William Stenhouse

Ancient Inscriptions (The Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo. Series A: Antiquities and Architecture) William Stenhouse

Latin inscriptions form a rich source of information about classical Rome for ancient historians. Eager to record their achievements in a permanent form, the Romans left inscriptions on buildings, altars and votive monuments, and on tombstones, many thousands of which have survived to this day. Historians in Renaissance Italy were the first to recognize that the inscriptions that turned up in farmers' fields and on building sites provided key evidence from the classical past. Realizing also that such stones were often being destroyed as fast as they were discovered, they set about recording as many as they could. By the early seventeenth century ancient epigraphy had become a highly developed branch of learning, and the drawings of inscriptions preserved in Cassiano dal Pozzo's Paper Museum are a fascinating reflection of this earlier world of scholarship. The finely executed illustrations cover a wide chronological range and provide details about Roman law, the Roman army and officials of the Roman Empire as well as aspects of Roman life overlooked in literary sources. In most cases the inscriptions concerned are known to us in other copies, but sometimes the dal Pozzo drawing provides our only record of the piece. All told, the assemblage offers a unique perspective on classical scholarship from 1550 to 1700.