Studies of Antiquity
Numerous European artists of the early modern period were fascinated by antiquity and its art. In addition to the extensive study of antique objects in Italy and Provence, artists north of the Alps also intensively researched traces of their ‘own’ Roman past, starting from the early 16th century. In the northern Alpine humanist circles of that time, the painter and architect Lambert Lombard (1505/6-1566), who founded his own academy in Liège dedicated to the study of classical antiquity; the cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), who designed and published the first modern world atlas in Antwerp in 1570; and many other scholars continuously studied antiquities of the Dutch-German region. The material and medial properties of prints were crucial to the reception and circulation of the ancient artefacts that had been collected and visually recorded. Their reproducibility allowed the rapid and economically profitable dissemination of humanistic knowledge and thus became the most important vehicle for contemporary archaeological research.
