Chapter 4 Through the Eyes of Idolatry: Pignoria’s 1615 Argument on the Conformità of Idols from the West and East Indies with Egyptian Gods
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Abstract
In 1615, the Paduan antiquary Lorenzo Pignoria (1571–1631) published a revised edition of Cartari’s Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei delli antichi. He added a new part on the diffusion of idolatry to the Americas and Asia, basing his Egyptogenetic argument on objects and images as evidence. This systematically illustrated treatise represents an innovative attempt at historical research into the origins of religious worship. A close reading of the text and study of the engravings’ genesis lay open not only their richness and complexity, but also their intriguing contradictions. The antiquary concurrently employed different explanatory models to make sense of religious alterity on the basis of material evidence. The chapter discusses Pignoria’s comparative method and particularly the intellectual and emotional challenges posed by his use of conformità as a heuristic tool for dealing with the collected sources.