- chapter 62: The reception of Etruscan culture –
sources and textual criticism, Buonarroti focuses on artifacts and monuments, i.e. on
material and visible evidence. Measured by current standards, Buonarroti appears more
“advanced” than Dempster, almost like a forerunner of the modern discipline. The
different uses that the two scholars made of their travel experiences are symptomatic
in this respect. Buonarroti repeatedly made trips to the Etruscan countryside to explore
ancient monuments, and even carried out excavations when possible, such as in Civita
Castellana – ancient Falerii – in 1691. As for Dempster, the tour he made when writing
his treatise in 1617 was signifi cantly not to an ancient site but to England, in order to
purchase books that were unavailable in Tuscany.^2 Equally eloquent are the divergences in
their respective attitudes towards the monuments. Dempster almost never cites ancient
remains in his descriptions of the cities of Etruria, the only exception being the Roman
ruins of Florence, which he knows second-hand;^3 moreover, he is uninterested in the
fi gural arts. By contrast, as to be expected from a descendant of Michelangelo, Buonarroti
is not only interested in iconography and the materiality of objects, but also displays a
keen sensitivity for stylistic features: on more than one occasion he dates objects based on
their degree of formal development.^4
Despite these differences, Buonarroti himself does not conceive his relationship to
Dempster in terms of contrast but rather of complementarity. When talking of his
predecessor, he does not present him as the representative of a superseded method but
rather as an earlier colleague.^5 Nor is Buonarroti’s approach invariably “progressive.” As
regards traveling, for example, it is signifi cant that Buonarroti’s archaeological tours all
took place in an earlier period, when he was residing in Rome at the service of cardinal
Carpegna, and that the publication of the De Etruria regali with its appendix did not
entail any new investigation of the Tuscan territory. The illustrated plates are emblematic
of the ambivalences in the relationship between the two components of the work: on the
one hand, they are distributed among the pages of Dempster’s text, which of course makes
no reference to them; on the other hand, they are explicitly referenced in Buonarroti’s
appendix, which is, however, structured according to a different order than Demspter’s
text. As a result, the images are quite cumbersome to consult, as contemporary reviewers
had already remarked.^6 In other words, the eighteenth-century publication of the De
Etruria regali has clear transitional connotations.
It would be a mistake to understand this transition in teleological terms, as a gradual
approximation to our own standards. In order to avoid this risk, the focus needs to shift
from methodology to the broader visions of the Etruscan past developed by Dempster and
Buonarroti, and specifi cally to their diverging ways of characterizing Etruscan identity
and relating it to the political sphere.
The pivotal aspect of Dempster’s whole endeavor clearly is the regal character of Etruria.
This is not coincidental: the De Etruria regali is the culmination of a long elaboration
process of the so-called “Etruscan myth” that played a crucial role in defi ning the ideology
of grand ducal power in Tuscany since the Renaissance.^7 Dempster’s work is the most
systematic treatment aimed at legitimizing the Medici’s hegemony and the autonomy of
their state based on the ancient history of the region. Despite its courtly nature, however,
Dempster’s work is not the outcome of a banal operation. Dempster addresses the issue of
Etruria’s regality in such a way that it cannot be reduced to the mere celebration of the
ruling dynasty; and some of his ideas have genuine historiographic value. For example,
he refuses to acknowledge the antiquity of noble families when it is not supported by
documentary evidence, and he does not make an exception for the Medici, about whom