{"product_id":"in-ruins-isbn-9781400030866","title":"In Ruins","description":"In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching the buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. We travel the Appian Way with Dickens and behold the Baths of Caracalla with Shelley. An exhilarating tour, at once elegant and stimulating, \u003cb\u003eIn Ruins\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ecasts an exalting spell as it explores the bewitching power of architectural remains and their persistent hold on the imagination.“Graceful. . . . A brief, spacious and personal book of travels and meditation.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A grand tour. . . . Eclectic, learned.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Freshly provocative. . . . Meticulously well-observed and well-traveled. . . . A steady stream of ebullient erudition [and] an outpouring of melancholy grandeur.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” –\u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If the painstaking Simon Schama is memory’s metaphysician, the late W. G. Sebald . . . is memory’s poet and its conscience. . . . Among these giants, Woodward’s elegant book has earned him an honored place.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Atlanta Journal Constitution\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Intriguing. . . . Woodward’s enthusiasm for ruins is infectious. . . . . A fascinating tour.” –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brilliant, daring and evocative.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Absorbing. . . . Delightful. . . . Woodward does a terrific job of showing us the variety of ways artifacts have been interpreted and treated over the years. . . . In Woodward, [ruins] have an accomplished and eloquent spokesperson.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Providence Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A handsomely written, constantly surprising meditation upon ruins . . . and the way they provide consolation in the face of so much human folly.” –\u003ci\u003eDaily News \u003c\/i\u003e(New York)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An enchanting and informative voyage. . . . Fizzes with felicitous detail, anecdote, literary reference, and art history.” –\u003ci\u003eEvening Standard\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Beautifully written. . . . Contains astonishing facts, interesting digressions, alluring illustrations and tantalizing references. . . . An entertaining, even an endearing work.” –\u003ci\u003eWinston-Salem Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Fetching. . . . Whimsical. . . . Woodward’s enthusiasms are catching.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A thought-provoking grand tour of familiar–and lesser-known–stops along the . . . archaeological trail.” –\u003ci\u003eArchaeology\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nothing less than a guided tour of the world’s most celebrated ruins as well as a short history of the human intellect as it has contemplated these ruins.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Tennessean\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rich, allusive, learned, delightful. . . . Not a breath of pretension emanates from this engaging, illuminating volume.” –\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews, \u003c\/i\u003estarred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Masterful. . . . Well-illustrated. . . . Constantly entertaining.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(Trenton, NJ)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A thoughtful book. . . . After reading it, no building will seem safe from time’s depredations.” –\u003ci\u003eConde Nast Traveller\u003c\/i\u003eChristopher Woodward is the director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, England, where he lives.chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho Killed Daisy Miller?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the closing scene of Planet of the Apes (1968) Charlton Heston,  astronaut, rides away into the distance. 'What will he find out  there?' asks one ape. 'His destiny,' replies another. On a desolate  seashore a shadow falls across Heston's figure. He looks up, then  tumbles from his horse in bewilderment. 'Oh my God! I'm back. I'm  home. Damn you all to hell! . . . You maniacs. They did it, they  finally did it, they blew it up!' The shadow is cast by the Statue of  Liberty. She is buried up to her waist, her tablet battered, and her  torch fractured. The planet of the apes is Earth, he realises,  destroyed by a nuclear holocaust while the astronauts were travelling  in space. He is the last man, and the lone and level sands stretch  far away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA century before the film was made, a man in a black cape sits on the  arch of a ruined bridge. He holds an artist's sketchbook as firmly as  if inscribing an epitaph. Blackened shells of buildings rise at the  marshy edge of a slow and reedy river, one façade advertising  'Commercial Wharf'. This is London - or, rather, its future as  imagined by the artist Gustave Doré in 1873. The wizard-like figure  in Doré's engraving is a traveller from New Zealand, for to many  Victorians this young colony seemed to represent the dominant  civilisation of the future. He sits on a broken arch of London Bridge  to sketch the ruins of St Paul's, exactly as Victorian Englishmen  sketched those of ancient Rome.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe cathedral-like ruin next to the commercial warehouse\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eis Cannon Street Station, brand-new in 1873 but here imagined with  the cast-iron piers of the bridge rusting away in the tidal ooze.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To  statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the  futility of mortal man's aspirations. To\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ea poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the  individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the  fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of  their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty  of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome years ago I was walking through the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,  past Rembrandt's Nightwatch and into the rooms of hunters, skaters  and merry peasants painted during the Golden Age of the Netherlands.  