the architecture

of ruins

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies
an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to
the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and i­magined
as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative,
­interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic,
­addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and
practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, na-
ture and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life
and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin
intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined
and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture.
Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monu-
ment and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and
a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular
ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate
an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical
understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past
that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, con-
vincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in
words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in
soil. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’.
Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is
lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past.
As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s incomplete and broken forms expand
architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can
remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the cre-
ativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between
nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin ac-
knowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or
atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing
climate change.

Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at the Bartlett School
of Architecture, University College London, where he directs the MPhil/PhD Ar-
chitectural Design programme. He is the author of The Illegal Architect (1998),
Actions of Architecture (2003), Immaterial Architecture (2006), Weather Archi-
tecture (2012) and A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction (2016);
editor of Occupying ­Architecture (1998) and Architecture—the Subject is Matter
(2001); and co-­editor of Critical Architecture (2007).
The Architecture
of Ruins
Designs on the Past, Present
and Future

J onatha n H i l l
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2019 Jonathan Hill

The right of Jonathan Hill to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill, Jonathan, 1958– author.
Title: The architecture of ruins: designs on the past,
present and future / Jonathan Hill.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056339 |
ISBN 9781138367777 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138367784 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429429644 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Architectural design. | Ruined buildings. | Monuments.
Classification: LCC NA2750 .H55 2019 | DDC 729—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056339

ISBN: 978-1-138-36777-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-36778-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42964-4 (ebk)

Typeset in News Gothic

by codeMantra
Contents

List of figures vii

Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

1 Monuments to Rome 5

2 The first ‘ruins’ 31

3 Architecture in ruins 61

4 Speaking ruins 85

5 Ruin and rotunda 113

6 Life in ruins 153

7 Wrapping ruins around buildings 203

8 Nations in ruins 255

Conclusion: a monument to a ruin 293

Bibliography 303

Index 343

v
Figures

Cover

Denys Lasdun, ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the National Theatre, London, in his
studio, 1970. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections.

Chapter 1

Andrea Palladio, Villa Poiana, Poiana Maggiore, c. 1555. Exterior detail. Courtesy
of Ruth Kamen/RIBA Collections. 10
Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo, Fanzolo di Vedelago, 1565. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 11
Andrea Palladio, Villa ­Barbaro, Maser, 1558. Interior with frescoes by Paolo
Veronese. Courtesy of Edwin Smith/RIBA Collections. 12
Andrea Palladio, Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza. Elevation and plan in I quattro libri
dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), 1570. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections. 13
Andrea Palladio, ­Basilica Palladiana, 1617, and statue of Andrea ­Palladio in
Piazza Signori, ­Vicenza. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 14
Andrea Palladio, Loggia del Capitaniato, Vicenza, 1571. Corner detail. Courtesy
of Edwin Smith/RIBA Collections. 15
William Kent, The Stone Hall, Houghton Hall, 1731. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 20
Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, Water House, Houghton, c. 1732. South
elevation. Courtesy of Houghton Hall Archives. 23
Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 1570. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 26

Chapter 2

Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, second century AD. The Thermal Baths. Courtesy of Jonathan
Hill. 32
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499. Illustration of ‘The Three
Doors’. Courtesy of Aldus Manutius edition/De Agostini Picture Library/
Bridgeman Images. 34
Giulio Romano, Palazzo Te, Mantua, c. 1530. Fresco in the Sala dei Giganti, detail
of the destruction of the giants by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, 1536. Courtesy of
Palazzo Te/Bridgeman Images. 36
Pirro Ligorio, Sacra Bosco, Bomarzo, 1552–1580. Courtesy of Danica O. Kus/RIBA
Collections. 36

vii
 f ig ur e s

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, 1682.
­Courtesy of Ashmolean ­Museum, University of ­Oxford/Bridgeman Images. 39
Claude Lorrain, Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644. Courtesy
of Private Collection/Bridgeman Images. 40
Guercino (Giovanni ­Francesco Barbieri), Et in Arcadia ego, c.1621–1623.
Courtesy of Palazzo ­Barberini, Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini, Rome/
Bridgeman Images. 41
Nicolas Poussin, Et in ­Arcadia ego, c. 1635. Courtesy of Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman
Images. 43
Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Arch and Waterfalls, c. 1630–1673. Courtesy
of Palatine Gallery, Pitti Palace, Florence/Finsiel/Alinari Archives reproduced
with the permission of Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Bridgeman
Images. 53

Chapter 3

Andrea Palladio with Vincenzo Scamozzi, Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza, 1585.

Courtesy of Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 67
William Kent, Italian Diary (‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit’),
1714–1717, fol. 26r. Kent’s reworking of a drawing in Giulio Troili,
Paradossi per pratticare la prospettiva, 1683. ­Courtesy of Bodleian
Library, ­University of Oxford. 68
Giovanni Paolo Panini, Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, 1758. Courtesy of
Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images. 69
William Kent, The Vale of Venus, Rousham, 1737–1741. Courtesy of Charles
Cottrell-Dormer. 73
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Detail of Antinous at the end of the Long
Walk. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 74
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Watery Walk and Cold Bath. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill. 74
William Kent, Rousham, 1737–1741. Detail of Peter Scheemaker’s sculpture,
Dying Gladiator. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 75
William Kent, The Temple of the Mill and the Triumphal Arch beyond the
Gardens, Rousham, 1737–1741. Courtesy of Charles Cottrell-Dormer. 76
William Kent, Elysian Fields, Stowe, c.1735. The bust of John Locke in the
Temple of British Worthies. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 77
William Kent, Richmond Hermitage, 1731. Section drawn by John Vardy in
William Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent,
1744. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 79
William Kent, Arcadian Hermitage with Satyr and Shepherdess, c. 1730.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 79

viii
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 4

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri, 1761. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 87

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vedute di Roma, 1770. Great Baths at Hadrian’s
Villa, Tivoli. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 88
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture, 1753. Frontispiece to the second
edition, 1755. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 92
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità romane, 1756–1757, vol. 1. Plan of
Rome based on Forma Urbis Romae, c. 203–211 AD. Courtesy of UCL
Library Special Collections. 96
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Il Campo Marzio dell’ Antica Roma, 1762. Ichnographia,
Louis Kahn’s own copy. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 97
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, MacDonald Monument, Non-Catholic Cemetery,
Rome, 1766, with the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in the background.
Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 100
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Detail of MacDonald Monument, Non-Catholic
Cemetery, Rome, 1766. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek. 100
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piazzale dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome, 1766.
The enclosing wall with obelisks and monuments. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek. 101
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piazzale dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome, 1766. The
entrance screen. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek. 102
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The front of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 103
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The
elliptical oculus in the front of the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/
Sovereign Order of Malta. 104
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The
chamber and passage within the base of the altar, with the organ currently
blocking the arched opening in the altar’s rear elevation. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 104
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. The rear of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 105
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with a side column. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta. 106
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of
the rear of the altar with the apse window. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/
Sovereign Order of Malta. 107
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar. Courtesy of Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign Order of Malta. 108

ix
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 5

Robert Adam, Trompe l’œil showing five drawings of ruins composed as if they
are on overlapping sheets of paper, c. 1757. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 116
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Design for the Ruin Room of the monastery (now
convent) of Santissima Trinità dei Monti, Rome, c. 1766. Courtesy of
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge/Bridgeman Images. 118
Giovanni Battitsta Piranesi, Blackfriars Bridge, London, under construction,
1766. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 121
Robert Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro
in Dalmatia, 1764, plate 8. Elevation of the South Wall of the Palace
depicted as reconstructed and ruined. 127
Robert and James Adam, Section of the New Design for Sir Nathaniel
Curson Baronet at Kedleston/From North to South, 1760. Drawn by a
member of the Adams’ office, possibly by Agostino Brunias, with the ‘now
Lord Scarsdale’ inscription added by William Adam. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 130
Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, 1765. The Saloon, looking north. Courtesy of
National Trust Images/Paul Barker. 131
Robert Adam, ­Kedleston Hall, 1765. The apse and dome in the Saloon.
Courtesy of National Trust Images/Chris Lacey. 132
Robert Adam, Kedleston Hall, 1765. The South Front. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Rupert Truman. 136
Robert Adam, Sketch for Landscaping the Park at Kedleston, 1759. Courtesy
of National Trust. 137
Robert Adam, Ruined Antique Shrine, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the Trustees
of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 138
Robert Adam, Ruined ­Temple, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the ­Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 138
Robert Adam, Design for a Roman Ruin, c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy of the
Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 139
Robert Adam, Capriccio showing parts of a ruined colonnade with a
triumphal arch on the left, c. ­1756–1757. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 142
Robert Adam, Capriccio showing parts of a ruined circular temple with
Corinthian capitals beside a pyramid with architectural fragments at its
base, c. 1756–1757. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 143
Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Capriccio showing a ruined circular colonnade of
the Corinthian order with a broken and overgrown cornice. Beside it is a
pyramid and in front of that is a circular altar-sacrophagus, c. 1756–1757.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 143
Plan of a circular pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust/
Andrew Pattison. 144

x
 f ig ur e s

Section of a domed pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust. 145
Interior wall elevation with chimney piece, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of
National Trust. 146
Sketch of a circular pavilion on a rock with a grotto underneath, Kedleston, early
1760s. Courtesy of National Trust. 146

Chapter 6

John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817. ­Mausoleum exterior. Courtesy of

Martin Charles/RIBA Collections. 162
John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817. ­Mausoleum interior. ­Courtesy of
Martin Charles/RIBA Collections. 162
John Soane, Exterior, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Martin Charles/
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 163
Joseph Michael Gandy, View of the Soane Tomb, 1816. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 171
George Basevi, View of the Soane Tomb, 1816. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 172
John Soane, The Dome Area with Soane’s bust, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 174
John Soane, The Breakfast Parlour, looking north, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Gareth Gardner/Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 176
John Soane, The Picture Room with the panels open to the Picture Room
Recess, 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Derry Moore/Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 178
Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Visions of Early Fancy, in the Gay Morning
of Youth; and Dreams in the Evening of Life, c. 1820. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London. 180
Joseph Michael Gandy, Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John
Soane between 1780 and 1815, 1818. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. 180
John Soane, The Monk’s Yard, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Courtesy of Derry
Moore/Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 183
John Soane, Pasticcio in the Monument Court, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London/Bridgeman Images. 185
Joseph Michael Gandy, View of the Consols Transfer Office, Bank of England,
1799. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 188
Joseph Michael Gandy, Architectural Ruins—A Vision, 1798/1832. Courtesy
of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 189
Joseph Michael Gandy, Aerial View of the Bank of England from the South-
East, 1830. Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. 191
John Soane, Old Dividend Office, Bank of England, 1811, during demolition,
1925. The ruins of a built ruin; only the outer wall of Soane’s Bank survives
today. Courtesy of RIBA Collections. 192

xi
 f ig ur e s

Chapter 7

Louis I. Kahn, Piazza Campidoglio, Rome, 1951. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn

Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission. 208
Louis I. Kahn, Bath House, Jewish Community Center, Trenton, 1955.
Courtesy of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. 227
Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1959. Ground
floor plan. Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 228
Louis I. Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1959. Model.
Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Photograph, Marshall
D. Meyers. 229
Louis I. Kahn, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, 1974. Entrance
façade of the dormitories. Courtesy of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 234
Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly Building, Sher-e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka, 1983.
The assembly hall seen across the lake from a dining hall courtyard. Courtesy
of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 234
Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly Building, Sher-e-Bangla-Nagar, Dhaka, 1983.
The Presidential staircase. Courtesy of ORCH/RIBA Collections. 235
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California.
Perspective sketch of the Meeting House, 1962. Courtesy of Louis I.
Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical
and Museum Commission. 236
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, 1965.
Public plaza seen from the east and looking towards the ocean. Courtesy
of The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph,
John Nicolais. 238
Louis I. Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, 1965. West end
of the central rill, looking up to the north block flanking the public plaza.
Courtesy of John Donat/RIBA Collections. 238
Johann August Arens, Roman House, Weimar, 1798. Courtesy of Jonathan Hill. 240
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808–1810. Courtesy of Alte
Nationalgalerie, Berlin/Bridgeman Images. 242

Chapter 8

Alison and Peter Smithson, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, Norfolk,

1954. Interior. Courtesy of Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 259
Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. The south façade with the well in the foreground. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 262

xii
 f ig ur e s

Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. View through the patio window to the woods to the north, 1995,
taken after the Smithsons left Fonthill. Courtesy of Georg Aerni. 262
Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire,
1962. The Smithson family lunching with Reyner Banham. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 263
Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London, under construction,
1970. Courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones/RIBA Collections. 267
Ernö Goldfinger, Balfron Tower, 1967, and Alison and Peter Smithson,
Robin Hood Gardens, 1972, London. Courtesy of David Borland/RIBA
Collections. 269
Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens, London. The west block has
been destroyed and the east block is awaiting demolition, 2018. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek. 270
Colvin & Moggridge, landscape architects for Phase 1 of UEA, 1970. Hal
Moggridge, site sketch. Courtesy of Colvin & Moggridge. 273
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. View of the ziggurats
from the River Yare. Courtesy of Richard Einzig/Arcaid Images. 275
Denys Lasdun, ‘scrapheap’ of discarded models of the National Theatre, London,
in his studio, 1970. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 276
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. Detail view of UEA
under construction. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 277
Denys Lasdun, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 1968. Panoramic view of
UEA under construction. Courtesy of Lasdun Archive/RIBA Collections. 278
Arata Isozaki, Kenzo Tange and Atsushi Ueda, Festival Plaza, Expo ’70, Osaka,
1970. A view of the west side with tiers of spectator seating. Courtesy of
Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections. 284

xiii
Acknowledgements

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future is dedicated
to Dr Izabela Wieczorek, who makes life special, and inspired, encouraged and
supported my research.
This book developed from my teaching and research at The Bartlett School
of Architecture, UCL. I particularly thank Elizabeth Dow, my teaching partner in
MArch Unit 12, and Matthew Butcher for their stimulating and generous dis-
cussions. My colleagues in the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design programme of-
fered invaluable encouragement, especially Professor Ben Campkin, Professor Nat
Chard, Dr Edward Denison, Professor Murray Fraser, Dr Penelope Haralambidou,
Professor Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Professor Sophia Psarra, Professor Peg Rawes,
Professor Jane Rendell and Dr Nina Vollenbröker. Also at The Bartlett, I wish to
thank Professor Laura Allen, Dr Eva Branscome, Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange,
­Professor Adrian Forty, Dr Jan Kattein, Chee-Kit Lai, Dr Guan Lee, Professor CJ Lim,
Professor Barbara Penner, Dr Tania Sengupta, Professor Bob Sheil, P
­ rofessor
Mark Smout and Colin Thom, Survey of London. Dialogue with an exceptional
group of MArch and PhD graduates and students has influenced the character
of this book, including Dr Alessandro Ayuso, Sophie Barks, Boon Yik Chung,
Dr David Buck, Sam Coulton, Ben Ferns, Clare Hawes, Ines Dantas, Colin
Herperger, Dr Felipe Lanuza Rilling, Ifigeneia Liangi, Aisling O’Carroll, Dr Luke
­Pearson, Natalia Romik, Wiltrud Simbürger, Elin Soderberg, Camila Sotomayor,
Quynh Vantu, Dan Wilkinson and Tim Zihong Yue. The Bartlett Architecture Re-
search Fund supported a sabbatical and contributed to image permission costs.
I appreciate the advice of the many individuals and their institutions, who
have assisted my research. These include Stephen Astley, former Curator of Draw-
ings, and Dr Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London; Professor Peter Brimblecombe, UEA; Colin Harris, Bodleian
­Library, ­Oxford; Kurt Helfrich, Fiona Orsini and Suzanne Walters, RIBA D
­ rawings &
Archives Collections; Christine Hiskey, Archivist, and Dr Suzanne ­Reynolds,
­Manuscript ­Curator, Holkham Hall; Whitney Kerr-Lewis, Assistant Curator of De-
signs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Monica Lais and H.E. Fra’ Emmanuel
Rousseau, Curator of the Magistral Libraries and Archives, Sovereign Order of
Malta, Rome; Lady (Susan) Lasdun; Jonathan Makepeace, RIBA British Archi-
tectural Library; Fiona Messham, Kedleston Hall, National Trust; Hal Moggridge,
Colvin & Moggridge Landscape Architects; Secrétariat de la Trinité des Monts,
Rome; Dr Joyce Townsend, Senior Conservation Scientist, Tate, London; William
Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, Architectural Archives, University of
Pennsylvania School of Design; and David Yaxley, Archivist, Houghton Hall.

xv
 ack n ow le d g em en t s

I am also indebted to Dr Ana Araujo, Architectural Association School of

­Architecture; Morag Bain; Dr Mikkel Bille, Roskilde University; Carolyn B
­ utterworth
and Dr Emma Cheatle, University of Sheffield; Ben Clement and Sebastian de la
Cour; Professor Mark Dorrian, University of Edinburgh; Paul Fineberg; ­Professor
William Firebrace, State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart; Dr Javier García Germán,
ETSAM; Catherine Harrington; Professor Toni Kaupilla, Oslo National Academy of
Art; Dr Amy Kulper, RISD; Perry Kulper, University of M
­ ichigan; Dr Constance Lau,
University of Westminster; Professor Katie Lloyd Thomas, University of ­Newcastle;
Professor Lesley Lokko, University of Johannesburg; Dr Sandra Löschke, Univer-
sity of Sydney; Professor John Macarthur, U
­ niversity of Queensland; ­Professor
Igor Marjanovic, Washington University, St Louis; Ganit Mayslits Kassif; Profes-
sor Jules Maloney, RMIT; Catalina Mejia Moreno, University of Brighton; Tom
Noonan, University of Greenwich; Jean Oh; Ulrike Passe, Iowa State ­University;
Dr Claus Peder Pedersen, Aarhus School of Architecture; Franco Pisani; Rahesh
Ram, University of Greenwich; Neil Rawson; Dr Tim Flohr Sørensen, University of
Copenhagen; and Dr Ro Spankie, University of Westminster.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future is my
eighth book published by Routledge. Trudy Varcianna is consistently helpful and
I am especially grateful to Fran Ford for her continuing support.

Illustrations

Considerable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images. The
author and publishers apologise for any errors and omissions and, if notified, will
endeavour to correct these at the earliest available opportunity.

xvi
introduction
 in t r o duc t i on

Painted Pompeiian red in allusion to the construction, destruction and redis-

covery of an ancient Roman town, the Little Study is encrusted with venerable
marble fragments and cinerary urns, which the coloured glass skylight bathes
in the golden light of Rome. Warm air rises through two brass floor grilles, fed
by the experimental furnace found among fabricated ruins in the Monk’s Yard.
The single desk fits snugly in the window to the Monument Court, observing a
sublime shadow of sulphuric soot accumulating on the assemblage of new and
old fragments. Living on site while the three adjacent houses were demolished,
constructed and rebuilt, the architect designed, occupied and imagined a building
as a ruin. Intensifying the already blurred relations between the unfinished and
the ruined, John Soane envisaged the past, the present and the future in a single
architecture.
Many societies and architects have conceived buildings as solidly stable and
resistant to the weather, nature and time. In this schema, a ruin is understood
only in terms of failure and decay. Instead, this book acknowledges that a ruin
represents potential as well as loss and identifies an alternative and significant
history of architecture in which a building is designed, occupied, and imagined as
a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, inter-
dependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, address-
ing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical
terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and cul-
ture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death.1
Rather than a broad historical narrative, specific architects, images and build-
ings are selected because they best represent the distinct issues and questions
in the development of this design practice. Emphasising the interconnections
between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from
earlier ones, this book uses the example of an evolving, interdisciplinary design
practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future offers
a new perspective on the Western architectural canon. Acknowledging the his-
torical and geographic relevance of the book’s themes and their influence and
limit in a global context, I discuss in detail the work of architects, landscape
­architects, painters and writers from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first
­century, ­including Andrea Palladio, Francesco Colonna, Claude Lorrain, ­Nicolas
Poussin, ­Salvator Rosa, John Evelyn, William Kent, Daniel Defoe, Giovanni
­Battista ­Piranesi, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Robert Adam, Edmund Burke, John
Soane, J.M.W. Turner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Ruskin, Alois Riegl,
Louis Kahn, Robert Smithson, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Alison and

2
 in t r o duc t i on

Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Brenda Colvin, Kenzõ Tange and Arata Isozaki.
This book is structured around a collection of biographies because for an individ-
ual, and notably for an architect, a monument and a ruin are metaphors for a life
and means to negotiate between a self and a society.

Note

1 Weather and climate differ in duration and scale. Unlike the weather, which we can see
and feel at a specific time and place, we cannot directly perceive climate because it is
an idea aggregated over many years and across a region.

3
 1
monuments to
Rome
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Palladio reborn

