Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Shifting Telos of Traveling Libraries

Abstract

The large collection assembled by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–1575) in his residence in Venice, a city that Charles V had the political imperative to keep within the Holy League, included an impressive range of objects: books and manuscripts, but also antiquities and paintings. By placing Hurtado de Mendoza in the context of specific Venetian trends of book-collecting and antiquarianism—with particular regards to the Greek library of Bessarion and its other public competitors of the time—this article argues that, rather than thinking of the archive as a collection of passive objects amassed and wielded by a sovereign agent for rivalry or anticlericalism, it makes more sense, both materially and historically, to think of the library as a networked assemblage of objects that are themselves mutable and “in motion” at all levels.