The changing face of erudition antiquaries in the age of the Grand Tour

In late seventeenth-century Rome, antiquarianism was still an ecclesiastical and courtly activity centered on local patronage circles. By the 1750s, it had become a profitable and secular pursuit practiced by art amateurs, dealers, artists, and academics. This dissertation focuses on transformations in the cultural practice of archaeology and scholarship after 1680. It examines the way in which the market in antiquities and the increasing preoccupation with taste as an arbiter of scholarship gave rise to a secular and aggressively visual approach to classical antiquity. As antiquaries in Rome gradually came to embrace archaeology as their defining focus of study and research, the study of antiquity became unmoored from both sacred universal history and the empirical sciences.;This study captures key moments in the shift from an ecclesiastical and empirical erudition toward an increasingly artistic and visual approach to the ancient past as a consequence of the Grand Tour and the rise of the academy as cultural arbiter. From a local and empirical model of erudition to the creation of international scholarly standards based on secular interests, from the intra-confessional Republic of Letters to national academies and private dilettante societies, from a scholarly community reliant on the exchange of gifts to one driven by the cash market, from memoria and emblems to fine art---these are just a few of transformations that altered the face of erudition in the first half of the eighteenth century.;This dissertation is composed of a series of case studies that proceed chronologically. The first chapter focuses on a Catholic prelate who considered the empirical sciences, clerical duties, and local antiquarian investigations as interrelated activities. The second chapter tells the story of an enterprising Roman dealer who championed the value of local expertise while tailoring his scholarship to Grand Tourists. The third chapter centers on a French abbe who learned how to apply contemporary artistic theory to the historical study of monuments in Rome, and the fourth chapter tells how a wily forger capitalized on the fascination with Pompeii and Herculaneum in the antiquities market at Rome.