The mutinous army of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V terrorised Rome in
1527, murdering thousands. Exacerbating the violence, many of the troops were
Protestant mercenaries opposed to the Catholic Church. The Sack of Rome led
to an exodus of patrons, painters, sculptors and architects northwards, some to
the Veneto. A prosperous city that produced the finest silk in Europe, Vicenza
had been a part of the Venetian Republic since 1404. But the wealthy Vicen-
tine scholar, dramatist and papal diplomat Gian Giorgio Trissino was suspicious
of Venice’s convoluted politics, culture and urban fabric, and aimed instead to
model his hometown on classical Rome. In a moment of serendipity, Trissino en-
countered Andrea, son of Pietro della Gondola, probably in 1537 or 1538 when
the Paduan stonemason was 30. Impressed by his protégé’s potential, Trissino
offered him a humanist education alongside the sons of Vicentine nobility at the
Accademia Trissiniana in Cricoli.1
Awarded a new name to reflect his enhanced status, Andrea Palladio vis-
ited Rome five times between 1541 and 1554, the year in which he published
­L’antichità di Roma (The Antiquities of Rome). The first compact and reliable
guide to the city’s ancient sites, it remained the standard reference for two centu-
ries, appearing in more than 30 editions by the mid-eighteenth century.2 Studying
the ruins was tortuous because many were either overgrown with vegetation or
appropriated for other uses and absorbed by later structures; the Forum was
known as the campo vaccino because it was a cow pasture. Palladio celebrates
‘the huge pleasure and the wonder that can come from a detailed understanding
of the great things in so subtle and celebrated a city as that of Rome’, but regrets
‘the wars, fires and structural collapses that have occurred over the many years in
that city and which have ruined, gutted and buried a large part of these remains’.3
Continuing this theme in the opening dedication of I quattro libri dell’architettura
(The Four Books of Architecture), 1570, he praises ‘the fragments of many an-
cient buildings, which, having remained upright until our own age as astonishing
testimony of the cruelty of the barbarians, provide, even as stupendous ruins,
clear and powerful proof of the … greatness of the Romans’, adding that the ruins
are ‘much worthier of study than I had at first thought’.4
The interdependence of the architect and the archaeologist was implicit in the
Renaissance in that surveys of revered ancient sites were a stimulus to design. Pope
Leo X appointed Raphael maestro della fabbrica—chief architect—of St Peter’s and
commissario delle antichità responsible for protecting Roman antiquities in 1514
and 1515, respectively. The pontiff’s intention was not to preserve the ruins but

6
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

to ensure that their stones were available for construction of the cathedral rather
than other new buildings. In his letter to Leo X, c. 1519, Raphael proposes to map,
record and draw the remains of the ancient city, and argues that ‘by preserving
the example of the ancients, may your Holiness seek to equal and better them.’5
But Leonard Barkan concludes that Raphael was only ‘given protective custody’
of marbles with inscriptions beneficial to ‘the improvement of linguistic culture.’6
No systematic preservation of the ruins was attempted because humanist scholars
believed that the authorial testimony of ancient texts was the more reliable record
of classical antiquity. Ancient ruins were still appropriated for new uses, denuded
of statues and quarried for stone, a practice in which even Raphael was engaged.
A Renaissance architect studied a ruin to deduce its original form. Rather
than appreciate the ‘stupendous ruins’ in their dilapidated condition and depict
them as such, The Four Books features monumental reconstructions of ancient
buildings as Palladio understood and imagined them, alongside new designs that
venerate classical antiquity. Explaining why the early sixteenth-century Tempietto,
Rome, appears among images of ancient temples, Palladio writes that since Do-
nato ‘Bramante was the first to make known that good and beautiful architecture
which had been hidden from the time of the ancients till now, I thought it reason-
able that his work should be placed among those of the ancients.’7 According to
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood:

The power of the image, or the work of art, to fold time was neither discovered
nor invented in the Renaissance. What was distinctive about the European Re-
naissance, so called, was its apprehensiveness about the temporal instability of
the artwork, and its re-creation of the artwork as an occasion for reflection on
that instability … The ability of the work of art to hold incompatible models in
suspension without deciding is the key to art’s anachronic quality, its ability really
to ‘fetch’ a past, create a past, perhaps even to fetch the future.8

Ancient Roman sites that juxtapose diverse and contrasting forms were of little
interest to Palladio and rarely appear in his books. Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, second
century AD, is not discussed in The Four Books and receives only a very brief
mention in The Antiquities of Rome.9 In this regard, Palladio was typical of his
era. With the exception of Philibert Delorme’s Le premier tome de ­l’architecture,
1567, all Renaissance architectural treatises ignore Hadrian’s Villa because it
is insufficiently Vitruvian.10 In contrast to the asymmetrical baths of the Re-
public and early Empire, James S. Ackerman concludes that the later ‘Imperial
baths came closest to Palladio’s ideal’ because they ‘began to be built around a

7
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

grandiose sequence of axial spaces’. Questioning the accuracy of Palladio’s influ-

ential depictions of ancient Roman baths, Ackerman continues:

Archaeologists, knowing that the ruins were better preserved in Palladio’s time,
have been influenced subtly by his taste for order as well as by his precious in-
formation; their reconstructions favour symmetry and hierarchy, too. But surely
Palladio was more of a rationalist than the Romans.11

In the early fifteenth century, searching through the monastic library at St Gallen for
Latin manuscripts that would support his humanist beliefs, the Florentine scholar
Poggio Bracciolini came upon a manuscript copy of Vitruvius’ De ­architectura libri
decem (Ten Books on Architecture), which was written in the first century BC.
The rediscovery of the only architectural treatise to survive from classical antiq-
uity was hugely significant, emphasising the Renaissance preference for ancient
Roman texts rather than ancient Roman ruins, which often diverge from Vitruvian
principles. It is likely that the author of De architectura libri decem ‘was more of a
rationalist than the Romans’ who created many of the city’s structures.
Modelled on Vitruvius’ example, written around 1450 and first printed in 1485,
Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture) was the first
thorough investigation of the Renaissance architect as artist and intellectual. Em-
phasising the immaterial idea of architecture not the material fabric of building, the
Renaissance restricted the architectural imagination to the universal geometries of
ideal forms, as Alberti concludes: ‘It is quite possible to project whole forms in the
mind without recourse to the material.’12 Classical antiquity established the prin-
ciple that ideas are immaterial and that intellectual labour is superior to manual
labour. In Timaeus, c. 360 BC, Plato claims that all the things we experience in the
material world are modelled on ideal forms defined by geometrical proportions.13
Consequently, there are two distinct realms. One consists of ideal originals, which
only the intellect can comprehend, and the other of imperfect copies subject to
decay. Concerned with establishing their intellectual status, Italian Renaissance
painters, sculptors and architects promoted a concept of beauty based on geomet-
ric ideals, but undermined Plato’s argument that the artwork is always inadequate
and inferior. The term ‘design’ derives from disegno, which means drawing in
Italian, and associates the drawing of a line with the drawing forth of an idea.
Disegno allowed the three visual arts—architecture, painting and sculpture—to be
recognised as liberal arts concerned with ideas, a position they had rarely been
accorded previously. Accordingly, architecture resulted not from the accumulated
knowledge of a team of anonymous craftsmen collaborating on a construction site
but the artistic creation of an individual architect designing in a studio.

