The First Archaeologist?

The First Archaeologist?

It was the phrase “Birth of Archaeology” that caught my eye when I saw the cover of Marina Belozerskaya’s To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology. I found it intriguing that archaeology could have been born in the Renaissance. Could that be true?

Then, in starting to read the book, I began to wonder what I was getting myself into. The book’s subject is a 15th-century merchant from the Italian port city of Ancona. I had never heard of Ancona (which I learned is on the eastern coast of Italy, below Venice). Nor had I heard of this merchant named Cyriacus Pizzecolli. But in reading the book, one finds out that he was well known to key players of the time—the 1430s and 1440s: Pope Eugenius IV, King Sigismund (the Holy Roman Emperor), John VIII Palaeologus (the Byzantine Emperor), Sultan Murad of the Ottoman Empire, Cosimo de’ Medici, and others.

His Life. As a merchant, Cyriacus travelled around Italy and visited port cities in Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Everywhere he went, he would sketch ancient Greek and Roman structures and monuments, or their ruins. He taught himself Latin and Greek so that he could translate ancient inscriptions. He often arranged commercial trips so that he could see important classical sites, such as Alexandria, Constantinople, Athens, and Delphi. Later in life, he was also sent on diplomatic and/or spying missions by Pope Eugenius IV and others. Everywhere he went, he noticed that governments and individuals were using the building blocks of ancient monuments and structures to construct their own structures, whether it be places of worship, homes, or whatever.

Cyriacus’s Contributions. Some important Renaissance artists, including Donatello, used Cyriacus’s sketches (see below) as visual references for their works. These artists did not have the same opportunities to travel that Cyriacus did. Another important contribution of Cyriacus was in preserving in visual memory the structures and monuments as he saw them but that were no longer standing some 200, 400, or 600 years later.

Axe to Grind? A major thesis that the author Belozerskaya makes is that although Cyriacus kept urging authorities to preserve ancient Greek and Roman structures, he contributed to their destruction at the hands of Ottoman conquerors. What she is referring to is the constant efforts of Cyriacus to persuade the Pope, Holy Roman Emperor, and others to patch up their quarrels with the Byzantine Empire and Eastern Church and combine in a new Crusade against the Ottomans. But then, this crusade failed, and the Ottomans occupied Greece and Constantinople for hundreds of years, destroying much that was still standing of the Hellenistic and Roman empires. I think the author failed to make her point. I believe that the Ottomans would have been successful no matter what Cyriacus had done or not done and that the Ottomans would have destroyed ancient structures anyway.

So, Was He the First Archaeologist? I don’t know. Perhaps the author was just trying to hype her book by implying that Cyriacus was the first archaeologist. The Wikipedia article “Archaeology” lists a contemporary of Cyriacus’s, Flavio Biondo, as “one of Europe’s first archaeologists” and does not mention Cyriacus. But based on the limited evidence presented in this book, Cyriacus seems to have travelled more to classical sites than Biondo did.