Jolly Readings of Equivocal Antique Material Heritage in Early Modern Rome and Naples

Abstract

To early modern observers many parts of the antique material heritage they came across turned out hard to understand and interpret. For knowledgeable erudites this was a welcome opportunity to indulge in learned debates. In some cases, though, the very ambiguities proper to some pieces of equivocal antique material heritage would be taken as blessings in disguise. They allowed for welcome speculations, like in the case of Virgil’s alleged grave near Naples that with success could be turned into a landmark of humanist culture. Within and beyond learned circles such ambiguities also gave way to a more jolly approach of such heritage, leading even to subversive practices of sometimes outright contesting nature, as happened with the statue of Pasquino and the sarcophagus of Constantina. Yet as the handling of the Borghese Hermaphrodite indicates, the equivocal and ambiguous nature of such antique heritage was also able to stimulate a sophisticated and deceitful playfulness that performatively questioned the very essence of what fixed meanings are.