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Four - Conclusion

from Part I - The Canon and the Basilica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2019

Christine Smith
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Joseph F. O'Connor
Affiliation:
Catholic University of America, Washington DC
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Summary

“Remembering St. Peter’s,” Maffeo Vegio’s last important work, is often considered the founding document of Christian archaeology.1 It has been mined for its factual information about the great Early Christian and medieval basilica ever since that building’s demolition in the century following Vegio’s record of it. Indeed, his is the last eyewitness account of Old St. Peter’s and some of its adjacent structures and artifacts. While much of his information could be found in other written sources – the Liber pontificalis and Petrus Mallius’s Description above all – it is Vegio’s synthetic account that Early Modern scholars like Tiberio Alfarano and Giacomo Grimaldi most frequently turned to for their own, necessarily reconstructive, histories of this church. But “Remembering St. Peter’s” is much more than this. Until now, very little, if any, attention has been given to Vegio’s composition as a literary whole, to its conceptual organization, or to its intellectual content. And yet Vegio brought to this task his early poetic sympathy for an ancient Roman culture as Vergil had imagined it; a commitment – one shared with Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and Lorenzo Valla – to the Humanist approach to history as recorded in sources and material evidence; and a canon’s conviction of the pre-eminence of Constantine’s basilica as the final resting place of the Apostle Peter and of his historical successors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Eyewitness to Old St Peter's
A Study of Maffeo Vegio's ‘Remembering the Ancient History of St Peter's Basilica in Rome,' with Translation and a Digital Reconstruction of the Church
, pp. 104 - 114
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Conclusion
  • Edited by Christine Smith, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Joseph F. O'Connor, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Maffeo Vegio
  • Book: Eyewitness to Old St Peter's
  • Online publication: 03 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654999.005
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  • Conclusion
  • Edited by Christine Smith, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Joseph F. O'Connor, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Maffeo Vegio
  • Book: Eyewitness to Old St Peter's
  • Online publication: 03 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654999.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Edited by Christine Smith, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Joseph F. O'Connor, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Maffeo Vegio
  • Book: Eyewitness to Old St Peter's
  • Online publication: 03 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108654999.005
Available formats
×