2
Antiquities and Political Prestige
in the Early Modern Era
Television programmes about archaeology, theAsterixseries on many chil-
dren’s bookshelves, Celtic-Xavoured holidays in Ireland, the megalomaniacal
classical style in the business buildings erected since the late 1980s—all
these tell us about the enduring popularity of the past in people’s minds.
The intellectual ‘other side of the coin’ are the departments of archaeology,
museums of archaeology, and heritage departments operating all over the
world. This interest in the past is certainly not new. Whereas the latter—the
museums, university and heritage departments—only appeared in the urban
landscape less than two hundred years ago, by then several generations of
intellectuals with knowledge in the arts had been aware of the existence of an
ancient past. A Doric folly on the bank of the river overlooked by the cathedral
in the pretty city of Durham was built in 1830 by a Polish count and the
eighteenth-century estate of La Alameda de Osuna on the outskirts of Madrid,
with its Greek-inspired temple of love with a statue of Bacchus (substituting
the original Venus statue that had been taken by the Napoleonic troops on
their withdrawal to France)—are only two examples of my own personal daily
encounter with the past I have had at diVerent periods in my life. Yet, a
diVerent type of past is also familiar to me, a past that is more related to the
nation’s past. In La Alameda de Osuna estate, in addition to its many classical
features, there is an eighteenth-century copy of a medieval hermit’s chapel, and
a country house which used to have displayed automatons in traditional dress.
In the seventeenth century a beautiful Gothic-style font cover was made for
Durham cathedral illustrating a continuity with a medieval past.
Many other examples could be added. All of them illustrate an obsession
with the past which on the one hand has lasted at least several centuries.
On the other, however, they also appear to indicate an initial quasi-Wxation
with the classical period, which gradually became counter-balanced by an
appeal to each country’s past. This reveals a continuous transformation in
time and space in the discourse of the past. Archaeological material has had a
symbolic but ambiguous potential that has been exploited diVerently in