Superstitious Archaeology
For your amusement, I present an anecdote from the early Renaissance.
Pagan fragments were considered bad luck. In the fourteenth century, for example, the Sienese had unearthed an ancient Roman statue and, after placing it on the fountain in their main piazza, suffered a military defeat at the hands of the Florentines. The statue was promptly removed from the piazza and, in order to curse their enemies, reburied it in Florentine territory.[1]
- Ross King, Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (New York: Walker, 2000), 24. ↩
