- Ingrid D. Rowland –
become “Larthal” by 1498, and he knew that this, at least, was a genuinely Etruscan
word. He decided that “Larth” must refer to the supreme leader of all the Etruscans (an
offi ce archaeologists now believe to have been called zilath mechl rasnal).^29 His analysis of
Viterbo’s historical topography is also based on genuine study of genuine evidence.
By the early sixteenth century, despite all the friar’s careful claims to plausibility, many
Italians believed that Annius of Viterbo was a forger, at the very least of the texts that
appeared in his 1498 Commentary, and possibly of many of his artifacts as well. In 1636,
the precocious young forger Curzio Inghirami subjected Annius to a thoroughgoing send-
up in his own forged Etruscan texts, the “Volterran Antiquities.”^30 And yet the last true
believer in Annius of Viterbo lived well into the twentieth century. Mario Signorelli was
the son of one of the city’s most scrupulous historians, the lawyer Giuseppe Signorelli,
who published his monumental Viterbo nella Storia della Chiesa in 1907. Mario, on the
other hand, believed fi rmly in the full authenticity of Annius and his antiquities, and was
confi rmed in his convictions by mystical meetings with Etruscan ghosts.^31
NOTES1 1437 is the date that Annius supplies himself; see Fumagalli 195; 1432 is the date on his
epitaph in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome; Roberto Weiss, “Traccia per una biografi a di
Annio da Viterbo,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 5 (1962), 426.
2 Weiss, “Traccia,” 427.
3 The undated Pro Monte Pietatis; Weiss, “Traccia,” 430, 434.
4 Edoardo Fumagalli, “Aneddoti della vita di Annio da Viterbo, O.P., 1. Annio e la vittoria dei
genovesi sui sforzeschi, 2. Annio e la disputa sull’Immacolata Concezione,” Archivum Fratrum
Praedicatorum, 50s (1980), 167–99.
5 De futuris christianorum triumphis; Weiss, “Traccia,” 428–30.
6 Fumagalli, “Aneddoti,” 189–191.
7 Giovanni Baffi oni, “Viterbiae Historiae Epitoma: opera inedita di Giovanni Nanni da Viterbo,”
in Gigliola Bonucci Caporali, (ed.), Annio da Viterbo, Documenti e ricerche, Rome: Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1981, 165.
8 Weiss, “Traccia,” 430.
9 Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985;
revised edition 1998; Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and
Moderns in Sixteenth-century Rome, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998.
10 Susanna Valtieri, La genesi urbana di Viterbo e la crescita della città nel medioevo e nel ‘500, Rome:
Offi cina edizioni, 1977, 31–37.
11 Thus Filippo Brunelleschi modeled his arcades on the eleventh-century Baptistery of Florence;
see Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Harper and Row,
1969, 20–23.
12 Torgil Magnuson, The Urban Transformation of Medieval Rome, 312–1420, Stockholm: Paul
Astroms Förlag, 2004.
13 Baffi oni, “Viterbiae Historiae Epitoma,” 11–254.
14 Baffi oni, op. cit.
15 Cited in Baffi oni, 78: “In tertio ineluctabilibus argumentis probavimus quotiens huius
nostrae urbis variata sunt nomina et cognomina, et eius vetustissimam senectutem ab hac
aetate ad Osirim Aegyptium et Italum, ipsius nepotem ex consobrino Ionico.”
16 Iohannes Annius [Giovanni, Nanni, O.P.], Commentaria...super opera diversorum auctorum de
antiquitatibus loquentium, Rome: Eucharius Silber, 1498.