I was brought up short by a small, dark painting which hung ignored  by the crowds: a view of the interior of an artist's studio painted  in the middle of the seventeenth century by a man named Michiel  Sweerts. The background of the scene was absolutely predictable: in  the convention of artists' academies, students were drawing an  antique sculpture of a naked figure, while an older artist was  casting a figure in bronze.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the foreground, however, fragments of ancient statues of gods and  heroes formed a gleaming pile of marble rubble, painted with such a  heightened degree of illumination and clarity that they seemed to be  a collage of photographs cut out and pasted on to the canvas. I was  mesmerised by this picture, as unsettled as if I had rediscovered a  forgotten nightmare. My mind travelled on to the fragmentary figures  in de Chirico's surrealist paintings, and to the pallid flesh of more  recent butcheries. On the left of the pile, I now noticed, was the  head of a man wearing a turban, as artists did in their studios. Was  this a self-portrait of Sweerts? I had never heard of him, a painter  who was born in Brussels in 1618 and who died in Goa at the age of  forty. Did he kill himself, for a kind of suicide is implied by the  painting? There was no more information on the label but I was  convinced that, at the very least, he abandoned his career as a  painter. The clash of creativity and destruction in this canvas  expressed the inner doubts of an artist confronted by the stupendous  classical past but, ironically, the promise of ruin has been one of  the greatest inspirations to western art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I turned away from Sweerts's studio, I felt oddly dislocated but  also very calm. Why, I wondered, does immersion in ruins instill such  a lofty, even ecstatic, drowsiness? Samuel Johnson spoke of how  'Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses - whatever makes  the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present,  advances us in the dignity of human beings. . . . That man is little  to be envied, whose patriotism would\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003enot gain force upon the plains of Marathon, or whose enthusiasm would  not grow warmer among the ruins of Rome.' Sweerts had been to Rome, I  was sure. For it is the shadow of classical antiquity which is the  deepest source for the fascination with ruins in the western world.  Every new empire has claimed to be the heir of Rome, but if such a  colossus as Rome can crumble - its ruins ask - why not London or New  York? Furthermore, the magnitude of its ruins overturned visitors'  assumptions about the inevitability of human progress over Time.  London in Queen Victoria's reign was the first European city to  exceed ancient Rome in population and in geographical extent; until  the Crystal Palace was erected in Hyde Park in 1851, the Colosseum  (or Coliseum) remained the largest architectural volume in existence.  Any visitor to Rome in the fifteen centuries after its sack by the  Goths in AD 410 would have experienced that strange sense of  displacement which occurs when we find that, living, we cannot fill  the footprints of the dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA second shadow falls on the same ground. This is the Christian  doctrine that man's achievement on earth is a fleeting transience,  that pyramids and houses and skyscrapers will crumble into oblivion  at the sound of the Last Trump. The apocalyptic finale is not  exclusive to the Christian religion, but what is unique is the  conjunction of the cult's holy shrines with the greatest ruins of  classical civilisation. The two greatest influences on the mind of  Europe share the same circle of hills above the River Tiber. So the  Eternal City is the place to begin an investigation into the feelings  of pleasure and fear which ruins suggest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn AD 400 Rome was a city of eight hundred thousand people glittering  with 3,785 statues of gold, marble and bronze. Its encircling walls  were 10 miles in length with 376 towers, and vaulted by nineteen  aqueducts carrying fresh spring-water to 1,212 drinking fountains and  926 public baths. There is no evidence that any writer or painter  imagined its future ruin, and the poet Rutilius Namatianus expressed  his contemporaries' view that Rome was as eternal as the universe  itself:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo man will ever be safe if he forgets you;\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMay I praise you still when the sun is dark.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo count up the glories of Rome is like counting\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe stars in the sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn AD 410 the Visigoths seized and plundered the city, and in 455 the  Ostrogoths. By the end of that century only a hundred thousand  citizens remained in Rome, and the rich had fled to Constantinople or  joined the Goths in their new capital at Ravenna. In the sixth  century the Byzantines and the Goths contested the city three times  and the population fell to thirty thousand, clustered in poverty  beside the River Tiber now that the aqueducts had been destroyed and  the drinking fountains were dry. The fall of Rome came to be seen by  many as the greatest catastrophe in the history of western  civilisation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn architectural terms, however, change was slow. The Goths plundered  but they did not burn or destroy. In the words of St Jerome, 'The  Gods adored by nations are now alone in their niches with the owls  and the night-birds. The gilded Capitol languishes in dust and all  the temples of Rome are covered with spiders' webs.' The public  buildings on the Capitoline Hill and the Forum were abandoned while a  new city, Christian Rome, rose around the outlying sites of St  Peter's martyrdom and the Pope's palace of St John Lateran. Over the  centuries the Forum became a cow pasture, and cattle drank in the  fountains where Castor and Pollux were said to have watered their  sweating steeds after the battle of Lake Regillus. Debris slid down  the steep slope of the Capitoline Hill to bury the Temple of  Vespasian in a mound 33 feet deep. Four-fifths of the vast area  enclosed by the old fortified walls of Rome became a wasteland  scattered with ruins, vineyards and farms. It remained disabitato  until after 1870, when the city became the capital of a reunited  nation, the 'third Rome'.