Historical Pyrrhonism and Architectural Truth

Abstract

This essay explores the status and function of non-literary sources — and, in particular, of architectural representation — in the polemical context of historical criticism in the 1670s, 1680s and 1690s. As Arnaldo Momigliano has shown, controversial essays such as ‘The Lack of Certainty in History’ (1668) by the sceptic philosopher François de La Mothe Le Vayer set the stage for an antiquarian response to historical methods in crisis. The aim here is to investigate the terms in which a regime of visual truth emerged in the illustrated writings of antiquarians such as Jacob Spon and others, who posited artifactual evidence as ‘symbol and proof of what happened’. The idea tested out, by way of a few, necessarily restricted, examples, is that the visual turn circa 1700 helped set the stage for the ensuing incursion of architectural knowledge into both antiquarian practice and historical method in the context of the pan-European fascination with antiquities. Central in all of this was the manner in which the conventions of architectural pictoriality surfaced, then intervened, in a methodological transformation of the terms in which speculation on the remote past was conceived.