Knowledge practices in Rome around 1700. Giovan Pietro Bellori, Francesco Bianchini and Filippo Antonio Gualtieri`s “Museo delle cose antiche" and the Cultural Hierarchization of Objects.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Oy-Marra
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 525215966

The project examines the selection and hierarchization of artifacts of different cultural provenance in the context of the generation, systematization, and ordering of knowledge, invoking the categories of inquiry for a history of knowledge established by Philipp Sarasin (Sarasin 2011), who also highlighted the importance of forms of representation and their mediality. Subproject 1 is devoted to a reconstruction of the encyclopedically oriented collection of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri (1660-1724), which has so far only been rudimentarily researched and which consisted of antiquaria from various cultures. Subject of the reconstruction will be the presentation of the collection in the Palazzo Manfroni in Rome, which had fundamentally broken away from the aesthetics of wonder introducing a new system of order according to groups of objects and their provenance. In doing so, the project raises questions about the orders of knowledge reflected in its display. This analysis is complemented by a second project, which examines the mediality of antiquarian knowledge, i.e., its re-presentation forms of showing in the medium of prints and its associated visual and aesthetic practices in Rome in the second half of the 17th century and the early 18th century. This will be primarily based on the Corpus Bellorianum, as well as Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus and his China Illustrata, as well as Bianchini's Istoria Universale and Montfaucon's Antiquité expliquée, with particular attention to Bellori's, Bianchini's, and Montafaucon's statements on aesthetics and image theory. The analysis has the goal to find out the epistemic preconditions that were decisive for the selection and hierarchization of antiquarian knowledge. Furthermore, the project will reveal to what extent these practices were in the service of the assertion of the cultural-political significance of Roman antiquity around 1700. Taking into account the display of the Gualtieri collection as well as the broad mediality of Roman antiquity around 1700 the project aims to uncover the underlying knowledge practices of the presentation of the collection as well as the mediality of antiquarian knowledge and its aesthetics and epistemic presuppositions. This will be done in order to clarify the question of the extent to which the visual and aesthetic practices stated here promoted a material selection and hierarchization of objects and its cultural-political effects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants