Ciriaco d’Ancona e l’invenzione della tradizione classica

Abstract

<div> <p>Cyriacus Pizzecolli, also known as Cyriacus of Ancona, is traditionally considered the founder of the antiquarian science. Nonetheless, it is yet unclear how the interest of a few intellectuals in antiques in the course of Fourteenth century came to be shared by the Western elites. It was infact Cyriacus, in deep connection with Byzantine emperors and cardinal Bessarion, to invent and spread this new intellectual vague in the first half of the Fourteenth century in a great political and mediatic operation aimed at promoting the Byzantine Empire in the West, pointing at the Byzantine empire as the depository of classical Greek antiquity and thus inventing what we now know as the ‘Classical tradition’.</p> </div>