The book explores the early modern regulations established by European states to safeguard their cultural heritage, including antiquities, monuments, and paintings. It highlights how these pioneering protocols have significantly influenced contemporary legal and aesthetic practices in heritage protection, shaping the way societies value and preserve their historical legacies.
The edicts on the antiquities and artworks issued in the Papal States and Greece in the early 19th century were the first comprehensive legislation for the protection of heritage in Europe. In this volume, such laws are analysed from a cultural, juridical and art-historical perspective in order to understand how both legal and artistic scholarship affected the guardianship of artefacts, fluctuations in the art market and the establishment of innovative systems for heritage administration in Rome and Athens. The analysis of the origins of these laws, discussed in comparison to earlier edicts (5th–18th century), and of their cultural consequences also sheds light on the development of new definitions of “art”, “artwork” or “monument” which are fundamental to contemporary approaches to heritage protection in Europe.