Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

Five: The Credulity Problem

149 Early modern European antiquarians made plenty of blunders—but they were such interesting blunders.1 In the first third of the fifteenth century , for example, Italian scholars developed a fluid and legible handwriting based on the manuscripts of classical texts that they had found in monastic libraries.2 They then instructed painters to adorn the initial letters and page borders of their own books with crawling, interlocking growths of vine, curling white stems and shoots, much like those they had seen in the old books. An initial E from a Bolognese manuscript of Suetonius, datable to the middle of the fifteenth century, adorning a text written in a round humanist hand, is a good example (fig. 1).3 But the white vine scroll and the minuscule alphabet were born of a chronological misconception, for the ancient models that scribes and painters looked to were not so ancient. Their models were actually twelfthcentury Italian manuscripts which in turn transmitted interlaced forms developed in transalpine monasteries such as St. Gall between the ninth and eleventh centuries; for example an initial C from a Homiliary, an Italian manuscript of the early twelfth century (fig. 2).4 There can be no mistake about the derivation, for fifteenth-century white vine ornament duplicated even the blue, green, and red color scheme of the intervals between the vines found in the medieval sources.5 The philologists in their enthusiasm were reviving not an ancient Roman but an early medieval and northern European form. An art historian might describe such a cross-wiring as a pseudomorphosis , following Erwin Panofsky, who used this term to characterize a Five The Credulity Problem Christopher S. Wood 150 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China historical form invested by Renaissance artists with a meaning that it had not possessed in the past.6 White vine ornament and other false antiquities were not the fantasms of mere ill-informed artists, however. They were promulgated by scholars, the pioneers of the modern disciplines of philology and archaeology, critical minds who defined themselves as the enemies of all hopeful or blurry thinking about the past. Just as the reform-minded theologians of the day deplored superstition and the cult of relics, so too did new-model historians ridicule the credulities of unlettered clerics, professorial imposters, and the common folk. In his Bavarian Chronicle of 1526 the historian Johannes Aventinus—to invoke only one distinguished figure—drily mocked the “good, foolish, and ignorant cathedral canon” in Regensburg who on the basis of an inscription mistook the tombstone of Aurelia, a Roman woman, for the tomb of a certain Saint Aurelia, who in fact there was no reason to believe had ever been in Regensburg.7 The local cleric, untutored in epigraphy and archaeology, had no idea how to date an inscription. And for all that the humanists, not excepting Aventinus himself, managed to find their own winding path into error. Renaissance scholars often display the same combination of severity and suggestibility that we find two centuries later in Giambattista Vico, who derided the “unclear, frivolous, inept, conceited, and ridiculous” opinions of other scholars on the origins of languages, and then went on to assert that the most ancient peoples had spoken a natural, nonarbitrary language and that this was the language of Atlantis, just as Plato had said; or who dismissed as “groundless, inappropriate, or simply false” the views of other authorities Fig. 1. Suetonius, De vita Caesarum. Bologna, mid-fifteenth century. Beinecke Library, Yale University, Marston MS 52, fol. 119r. The Credulity Problem 151 on the reasons for the monstrous stature of ancient giants, but was himself completely confident of the historical reality of giants.8 Fifteenthand sixteenth-century scholars were peculiarly prone to credulity, as if archaeology itself, the epochal turn to material evidence as a supplement to oral and textual authority, only led them to ever more wonderful and lucid errors. Credulity was the matrix of creativity. Ernst Gombrich, in one of his most ingenious essays, associated Leon Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi’s reform of architecture with Poggio Bracciolini and Coluccio Salutati’s invention of the minuscule script.9 In both cases, the modern-pointing innovations were grounded in what Ingrid Rowland calls an “antiquarianism of false premises.”10 Just as the Florentine scribes had modeled their antiqua alphabet on Carolingian precedents, so too did the pioneering architect Filippo Brunelleschi select as his paragons the Baptistery and...