8
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The history of the architectural book is interdependent with that of the ar-
chitect, and has been crucial to the architect’s status since the Renaissance. In
the new division of labour, architects acquired complementary means to practice
architecture—drawing, writing and building—creating an interdependent and
multidirectional web of influences that stimulated architects’ creative develop-
ment. To affirm their newly acquired status, architects began increasingly to the-
orise architecture both for themselves and for their patrons, ensuring that the
authored book became more valuable to architects than to painters and sculptors,
whose status as liberal artists was more secure and means to acquire commis-
sions less demanding.
Affirming his allegiance to Vitruvius, Palladio prepared drawings for Daniele
Barbaro’s 1556 Italian translation and analysis of De architectura libri decem and
described the ancient Roman architect as ‘my master and guide’.14 More than any
other Renaissance architectural treatise, The Four Books includes practical advice
on construction, climate and the means to combine domestic and agricultural
programmes in one building complex.15 But Palladio still remarks that ‘buildings
are esteemed more for their forms than for their materials’.16 In this vein, each of
his designs in The Four Books is an ideal and not that was actually built. Including
ideal designs and practical matters in one publication could be a means to con-
sider the dialogue between the immaterial and the material. But these relations are
not resolved in The Four Books, which more often presents two distinct realms.
When a resolution was attempted, one decision particularly undermined Palladio’s
concern to express ideal geometries in built form. Renaissance architects con-
structed in local measurements, which varied in Rome, Venice and Vicenza, and
determined the size of building materials such as bricks. As Palladio selected the
Vicentine foot as a standard measurement throughout The Four Books, the ideal
proportions of Vicentine buildings were expressed in perfect numbers, while those
of other Renaissance buildings and ancient ones too were obscured.17
In built architecture, especially the villas, Palladio explored the interdepend-
ence of the immaterial and the material with great subtlety. As a contrast to the
courtly humanism of his original patron, Palladio also appreciated the practi-
cal humanism of Alvise Cornaro, who remarked that he had learnt more ‘from
the ancient buildings than from the book of the divine Vitruvius’ and proposed
land reclamation and agricultural reform at a time when Venice’s trading em-
pire and territorial ambitions were diminishing, stimulating the construction of
rural villas.18 Referring to Cornaro’s architectural treatise, Ackerman writes that
he ‘was the only Renaissance theorist who suggested that frugal patrons might
­abandon the ancient orders and all traditional ornament in façade design, and
Palladio was the only architect of the time who accepted the challenge’.19

9
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa Poiana, Poiana
Maggiore, c. 1555. Exterior
detail. Courtesy of Ruth
Kamen/RIBA Collections.

A rural villa was practical and poetic, and a further affirmation of ancient
Rome. Written in the first century BC and derived from georgos, the Greek term for
farmer, Virgil’s four-volume Georgics equates the virtuous management of the land
to the benign management of Rome, while his slightly earlier Eclogues evokes a
leisurely rural life.20 Written in the first century AD, Pliny the Younger’s letter to
his friend Gallus also extolls the pleasures of a relaxed rural retreat, mentioning
frescoes, fountains, fruit trees, terraces and vistas.21 Pliny’s account, like those
of Virgil, is an urbanite’s impression of the countryside, inspiring others to follow
this model.
Emphasising the interdependence of architecture and agriculture, Ackerman
notes that ‘Renaissance writers used “villa” to refer to the whole estate; Palladio
calls the proprietor’s residence “casa di villa.”’22 In most cases, modestly scaled
country residences and working farms for Venetian or Vicentine nobility, Palladio’s
villas recall the rural life evoked in classical antiquity, while their elegant but inex-
act proportions refer to the immaterial and its uncertain presence in the material
world. The Villa Emo, Fanzólo di Vedelago, 1565, consists of a central pedimented
block flanked on each side by an arcaded farm building terminated by a dovecote.
The central ramped staircase provides entry to the principal rooms and is also
a threshing surface that monumentalises the landowning family’s introduction
of grain cultivation to the surrounding fields. The exterior is unadorned, but the

10
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio, Villa Emo,

Fanzolo di Vedelago, 1565.
Courtesy of Jonathan Hill.

principal rooms and the interior of the portico are covered in Giovanni Battista
Zelotti’s trompe l’œil frescoes, in which architectural elements frame landscape
scenes, celebrating humanistic and mythological narratives on the virtues of an
agrarian life. Indicating that Palladio’s villas are creative reconstructions of ancient
precedents, the interiors of the Villa Barbaro, Maser, 1556, are covered in Paolo
Veronese’s illusionistic frescoes of Roman ruins painted a few years after the villa
was constructed. According to David Watkin, the frescoes ‘suggest that the Villa
Barbaro, as the idealised villa d’antica, represents Rome reborn.’23 Palladio did
not include painted frescoes in his designs. Although he would have expected his
clients to decorate their villas with such scenes, it is unlikely that he contributed
to their conception and he was rarely involved in the choice of a painter or a
precise theme. However, Bruce Boucher remarks that the frescoes in the sala
degli imperatori in the Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore, c. 1555, ‘bear such close
resemblance to Palladio’s reconstructions of ancient rooms as to suggest that here
the artists worked closely with the architect.’24

11
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa ­Barbaro, Maser,
1558. ­Interior with
­frescoes by Paolo Veronese.
­Courtesy of Edwin Smith/
RIBA Collections.

