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Although the papal museums and galleries were based on the earlier work of Popes Clement IX and Pius VI, it was Pope Gregory XVI who founded the Etruscan Museum in 1837 and the Egytian Museum in 1839. The Vatican used the Etruscan Museum to house material recovered from excavations in southern Etruria, which were begun around 1828. The Egyptian Museum housed not only materials acquired by the Vatican from Egypt but also pieces from its collection of classical (Greek and Roman) artifacts. Since that time, the vast archaeological and ethnographic collections of the Vatican have grown in richness and complexity and are open to the public.
References
Pietrangeli, C. 1993. The Vatican Museums: Five Centuries of History. Rome: Quasar, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
(1922–1956)
Although trained as an architect, Michael Ventris was an accomplished cryptographer who played a significant role in the decipherment of the Linear B script. Ventris published his first paper on the issue at the age of eighteen, but because of war service, he had to wait until 1949 to resume work on the decipherment. In 1952, he announced that he had cracked the secrets of Linear B and had established that it was based on an archaic form of Greek. That same year he was introduced by sir john l. myres to the Cambridge philologist John Chadwick, and together they collected further evidence that Ventris’s approach was correct. The 1953 publication of “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives” was a clear and effective statement of their work.
See also
References
Doblhofer, E. 1973. Voices in Stone: The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings. London: Graxrada.
(ca. 1470–1555)
Polydore Vergil was born in Italy at Urbino about 1470 and studied at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. He became secretary to the duke of Urbino and went on to become chamberlain to Pope Alexander VI. Made famous by two early works, Proverbiorum libellus and De inventoribus rerum, he was sent by the Pope to England in 1501 as a subcollector of Peter’s pence (an annual tribute of a penny paid by each householder in England to the Pope). Vergil so impressed the English king, Henry VII, that in 1505 he was commissioned to write the history of England—the Anglica Historia, which was finished by 1512 but not published until 1534. Vergil was made archdeacon of Wells, and on 22 October 1510, he was naturalized as an English subject. Falling out with Cardinal Wolsey in 1514, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and was not released until the Pope personally intervened.
Polydore Vergil has often been described as the first of the modern historians who placed great store on detailed source criticism and rational argument woven into a continuous narrative. It was Polydore Vergil who first seriously questioned the value of geoffrey of monmouth’s legends of the role of the Trojan Brutus in the foundation of England. Vergil left England after the death of King Edward VI in 1553 and returned to Urbino, where he died.
References
Hay, D. 1952. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
(1821–1893)
Juan Vilanova y Piera’s father was a lawyer, and the son received his primary education in Alcalá de Chisvert in Valencia, spain. Also in Valencia, he read humanities in the Jesuit Real Colegio de San Pablo, and later, he studied medicine, surgery, and sciences. In 1845, he graduated in medicine. In Madrid, he worked toward a doctorate in the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Museum of Natural Sciences), which is part of the Universidad Central (Central University), and
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