# V.C. Laurentii Pignorii Pat. Canonici Tarvisini Historici, & Philologi Eruditissimi Bibliotheca, et Museum. Auctore Iac. Philippo Tomasino [...]



**Autore:** Tomasini Giacomo Filippo

**Dati editoriali:** Venice, Giovanni Pietro Pinelli, 1632

**Codice archivio:** 167

**Prezzo:** 2000.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/tomasini-pignoria-bibliotheca-museum-1632

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

4to. [8], 31, [1 blank] pp. Collation: A-E4. Woodcut printer’s device on the title page. Engraved portrait of Lorenzo Pignoria on l. A4v attributed to Jérome David, 3 woodcut illustrations of medals on pages 5-6, ornamental initials, tail-pieces. Later cardboards, blue edges. A very good copy. Rare first edition, dedicated to Domenico Molino (1572-1635), of Giacomo Filippo Tomasini’s memorial account of Lorenzo Pignoria (1571-1631), published only a year after the antiquary’s death and devoted, significantly, not only to his life and publications but also to his library and museum. The work is much more than a brief bio-bibliography: it preserves a vivid picture of how a learned antiquary of the early seventeenth century actually worked, combining books, inscriptions, coins, gems, amulets, weights, lamps, textile fragments, papyri and other material remains into a single collection for historical enquiry. Tomasini knew Pignoria personally and belonged to the same Paduan erudite milieu. During the 1620s he entered a circle that included scholars such as Johan Rode, Felice Osio and, during his Italian sojourn, Gabriel Naudé. This was an environment in which the organization of libraries, the collection of antiquities and the practical uses of learned repositories were subjects of active discussion. When Pignoria died during the plague of 1631, Tomasini was therefore especially well placed to preserve not merely the memory of the man but the structure of the intellectual world he had assembled around himself. Pignoria had been one of the most accomplished antiquaries of his generation. Born in Padua in 1571, he was formed in the learned culture of the city and entered the circle of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, whose celebrated library was one of the major centres of European scholarship in the late sixteenth century. Through that network Pignoria came into contact with an international republic of letters that included Peiresc, Galileo, Cassiano dal Pozzo and other scholars interested in antiquity, philology and material culture. His antiquarian method was distinctive because he did not treat ancient objects merely as curiosities or aesthetic trophies. He used them as evidence. That is precisely what Tomasini’s Bibliotheca et Museum allows us to see. The collection was organized into several major groups, including portraits of illustrious men, statuettes, coins and medals, and a broad category of antiquarian objects or suppellex antiquaria, alongside the library itself, consisting of 71 manuscripts (50 in Latin, 4 in Greek, and 17 in vernacular). The structure already reveals Pignoria’s method: visual likeness, numismatic evidence, small-scale sculpture, inscribed and portable objects, and books all belonged to the same field of enquiry. The suppellex antiquaria is especially revealing. Tomasini records fragments of aes grave, ancient weights and measures, a model of an ancient foot, Roman and Constantinopolitan weights, a stylus, tesserae, hairpins, bracelets, necklaces, a double axe, projectile weapons, a spear or javelin, keys, small vessels, counters, fibulae, rings, lamps and amulets. These are not the objects one would choose if the primary aim were magnificence. These are the instruments and residues of daily life, exactly the kind of material from which an antiquary could reconstruct ancient habits, technologies and social practices. This makes Pignoria’s collection unusually important for the history of antiquarian method. He was interested in the ancient world at the level of lived material culture: how people wrote, measured, fastened clothing, lit rooms, carried objects, sealed documents, adorned themselves and organized domestic or ritual life. The collection therefore functioned almost as a laboratory of comparative evidence. In Pignoria’s scholarship, objects were repeatedly used to clarify texts, while texts gave meaning to objects. Among the most striking items were ancient papyri, including large fragments with writing identified by Tomasini as Lombardic, and fragments of ancient textiles with purple borders. Such objects had a very different evidentiary value from coins or inscriptions. They brought writing materials, fabrics