The Four Books includes numerous references to the interdependence of the

urban and the rural, and the public and the private. Emphasising the ancient his-
tory of a recurring theme, Palladio remarks that ‘the city is nothing more or less than
some great house and, contrariwise, the house is a small city,’ which Alberti also
affirmed.25 Equating the design of a rural villa to that of an urban palazzo, Palladio
remarks: ‘The house of the owner must be built taking into account the household
and their status in the same way as is customary in towns.’26 To justify an influ-
ential design decision, he inaccurately claims that pediments were first employed
on private buildings in ancient Rome and then on public ones, and cites Vitruvius
in support of this argument.27 In adopting the temple pediment and the imperial
baths’ axial plan, Palladio’s villas have a civic as well as a rural character, mon-
umentalising the redirection of the Venetian Republic from the sea to the land.28

Basilica Palladiana

Venetians cultivated the myth that refugees from Rome had established the la-
goon city after the fall of the Empire. Palladio subscribes to this narrative in The
Four Books, describing Venice as ‘the sole remaining exemplar of the grandeur
and magnificence of the Romans.’29 The Sack of Rome added new impetus to

12
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

the Venetian Republic’s claim to be Rome’s heir. But Venice had not been built in
the classical image of the imperial city and Palladio encountered ambivalence; ac-
cording to Manfredo Tafuri: ‘But what was one to do when the “Roman” language
claimed to be absolute? Venice could accept his language, but only by pushing
its propositions out to her margins,’ such as Il Redentore, 1592, on Giudecca.30
In Vicenza, however, Palladio acquired projects at the heart of the city. Ap-
pointed after a succession of architects failed to convince the City Council, his
first public commission was to transform the Palazzo della Ragione, the principal
building in Piazza dei Signori, Vicenza’s main square on the site of a Roman fo-
rum.31 Rebuilt in the mid-fifteenth century, the Palazzo had acquired a two-­storey
colonnade later in the century, which then partially collapsed, initiating the search
for a new architect. Shops for merchants occupied the ground floor while the large
hall on the upper floor functioned as a law court and gave the building its name,
the Palace of Justice, which was much in use as Vicenza had a reputation as one
of sixteenth-century Italy’s most violent and unruly cities.32 Palladio began design
work after visiting Rome with Trissino in 1545. Wooden prototypes were prepared
and the design was approved in 1549. But it was only completed in 1617.

Andrea Palladio, Basilica

Palladiana, Vicenza. Eleva-
tion and plan in I quattro
libri dell’architettura (The
Four Books of Architecture),
1570. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

13
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Imagining Vicenza as a Roman city, Palladio renamed the Palazzo the

‘Basilica’ and wrapped two-storey ‘porticoes’ around the existing building.33
Abutting an adjacent building on one side, Palladio’s design unifies piazzas of
differing scales on the three other sides. The openings in the porticoes adopt
a model that was known in antiquity, revived in the Renaissance by Bramante
and Raphael, and became widely known due to Sebastiano Serlio, who de-
picted it in his fourth book on architecture in 1537.34 Sometimes called a
Serlian, Palladian or Venetian window, it has a central arched opening and
a lower rectangular opening to each side. Palladio’s design cleverly accom-
modates the irregularly dimensioned bay widths of the existing building by
ensuring that the central openings are consistent and the variations are taken
up in the secondary openings.

Andrea Palladio, ­Basilica

Palladiana, 1617,
and statue of An-
drea ­Palladio in Piazza
Signori, ­Vicenza. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

14
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Basilica ‘in Vicenza’ depicted in The Four Books is not the one actually
built, but an idealised uniform design with site irregularities removed such as the
varying bay widths and the adjoining building.35 The openings in the projecting
porticoes are shown in dark shadow, as often occurs in the actual building,
which is faced in white stone quarried from nearby Piovene to accentuate the
contrast between the masonry porticos and the shadowed recesses. Also seen in
both the drawing and the building, the oculus to each side of the central arch is
a pure, unframed opening cut through stone.

Andrea Palladio, Loggia del

Capitaniato, Vicenza, 1571.
Corner detail. Courtesy
of Edwin Smith/RIBA
Collections.

15
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Piazza is named after the Signoria, the supreme governing body of
the Venetian Republic. Facing the Basilica on the opposite side of the square
is ­Palladio’s Loggia del Capitaniato, an addition to the residence of the capita-
nio, a senior Venetian military official and the symbol of the Republic’s authority
over Vicenza. Construction probably started in 1571 and the Loggia does not
appear in The Four Books. Four massive columns complete the façade. Unusual
for a sixteenth-century public building and especially one of such importance,
the columns are neither clad in stone nor faced in stucco but expressed in ex-
posed brickwork, which Palladio refers to as ‘Man-made stones (i.e. bricks)’,
emphasising their use in classical antiquity.36 In these two buildings facing each
other across Piazza dei Signori, Palladio designed monumental forms in mono-
lithic brick and stone and conceived ‘porticoes’—cut with stark unframed oculi—­
wrapping around a building and creating strong shadows, all principles that Louis
Kahn would adopt four centuries later. But despite these formal similarities, the
journey from Palladio to Kahn proceeds from a ruin reconstructed as a building to
a building designed as a ruin.

