Raphael and Pirro Ligorio — Historical and Philological Descriptions and Archaeological Studies of the Architecture of Ancient Rome in the 16th century

Abstract

The difficulty of comprehending artistic terminology in the Renaissance was associated with the activities of humanist philologists and scholarly antiquarians. Interest in antiquity was inherent in artists and architects. Around the archaeological work of Raphael, Ligorio, associations of learned humanists were organized, which accompanied their archaeological research with philological clarifications. The functions of archeology were combined with the need to check the terms, with the help of a visual, graphically reconstructed monument, which, as a rule, came down with losses. In this regard, scientists had to use their erudition and ingenuity to display the ruined monument in its entirety. An example of such a field of activity is printed graphics, which allows depicting monuments graphically and accompanying illustrations with albums of antiquities, replicating images of individual works of art. Such was the direction of the printing workshop of comrade Rafael Marcantonio Raimondi. A number of works by Marcantonio, as well as engravings by Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente, were made from drawings by Raphael. Some of the drawings were related to Raphael’s archaeological interests, such as the engraving of the Laocoön group (1519) by Marco Dente. Among philologists, after the publication of P. Bembo’s treatise “Discourses in Prose on the Folk Language” (1525), where in the second part of the treatise the author proposed to strictly follow the style of Petrarch and Boccaccio, a controversy flared up about the literary language, as the humanists held different points of view, to the term “volgare” (“folk”). Discussions on this topic were reflected in the association of humanists “Accademia degli Sdegnati” (1541–1545), which was joined by P. Ligorio, who, like Raphael, accompanied his studies with etymological clarifications, graphic representations and archaeological maps.