The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery - Softcover

Rowland, Ingrid D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226730379 ISBN 13: 9780226730370

Verlag: University of Chicago Pr., 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Bored teenager Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century when he hatched a wild scheme that preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry by forging an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. Stashing the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello, Curzio reeled in seventeenth-century Tuscans who were eager to establish proof of their heritage and history. However, despite their excitement, none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, and they simply perpetuated the hoax. Written with humor and energy by Renaissance expert Ingrid Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "findings" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again—this time over Etruscan history. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland captivates readers with her obvious delight in Curzio's far-reaching prank.

"Rowland reconstructs the whole story with flair and zest."—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Rowland skillfully weaves her way through this long-forgotten controversy, framing it within the cultural and political struggles between Rome and Tuscany, and the larger intellectual debates of the period. At every turn she provides fascinating detail about the workings of the scholarly world. . . . In a mere 150 pages . . . she summons up a world and an age."William Grimes, New York Times

"A remarkable book . . . Rowland's account . . . has the verve of a good detective story."Joseph Connors, New York Review of Books

"A fascinating, erudite book."—Spectator

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ingrid D. Rowland has taught at the University of Chicago and at the American Academy in Rome. She is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and the author of several books, including The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome and The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome.

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The Scarith of Scornello

A Tale of Renaissance ForgeryBy Ingrid D. Rowland

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2005 Ingrid D. Rowland
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780226730370

Chapter One

Discovery

November 1634

Cave, cave, cave

Beware, beware, beware.

On a beautiful afternoon in November 1634, lunch had ended for the Inghirami family in their Tuscan villa. Curzio Inghirami, aged nineteen (fig. 1), decided to go fishing with his thirteen-year-old sister, Lucrezia, in the river behind their house. They were used to doing things together; their villa, Scornello (fig. 2), stood on an isolated hill in the rugged countryside south of Volterra, the highest and most remote of the great ancient Etruscan cities, and their only close neighbors were a few families of tenant farmers. Half an hour's walk brought them down to the flat bed of the river Cecina, where the fishing was good that afternoon. Curzio's manservant would later tell the police that as they made their way back up the tree-lined road toward home, brother and sister suddenly bent laughing over a "a mixture of certain hairs" (fig. 3). Curzio himself would tell the story somewhat differently; he confessed that he had been standing on the riverbank, throwing rocks:

It was when we were going fishing after lunch on Saint Catherine's Day, while, some three hundred cubits distant from our House, I looked over the river Cecina, waiting for the servants, and to amuse myself I rolled stones down the bank. It so happened that once another large stone had been moved aside, a small blackish clod was uncovered.... This I threw around several times, until it chanced to break apart. Then I could see that there were hairs underneath the layers of which the clod had been made. Astonished, I dissolved it with great effort. Many would come to think that the outer layer had been compacted of bitumen, pitch, resin, wax, frankincense, storax, and mastic, and other substances of this sort. The second layer, which was sturdier, was enveloped in fabric that had been mixed in with the hairs and reduced to powder, and underneath this there was linen rag paper marked with the following characters:

This paper contained another, which broke into fragments from the blows, with the following prophecy, precisely expressed:

In the year of the prophesied King of the Jews 1624, one thousand five hundred ninety-first from his Crucifixion:

A Dog shall come who shall serve out his term of indenture faithfully and freely for nine years, and more. The Wolf is the mother of the Lamb. The Lamb shall love the Dog. A Pig shall come forth from the horde of Pigs and shall devour the work of the Dog.

Cave, cave, cave [beware, beware, beware]

Prospero of Fiesole, resident of this colony, Guardian of the Citadel, Prophesied the year after Catilina's death. You have discovered the treasure. Mark the spot, and go away.

Archaeological discoveries were nothing new around Volterra; the city was one of the oldest in Italy. Its imposing walls had been built in Etruscan times, nearly two thousand years before Curzio took his fishing trip. Patched and restored, they had served their purpose until 1472, when the city finally fell to Florence in a horrific siege (fig. 4). Volterra's streets and buildings largely rested on Etruscan or Roman foundations, and where the city ended, limestone grave markers, marble statues, and tiny alabaster coffins came out of the earth with images of Volterrans long dead. Some of the names on these ancient graves were still familiar. Plowmen turned up tiny Etruscan bronzes in their fields or stored their animals and equipment in Etruscan chamber tombs. Nothing, however, had ever looked quite like the capsule that Curzio Inghirami had just pulled from the riverbank.

Despite their portentous tone, almost comical in its pomposity, the prophecies recorded by Prospero the guardian also fit neatly into Curzio's experience of the world. Seventeenth-century Italians heard oracular predictions all the time from traveling preachers and passed them to one another by printed broadsheet, book, or word of mouth, much as their twentieth-century descendants would scan their newspapers for the horoscope and the weather report. The biblical book of Revelation provided a favorite source for these oracles, as did the prognostications of Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian abbot who had first spouted similar meldings of apocalypse, political satire, and animal fable in the twelfth century. Prospero the guardian's fulminations about the lamb, the wolf, the dog, and the pig therefore belonged to a familiar form of speech, and not only for prophecies, but also for satires about political figures of the day, especially about Italy's uniquely peculiar politician, the pope. The satires, especially, affected the same bombastic tones as Joachim's-or, now, Prospero's-prophecies, to comical effect.

However familiar the tone of Prospero's oracles, however, the guardian's final injunction to "mark the spot, and go away" sounded serious, and Curzio obeyed. In his own words: "I read it over, and I marveled; I marked the spot." But the augur's scroll said nothing about souvenirs, so Curzio and Lucrezia took the whole strange bundle home with them, while their manservant went ahead with the fish; it had been, all in all, a productive afternoon. When they brought their package into the house, their grandmother spluttered, "It's a curse!" and ordered them to throw it away. Luckily their father, Inghiramo, took a more sober interest in the sturdy capsule with its paper scroll, so much so that he and Curzio returned to the riverbank with shovels the very next day-"You have discovered the treasure" seemed to impress Inghiramo more than the warning to "mark the spot, and go away." But their search for Prospero's treasure proved frustrating; the amateur archaeologists uncovered only a series of clay vessels that had been broken in antiquity, their contents long since carried off. That single day's taste of excavation was enough for Inghiramo, who took off for Florence shortly afterward, bound on his own business, which included not only their farms and pastures, but also the salt springs that welled up on their property and at the base of the hill, one of the many oddities of Volterra's strange, mineral-rich terrain.

There matters stood until 13 December, when the Inghirami's tutor, Father Domenico Vadorini, came by Scornello to celebrate the Feast of Saint Lucy with the family, say Mass in the villa's little chapel, and hear the children's lessons. When Curzio brought out the paper scroll with its Etruscan prophecy, Vadorini urged another try at excavation with a larger team of diggers. Together they summoned the only candidates available, a contingent of Scornello's tenant farmers, and marched back to the site to make their assault. Seasoned spadeworkers, the contadini soon cleared a sturdy wall with a stone urn embedded in one of its crannies. The urn contained another bundle like the one Curzio had found by the river, again inscribed on the outside, and again with what appeared to be Etruscan letters (fig. 5).

Confirmation of the bundle's Etruscan origin was easy to secure. Volterra boasted a famous pair of Etruscan inscriptions, both unearthed in 1494 by the famous local scholar Raffaele Maffei, whose descendant, Raffaello Maffei, was Curzio Inghirami's best friend. A visit next day to the Palazzo Maffei gave Curzio and Father Vadorini the information they needed: the letters on this new...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Pr.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226730379
• ISBN 13: 9780226730370
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 230
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar