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May 18, 2000
Leonard Barkan Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture Yale University Press, 1999. 512 pp.; 206 b/w ills. Cloth $35.00 (0300076770)
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Sometime in the year 1512, the remains of a fallen obelisk were discovered by a barber digging a latrine near the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome. Thanks to a detailed account in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, the monument was almost immediately recognized as the obelisk raised by the Emperor Augustus as the gnomon of a gigantic sundial in the Campus Martius. The Bellunese humanist Laelius Podager confirmed the identification by...