| Summary: | The work of Gaetano Marini (1742–1815) is still largely unknown in the historiography of the last decades of the eighteenth century. He was, however, a first-rate epigraphist, palaeographer, archivist and curator: not only for the quality of his research, but also for his place at the Vatican, at the heart of the museum developments and the vicissitudes of the Napoleonian confiscations. In this article, the case of Christian monograms allows us to add a new aspect to his contribution to the knowledge to the imagery of Late Antiquity. Although they were unpublished, the four volumes of his Inscriptiones christianae latinæ et graecæ aevi milliarii see through the prism of epigraphy the nuances of a typological method whose innovations should be appreciated vis à vis a then emerging field of studies.
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