To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology [Hardcover]

Marina Belozerskaya (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2009

How Cyriacus of Ancona—merchant, spy, and amateur classicist—traveled the world, fighting to save ancient monuments for posterity.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, a young Italian bookkeeper fell under the spell of the classical past. Despite his limited education, the Greeks and Romans seemed to speak directly to him—not from books but from the physical ruins and inscriptions that lay neglected around the shores of the Mediterranean.

As an international merchant, Cyriacus of Ancona was accustomed to the perils of travel in foreign lands—unlike his more scholarly peers with their handsome libraries and wealthy patrons, who benefited greatly from the discoveries communicated in his widely distributed letters and drawings. Having seen firsthand the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage, Cyriacus resolved to preserve it for future generations. To do so he would spy on the Ottomans, court popes and emperors, and even organize a crusade.

25 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cyriacus Pizzecolli of Ancona was the first to travel solely to discover, observe and analyze historic monuments and, Belozerskaya convincingly argues in this charming and intriguing book, a key figure in the birth of archeology. A clerk in the bustling Renaissance port city, Pizzecolli's business trips took him to Greece and Asia Minor. He was unrelentingly curious and restless and while fascination with classical texts was widespread in the mid-15th century, few investigated the ancient physical remains. Pizzecolli educated himself in classical civilization in order to understand and preserve thousands of artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome, his true profession being, according to Cyriacus himself, to wake the dead of antiquity. Art historian Belozerskaya (The Medici Giraffe) writes with verve and aplomb, transporting us to 15th-century Rome, Constantinople, Florence, Greece and its islands, where he made sketches of antiquities later used by Raphael and da Vinci. Belozerskaya has written a well-researched history of an important yet relatively unknown figure that deftly integrates Renaissance social, cultural and political history. 25 illus. (Aug.)
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About the Author

Marina Belozerskaya is the author of The Medici Giraffe: And Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power, The Arts of Tuscany from the Etruscans to Ferragamo, and Luxury Arts of the Renaissance. She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (August 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393065545
• ISBN-13: 978-0393065541
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #777,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've always read books to travel to other places. Growing up in Moscow, in the Brezhnev era, I dove into books to escape the drabness and oppression of Soviet life. After emigrating to America and enrolling in high school in Boston, I read novels during math classes because I never like that subject, could get away with avoiding it in the more lenient American school, and sought greater excitement of the written word. Dispirited by academic politics as a graduate student and an aspiring professor, I found in reading and writing safe harbors of refuge and joy.

A Bunting Fellowship (administered by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard) gave me an idea to devote myself to these forms of indulgence full-time. I did not think of myself as a born writer, not like people who begin constructing stories at age 5 and never stop. I was astonished when one day, chancing upon a tattered notebook I had brought with me from Russia, I opened its cover and read on its opening page: "Chapter 1 - How I began to write." My best friend and I spent countless afternoons creating an elaborate fictional world in which we were captains of a pirate ship, sailing across stormy seas and lording it over a motley crew that included Dumas' Three Musketeers, popular Russian bards, and other heroes of our youth. We embarked on these adventures first with the help of dolls, then paper cut-outs, then notebooks in which we feverishly scribbled our stories, inspired by all sorts of books we read, but especially those set in the past. I guess the desire to read and write about history has been with me since my childhood after all.

History remains the subject of endless fascination for me, a driving motor behind my books, a lens through which I view the world around me. It might be my Russian roots, my emigrant's deracination, or just innate curiosity that always makes me wonder how things came about, and why.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ride along with the Father of Archaeology, October 23, 2009

By 

Novathinker (Northern Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology (Hardcover)

This book is a wonderful journey into the past. Your tour guide is the enthusiastic, romantic Cyriacus of Ancona, a 15th century Italian port master that developed a passion for ancient Greek and Roman architecture. His detailed record-keeping and sharp mind earned the trust of the local merchants and authorities. He adroitly used that trust to gain passage and access to ancient sites all over the Eastern Mediterranean. He was a careful, meticulous chronicler of all he surveyed. Many of the sites he visited have since been destroyed by war, earthquake or pilferage. His detailed renderings and descriptions are often the only surviving record of these ancient treasures.

