Review: La memoria de las piedras. Anticuarios, arqueólogos y coleccionistas de antigüedades en la España de los Austrias by Miguel Morán Turina

Abstract

Miguel Moran Turina . La memoria de las piedras. Anticuarios, arqueologos y coleccionistas de antiguedades en la Espana de los Austrias . Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanic: 2010, 451 pp., 80 color and 96 b/w illus. €40, ISBN 9788493606077 The story Miguel Moran Turina tells is one seldom told. It is an obscure tale, one could even argue. In a word, antiquarian. Why, then, painstakingly trace the story of these early modern Spanish lovers of Roman antiquity, of their quixotic struggle against the inexorable forces of time to salvage, whether textually or graphically, the memory of stones, as the title of the book poetically evokes? It is not the least of La memoria de las piedras ' merits that it demonstrates the presence and relevance of the Roman past in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, most notably among its cultural and political elite. Superbly edited by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica (CEEH), which has been promoting the study of the Habsburg monarchy and early modern Spanish visual culture for close to a decade now, and lavishly illustrated with judicious selections from a vast array of little-known manuscript and printed sources, this book fills a long-standing gap in a field dominated by historians of art and architecture, who have traditionally been interested in and fascinated by the royal or private collecting of chiefly Italian paintings and the reception of Italian art forms. La memoria de las piedras starts off with two introductory chapters, the first on the interest in and appreciation for Roman ruins in medieval Spain, and the second focusing on Spanish travelers to the Eternal City as well as perceptions and descriptions of Rome in Spanish Renaissance writing. This initial section is followed by some fascinating pages on the development among Spanish erudites of a more systematic and rigorous method of studying Roman coins, transcribing Latin inscriptions, surveying the …