of diverse intentions and specific business circumstances. Also noteworthy is the book's spotlight on how artisanal and technical knowledge was mobilized to transform ancient finds into coveted commodities. Kilnsmen were engaged in making fine lime out of ancient marbles; sculptor-restorers contributed their knowledge on material facture in cleaning and integrating fragments, and this not only for preparing an object for sale but also for its transportation in an often-dismembered state. What is revealed then is an incredibly dynamic period attitude to objecthood and materiality that challenges standard narrative. Early modern collectors had no qualms about sawing statues into pieces to facilitate shipment, and artisans were deeply engaged in the constant and often unstable conversion of raw materials into reconstituted antique objects and vice versa. Antiquities emerge from the book as spatially mobile, materially mutable, and emphatically physical objects.

Small wonder, then, that the book opens with contemporary practice of illegal trade and looted antiquities and the pointed question about the ethical dimension of collecting. Chapters 1 and 2, tackling the initial stages of excavation and transfer to the marketplace, are set in a teeming panorama of frantic building boom, urban regulation, and business activities in the papal city. On stage in the first chapter is a wide array of urban actors engaged in the activity of chance or organized excavations: from peasants, laborers, and landowners, to kilnsmen and workers in the building trade, and from maestri di strada and other papal officials responsible for supervising excavation to members of the papal curia avidly pursuing building projects and advancing sociopolitical status...