From Chicago to Subterranean Rome: Early Printed Books, Archeology, and the Ownership of Discovery (c. 1578-1700)
Gloria Moorman, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick
Like the ‘discovery’ of the New World, that of subterranean Rome is still commonly, conveniently, pinned down to a set moment in time: excavations in the year 1578. But new discoveries need new heroes, and those can include poets and proto-archaeologists alike. This paper will shed new light on the Renaissance reception of the underground burial spaces of Late Antiquity by connecting the visual summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy created by Johannes Stradanus (c. 1595) with Antonio Bosio’s catacomb atlas Roma Sotterranea (1632-1671). The materiality of the early printed book helped Bosio to incorporate the 1578 finds into a seventeenth-century success story: Roma Sotterranea duly delivered ‘discovery,’ and in this process the Vatican created its own Columbus of the catacombs. Propagandistic print production thus became the privileged means to stage discoveries and symbolically conquer the catacombs, in a desire to triumph over the otherwise obscure worlds of death.
About William Frederking
William Frederking has an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois in Chicago and worked at Columbia College Chicago as a tenured faculty member in the Photography Department for over thirty years. He was Associate Dean for the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago under two different Deans, from 2008-2012, and 2015-2017.