Review: La memoria de las piedras. Anticuarios, arqueólogos y coleccionistas de antigüedades en la España de los Austrias by Miguel Morán Turina

The story Miguel Morán Turina tells is one seldom told. It is an obscure tale, one could even argue. In a word, antiquarian. Why, then, painstakingly trace the story of these early modern Spanish lovers of Roman antiquity, of their quixotic struggle against the inexorable forces of time to salvage, whether textually or graphically, the "memory of stones," as the title of the book poetically evokes? It is not the least of La memoria de las piedras' merits that it demonstrates the presence and relevance of the Roman past in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, most notably among its cultural and political elite. Superbly edited by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), which has been promoting the study of the Habsburg monarchy and early modern Spanish visual culture for close to a decade now, and lavishly illustrated with judicious selections...