Eleonora Pistis:
Liquid Knowledge: Antiquarians on Architecture, History, and Water

Early modern antiquarians were famously obsessed with understanding the past, but over the course of the eighteenth century, they found themselves in an increasingly contradictory situation in terms of coming to know it. A paradigmatic shift from text-based to object-based history created a growing opportunity for architecture to become an epistemic instrument. Ancient amphitheaters, aqueducts, and bridges were turned into mirrors of past societies. These structures provided information not only on architecture but also on the history of water and its management. The aim of this talk is twofold. First, it intends to demonstrate how architecture and water brought to the extreme the tension that existed at the time between the foundational role that antiquarians ascribed to material evidence and the frequency with which it was physically unavailable. Second, it illustrates how antiquarians’ studies of architecture and waterways networks were interwoven. In so doing, this paper also calls for a reconsideration of water as a crucial element in the formation of antiquarian knowledge.

Eleonora Pistis is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is an architectural historian who studies the significance of architecture as an epistemic instrument in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her scholarship addresses how the study of architecture contributed to the accumulation of academic knowledge in universities; how it led to the design and production of new spaces for scholarly inquiry; and how it underwrote the antiquarian construction of historical knowledge. She is the author of Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (2024) and is now working on a book titled History and its Fragments: Architecture and Antiquarianism in the Republic of Letters.

Pistis was a KHI visiting Scholar during Summer 2024. She has also been Getty Scholar (Spring 2022), visiting scholar at NIKI, Florence (Fall 2022), Michael Sovern Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (Summer 2019), Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (Spring 2015) and Scott Opler Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford (2011 to 2014).