Belozerskaya offers us a ticket to ride along with Cyriacus on his many adventures. Her outstanding research and engaging writing style combine to make this a fun book about the amazing, mostly forgotten "father of archaeology." The book does lack one thing: a reference map.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Reading for Anyone Interested in the Renaissance, September 2, 2009

By 

Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology (Hardcover)

"To Wake the Dead," a fascinating tale of a little-known Italian renaissance merchant who somehow made himself into the world's first archaeologist, is the latest release from Moscow-born Marina Belozerskaya. She has previously penned The Medici Giraffe;Luxury Arts of the Renaissance; Ancient Greece: Art, Architecture, and History (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum), (with Kenneth Lapatin); and The Arts of Tuscany: From the Etruscans to Ferragamo. And she has been an award-winning teacher at Harvard, Tufts, and Boston Universities.

The author here gives us the life of Cyriacus Pizzecolli, who was born at Ancona, in southern Italy. In autumn 1421, young Cyriacus, apprenticed to a merchant from a young age, who was himself to become a most successful merchant, looked up from his business at the port of Ancona, and noticed something the users of the port had long ignored, a Roman triumphal arch rising high overhead. The young merchant would do some research, and realize that it was dedicated to the Roman emperor Trajan. From this would develop a lifelong, extremely productive mission of finding and preserving classical monuments wherever he could: and his business as a merchant enabled - paid -- him to travel widely.

It surely is hard for us to understand now, but, at the dawn of that period of great renewal known as the Renaissance, when artists, architects, humanists and scholars were just beginning to search out, translate, and utilize ancient Greek and Roman literature, the remains of those classical periods still standing in the known world weren't just ignored. They were heavily cannibalized for newer buildings, or for lime to whitewash houses and churches, or for cannonballs. Cyriacus was virtually alone in traveling just to view relics of the past. He was the first to grasp the meaning and importance of such famous sites as the Parthenon in Athens, Greece; and the Temple of Jupiter at Cyzicus in Asia Minor. But he did better than that: his training as a merchant and accountant enabled him to examine the monuments carefully; to draw, and to describe them, and he is often the only source able to tell us how some of the greatest of them once looked. He taught himself Greek and Roman the better to puzzle out what the inscriptions on them were saying - there were no guidebooks in existence; and, alone among Renaissance humanist scholars, concentrated on the art and architecture of the classical period, rather than just the literature. Though he paid plenty of attention to books too, importing them into Italy for those scholars, and, of course, reading them himself. As a result of all this, he became an intimate of famous scholars, popes; of the Medici Grand Dukes of Florence, although merchants were at that time looked down upon by all these people. His drawings, inscriptions and written data inspired the leading artists of his day, such as Donatello and Raphael; and continue to inspire artists, architects, and archaeologists.

Despite the heavy load of scholarship and research Belozerskaya must have invested in this book, it's accessibly written, in lively prose, and unfailingly interesting. It also, praises be, comes with illustrations, each of them surely worth a thousand words. I myself studied Renaissance history at Cornell University, certainly an outstanding school, but I'd never heard of this hugely influential, overlooked merchant, Cyriacus. The book is compelling reading for anyone with an interest in Renaissance, or art history.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Birth of Archaeology, February 15, 2010

By 

G. Poirier (Orleans, ON, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology (Hardcover)

This book illuminates a period in history of which I was well aware in a general sense, but completely oblivious to its particular importance to the world of archaeology. In very animated and often gripping prose, the author recounts the birth of archaeology through the life and efforts of the Italian merchant/bookkeeper who was responsible for it: Cyriacus of Ancona. By making detailed drawings of ancient monuments, mainly throughout Greece, Italy and Asia Minor, and copying inscriptions that he found on them as well as on building stones that had been scavenged for use in new structures, he made the ancient past come alive for his intellectual contemporaries.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Cyriacus' work for today's archaeologists. One significant reason for this is that many of the structures that he carefully drew and documented were subsequently severely damaged and some were completely destroyed in the subsequent decades and centuries. Thus, his records became the only remaining reliable detailed descriptions available. This book also presents a snapshot of the Renaissance in the mid-fifteenth century, complete with the religious and political turmoil that played an important part in Cyriacus' life and times.

The writing style is clear, friendly, accessible, lively and immensely captivating. This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone who likes a good adventure story; archaeology/history buffs in particular will be in for a treat.