and techniques of manufacture into the antiquarian field and show how broad Pignoria’s conception of historical evidence had become. His cabinet also contained shells, petrified natural specimens, stones, crystals and objects from India and China, extending the range of comparison beyond the classical Mediterranean. The collection of engraved gems and amulets was particularly important because it intersected directly with Pignoria’s studies of ancient religion. He had become famous for his work on the so-called Mensa Isiaca, the elaborately decorated bronze table that early modern scholars associated with Egyptian cult. Pignoria’s treatment of Egyptian imagery was innovative because he relied not only on literary authorities but on gems, inscriptions, amulets and other material evidence in order to reconstruct religious practice. Some of the objects described by Tomasini were therefore not passive collectibles but working instruments in the production of Pignoria’s published scholarship. The same is true of the numismatic collection. Ancient coins and medals furnished portraits, titles, names, chronological data and iconographic parallels, and they were among the most reliable categories of material evidence available to early modern antiquaries. Pignoria’s coins belonged to a scholarly rather than merely precious collection: they functioned as documents. His portraits of learned and illustrious men performed a complementary role, linking the classical tradition of imagines virorum illustrium with the living republic of letters to which Pignoria himself belonged. The title Bibliotheca et Museum is therefore exact rather than ornamental. Pignoria’s library and museum were conceived as two parts of a single research apparatus. Manuscripts, coins, inscriptions, weights, gems, textiles and other objects were meant to be read against one another. The museum was not a decorative appendix to the library, nor the library merely a source of labels for the objects; together they constituted a method for reconstructing antiquity through the combination of textual and material evidence. Tomasini’s book is especially valuable because it records the collection at a moment very close to Pignoria’s death, before its original unity was lost. Published in 1632, it preserves a contemporary snapshot of a working scholarly environment rather than a retrospective reconstruction compiled generations later. Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, also encountered as Tommasini, was born at Padua on 17 November 1595 and died there on 13 June 1655. Ecclesiastic, antiquary, biographer, bibliographer, epigraphist and historian, he belonged to the learned culture that connected seventeenth-century Padua and Venice with the wider European Republic of Letters. His importance rests less on a single synthetic work than on the consistency with which he treated books, manuscripts, inscriptions, portraits, libraries, monuments and correspondence as documentary evidence. Tomasini repeatedly sought to preserve intellectual memory by fixing dispersed materials in print: cataloguing manuscript collections, reconstructing scholarly lives, recording inscriptions before their disappearance, describing collections and producing institutional histories from archival traces. Tomasini’s pamphlet on Pignoria’s life, works and collections was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1669 as an appendix to the latter’s Mensa Isiaca, qua sacrorum apud Aegyptios ratio & simulacra subjectis tabulis aeneis simul exhibentur & explicantur.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

F. Zen Benetti, Per la biografia di Lorenzo Pignoria, erudito padovano († 1631), in: “Viridarium floridum. Studi di storia veneta offerti dagli allievi a Paolo Sambin”, M.C. Billanovich, Giorgio Cracco, and Antonio Rigon, eds., Padua, 1984, pp. 317-336; I. Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima, Rome, 1990; K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, Cambridge, 1990; M. Buora, Pignoria, Lorenzo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 83. Rome, 2015, s.v.; A.N. Worthen, Cassandrae Fidelis venetae literis clarissimae in Padua, in: “Padua and Venice: transcultural exchange in the early modern age”, B. Blass-Simmen and S. Weppelmann, eds., Berlin, 2017, pp. 123-136; G. Trebbi, Tomasini, Giacomo Filippo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 96. Rome, 2019, s.v. S. Nicolini, Bibliografia degli antichi cataloghi a stampa di biblioteche italiane, Florence, 1954, p. 56, no. 43; Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\VEAE\006653.

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