The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome by David Karmon (review)

David Karmon has written a cultural history of Renaissance efforts to preserve ancient Roman ruins with particular emphasis on the legislators who were responsible for excavation licenses. His investigation focuses on how the preservation of antiquity was conceived and practiced, and on the ways that the rulers of the city (both the papal and civic governments) attached symbolic importance to the preservation of ancient Roman monuments. Preservation of ancient architecture is a long-standing tradition in Rome, an outlook carefully cultivated over the centuries and renewed during the Renaissance. Government involvement in regulating, controlling, and limiting the destruction of ancient remains is presented as a means of consolidating power and legitimating authority over the Eternal City, since it enabled those in power to bend the interpretation of the past to fit their aims.

The first part of the book is composed of three chapters, the first of which provides an overview of the concept of preservation from the ancient period until the Middle Ages. The next two chapters provide a more extensive account of preservation in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, outlining the main interventions and strategies (including edicts and bulls) used to preserve the traces of the ancient Roman past.

Preserving the traditions and artifacts of the past was central to the imperial propaganda of Augustus, who wanted to present himself as the restorer of, inter alia, lost peace, moral customs, and piety for the ancestors.¹ Karmon emphasizes the importance of Augustus's establishment of legislation and a permanent municipal bureaucracy devoted to the cura urbis, the norms of which were followed by subsequent emperors. The popes who ruled Rome in later centuries perpetuated this tradition, as when Gregory the Great declared that pagan temples should not be destroyed. But it is debatable whether this was truly a "preservation practice," as Karmon argues, rather than an "appropriation practice" of rituals and actual buildings, as indicated by Françoise Choay (as quoted on 35).² When the civic government was founded in 1144, it promoted an antiquarian revival by restoring senatorial dignity and Roman law, thus presenting itself as the guardian of the Roman past. This opened the way for a power struggle between church and state over the preservation of Rome's ancient buildings. The statutes of the maestri di strade,³ revised by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, specifically put their excavation licenses (to supply major papal building projects) under papal approval but did not include those issued by the Conservators (the other magistrates of the civic government, together with the senators), thereby maintaining an overlapping of jurisdictions between the papal and civic governments. Karmon makes frequent reference to the controversy between rival ruling administrations, but his discussions are always brief. His account would have benefited from greater detail about the actual impact of the civic government activity on the "immense ancient landscape" (44) of the city as compared to that of the popes, and from further information about their alliances and disputes during these centuries (a question examined extensively by Massimo Miglio on more than one occasion).⁴

At this point Karmon introduces one of his main arguments: that the excavation licenses issued by the civic government (and later by the papal bureaucracy) were a fundamental means of controlling and safeguarding ancient Roman remains. Though such licenses authorized the use of ruins as a source for building materials, their "protective dimension" (43) regulated the exploitation of those remains and so gave shape to one of the most powerful preservation practices in Rome.

After the papacy returned to Rome in 1420, fifteenth-century popes continued to use the preservation of antiquity as a strategic tool to consolidate their temporal power over the city. They strengthened the existing civic institutions of the maestri di strade and the Conservators as part of their more general appropriation of civic power. The reader sometimes has the impression that every intervention into the city and its physical territory was focused on...