(1313–75) also encouraged a critical assessment of monuments (Schnapp
1993: 108). Other scholars such as the Florentine doctor Giovanni Dondi
(born.c. 1330) incorporated accurate surveys and careful descriptions of
monuments into the analysis of the existing documentation (ibid.). The
study of antiquity was further fostered by the formation of theWrst academies
created to encourage the discussion and exchange of scholarly ideas. Follow-
ing the example of the ancient Plato’s Academia, the Academia Platonica was
founded by Cosimo de Medicis in Florence in 1438, and another Academy
was opened in Naples by Alfonse V, king of Aragon (1416–58) and of Naples
(from 1442). Three genres were developed in this period, adoptedWrst in the
study of the Graeco-Roman world and then emulated for other antiquities
elsewhere in Europe and America: topographic descriptions; systematic trea-
tises of antiquities ordered into diVerent classes; and,Wnally, catalogues of
collections (Schnapp 2002: 137).
From Italy to Europe: towards the own past, the Wunderkammer
and early legislationIf the success of this new language of the past that took place in Italy was due
to the new nobility and the emerging mercantile classes, and to its adoption
by the papacy, in the rest of Europe it can also partly be explained by the
support of the earthly powers of royalty and religion who embraced it partly
as a result of emulation. Yet other external factors were also powerfully
inXuencing this process; notably the tremendous impact of economic growth
and the changing social composition of the Western world resulting from the
expansion of the trade networks to Africa and Asia, and especially from
the eVect of the European discovery of the existence of the New World. The
growth of the new middle classes would powerfully contribute to the break
with medieval social and political structures.
To begin with, the majority of—if not all—the intellectuals who were
concerned with the past elsewhere came from Italy. Cyriac of Ancona
(c. 1390–1455) was an Italian merchant who copied inscriptions and drew
monuments throughout the Mediterranean. He believed that ‘the monuments
and inscriptions are more faithful witnesses of classical antiquity than are
the texts of ancient writers’ (E ́tienne & E ́tienne 1992: 26). He provided
the historical basis for the Ottoman sultan of Turkey to legitimize the conquest
of Constantinople as a revenge for the fall of Troy. A contemporary of Cyriac of
Ancona, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, praised the Germans as the people chosen
by God who were capable of facing the might of Rome. In 1496 Piccolomini
followed this line in another book,Germania, describing Turks not as
34 Early Archaeology of Great Civilizations