The study and compiling of the materials takes place in six modular sections on three central thematic areas that have hitherto been explored in a much too limited way: Firstly, antiquities in Egypt, in the Levant and Asia Minor, on the Iberian Peninsula, and in today’s France, Germany, and Great Britain, including a considerable amount of travel notes on the different antiquities in these former Roman provinces and on the margins of the Roman Empire; secondly, objects of everyday culture; and, thirdly, three protagonists and their compendia of images: Pietro Santi Bartoli’s set of drawings related to ancient mural painting, Pier Leone Ghezzi’s collection of drawings of objects from Egypt into late antiquity found in Rome, and Bernard de Montfaucon’s materials, which flowed into the publication of his fifteen-volume visual thesaurus as the most extensive collection of its kind until the end of the early modern period.

Module 1 – Egypt: On the search for origins

Module 2 – Challenges of the peripheries and new centres: Antiquities in Asia Minor and the European ‘provinces’

Module 3 – An alternative in the centre: Pier Leone Ghezzi’s volumes of drawings

Module 4 – Small-scale everyday objects

Module 5 – Pietro Santi and Francesco Bartoli’s collections of drawings

Module 6 – From a look at details to an overall view of Montfaucon’s L’antiquité expliquée et representée