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut if the Goths did not demolish the buildings, where did the dusty,  cobwebbed temples disappear to? They were recycled: in the thousand  years that followed, ancient Rome was remade as Christian Rome. In  the darkness of the deserted ruins the colonnades echoed with the  clang of mallets as thieves stole the gold and bronze statues in  order to melt them down. And why open a quarry when the Forum was on  the new city's doorstep, with its stones polished and ready? The  Colosseum was leased as a quarry by the Popes: picking up one receipt  in the Vatican archive we see a payment of 205 ducats for the removal  of 2,522 tons of stone between September 1451 and May 1452. One of  the first Popes to introduce legislation to protect the few monuments  that still stood was Pius II, in 1462. A humanist scholar, Pius had  praised the ruins in a poem written many years before:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOh Rome! Your very ruins are a joy,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFallen is your pomp; but it was peerless once!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYour noble blocks wrench'd from your ancient walls\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAre burn'd for lime by greedy slaves of gain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVillains! If such as you may have their way\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree ages more, Rome's glory will be gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePius's laws were disregarded like many before or since, however. In  1519 Raphael told Pope Leo X, 'I would be so bold as to say that all  of this new Rome, however great it may be, however beautiful, however  embellished with palaces, churches and other buildings, all of this  is built with mortar made from ancient marbles.' In the twelve years  since Raphael had known the city the Temple of Ceres and one of its  two pyramids had been destroyed. The lime-burning which Pius II and  Raphael decried was the most banal, yet most destructive, aspect of  the recycling. In mixing mortar the best aggregate is powdered lime,  and the easiest way to obtain powdered lime is to burn marble. At the  end of the nineteenth century the archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani  discovered a lime-kiln abandoned by lime-burners in a sudden hurry  many centuries before. Inside stood eight marble Vestal Virgins ready  to be burned, stashed 'like a cord of wood, leaving as few  interstices as possible between them, and the spaces formed by the  curves of the body filled in by marble chips'. Once when he was  sketching in the Forum, the great French seventeenth-century painter  Nicolas Poussin was asked where to find the spirit of ancient Rome.  He knelt down and scooped up a handful of earth. 'Here.' The cow  pasture was mingled with marble dust, the richest sediment in the  world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the fall of classical Rome until the eighteenth century the only  houses in the Forum were the cottages of the lime-burners, and the  hovels of beggars and thieves. To Christian pilgrims in the Middle  Ages the ruins were the work of mysterious giants of folklore and not  fellow men, and the Colosseum was thought to have been a domed Temple  of the Sun. The marshy, fetid wilderness of the Forum was to be  avoided in the journey from one shrine to another. A soldier in the  army of Frederick Barbarossa which invaded Rome in 1155 described the  ruins crawling with green snakes and black toads, its air poisoned by  the breath of winged dragons, and by the rotting bodies of the  thousands of Germans who had died of the fever during their  occupation of the city. When Adam of Usk travelled from Henry V's  England he saw dogs scrapping outside St Peter's: 'O God! How  lamentable is the state of Rome! Once it was filled by great Lords  and Palaces; now it's filled with huts, thieves, wolves and vermin,  and the Romans tear themselves to pieces.'\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was not until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century that we  find a new approach, in which the study of ancient inscriptions and  manuscripts replaced superstitious legends, and artists and  architects tried to piece together the scattered jigsaws of  antiquity. The first painting of the ruins of the Forum was made by  Maso di Banco in the church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1336, and  at the dawn of the following century Brunelleschi and Donatello came  from Florence to study the remains. When they began to excavate, the  local rabble assumed they were treasure-hunters; when they used  compasses and rulers to establish the measurements they needed for  their own works of art they were accused of being necromancers using  occult secrets to discover the gold and silver. The antiquary Poggio  Bracciolini arrived in Rome in 1430:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of  the Roman Empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings;  illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the  spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world,  how it is fallen! How changed! How defaced! The path of victory is  obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed  by a dunghill. . . . The Forum of the Roman people, where they  assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now  enclosed for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and  private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate,  broken, and naked, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is  the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the  injuries of time and fortune.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePoggio's lament became a new way of seeing Rome. And nowhere was the  lesson of Sic transit gloria mundi more evident than in the  Colosseum. It had served as a quarry, a private fortress and a  bull-ring: earthquakes had struck in 422, 508, 847, 1231 and 1349 AD.  Its external arcades, littered with dunghills, were full of beggars  and occupied by shopkeepers who slung their awnings on poles slotted  into the holes where clamps of bronze had once held the marble  cladding in place. Even inside you could smell the cabbages from the  surrounding farms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuamdiu stat Colyseus, stat et Roma:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuando cadet Colyseus, cadet et Roma:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuando cadet Roma, cadet et Mundus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Byron translated the words of the Venerable Bede:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd when Rome falls - the world.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302175363301,"sku":"NP9781400030866","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400030866.jpg?v=1767729936","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/in-ruins-isbn-9781400030866","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}