Vitruvius Britannicus

Published as a three-volume collection in 1711, Characteristicks of Men, Man-

ners, Opinions, Times established Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaft-
esbury, as a persuasive influence on eighteenth-century thought, influencing
Edmund Burke and Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, in England, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau in France and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried
Herder and Immanuel Kant in Germany.37 The first volume promotes the political,
moral and cultural authority of the educated elite, celebrates their moderation and
restraint and concludes that beauty follows objective, moral and universal stand-
ards that only the most cultured intellect can appreciate.38 Shaftesbury proclaims
the virtuoso to be the finest eighteenth-century gentleman, not merely a collector
but a patron and an enlightened cultural force infinitely superior to a scholar such
as Christopher Wren, a pivotal figure in the Royal Society who favoured scientific
reason rather than immutable truth.39
In the second edition of Characteristicks, 1714, Shaftesbury d
­ ismisses
the baroque designs of Wren and John Vanbrugh and suggests that ­England
needs a new architectural style.40 Following this lead, Robert Morris in
Lectures on Architecture, 1734–1736, denigrates Wren and Nicholas
Hawksmoor’s design for Kensington Palace, 1690–1705, as ‘most irreg-
ular and disproption’d’.41 Shaftesbury’s implicit support for the moral and

16
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

aesthetic virtues of restrained classicism was made explicit by Burlington’s

promotion of the early eighteenth-century architectural revival of Palladio and
his first British disciple Inigo Jones. The architect associated with disegno
was established in Italy in around 1450 and in France a century later, but
only arrived in England in the early 1600s after Jones visited Florence, Rome,
Venice and Vicenza, acquiring a large collection of Palladio’s drawings from
Vincenzo Scamozzi. Jones ensured that England was the first country outside
Italy to embrace Palladianism, translating classical precedent to a contempo-
rary context just as Palladio had reimagined ancient structures for his Venetian
and Vicentine patrons. Ackerman concludes that Palladio’s rural villa was
an engaging model because of the values that eighteenth-century England
shared with sixteenth-century Venice—a reverence for ancient Rome, an ap-
preciation of dynamic capitalism and intellectual inquiry and a distrust of
autocratic leaders—which ‘­differentiated them from the still feudal world’ of
many ­European countries:

The most apparent reason is that country life and economy in mainland Venice of
the Renaissance was much closer to that of eighteenth-century England than to
that of other European lands. In both, aristocrats and rich commoners, typically
active in the politics and commercial affairs of a metropolitan capital, acquired or
inherited—through primogeniture—large rural landholdings.42

Ackerman emphasises: ‘In both places, the country house was transformed at a
moment of far-reaching land-reform, which in Venice was based on reclamation
and in Britain on Enclosure.’43 Beginning in the seventeenth century and increas-
ing in the first half of the eighteenth century, parliamentary land enclosures en-
sured that over six million acres nationally were transferred from public to private
use, benefitting wealthy landowners but undermining the rural poor who relied
on common grazing land for a part of their livelihood. Heaths and pastures were
ordered into regular fields before any other European nation. The principal meas-
ure of wealth, status and influence, the landed estate was ‘the economic engine
of Georgian England—locus of its capital accumulation, technical innovation and
social modernization,’ writes Denis Cosgrove.44
Increasing confidence in the nation’s growing prosperity encouraged wealthy
landowners to reconfigure estates and rebuild houses in the newly fashionable
Palladian style. In the highly influential Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715–1725, Colen
Campbell celebrates Palladio as the heir to the classical tradition of ancient Rome
and illustrates his three volumes with contemporary examples of the nation’s

17
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

second Palladian revival. In the third volume, Campbell describes Burlington as

‘not only a great Patron of all Arts, but the first Architect,’ an opinion confirmed by
the subject of Campbell’s sycophancy, who signed himself ‘Burlington architec-
tus.’45 But satirising the doctrinaire Palladian revival in Gulliver’s Travels, 1726,
Jonathan Swift notes ‘the very melancholy Air’ of Lord Munodi who felt compelled
to rebuild his house according to ‘the best Rules of Ancient Architecture,’ which
the ‘Grand Academy of Lagado’ had imported from Laputa, a land that was as-
sumed to be its intellectual superior.46
Palladio’s extensive influence on architecture is primarily due to The
Four Books. The first complete English translation appeared in 1721, when
Venetian architect Giacomo (James) Leoni replaced the original woodcut il-
lustrations with his own versions engraved in copper.47 Dismissive of Leo-
ni’s publication, Burlington commissioned his own translation by Isaac Ware,
which was published in 1738 with more precise copper engravings of the
original woodcuts.
Palladio’s conjunction of rational humanism, agrarian purpose and pastoral
idyll appealed to British architects and patrons. However, the most frequently
studied and influential designs were not the actual structures but those expressed
in idealised drawings, which were replicated and repeated as required. Wealthier
than their Venetian counterparts, many British landowners commissioned houses
that were dislocated from agricultural activities and too grandiose for their settings,
incorporating a massive central block and imposing side pavilions all modelled
on Palladio.48 Only the architects and patrons who visited the buildings in Venice
and Vicenza and the less accessible rural villas in the Veneto—his most copied
designs—were able to appreciate the intimate fusion of the rational, sensual and
practical in Palladio’s built architecture.

The great man

In 1688, a confrontation with the absolutist Catholic monarch, James II, led the
dominant parliamentary grouping, the Whigs, to invite invasion, establishing
his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange as constitu-
tional monarchs with the overriding power of parliament affirmed. While the
Whigs promoted religious toleration and the collaboration of parliament and
monarch, the Tories supported the high Church establishment and the supreme
power of the crown. Tory ministers held power between 1700 and 1714, but

18
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Queen Anne’s death and the ascent of the first Hanoverian monarch George I
returned the Whigs to power seven years after the union of England and Scot-
land. A Whig, Sir Robert Walpole is familiarly described as Britain’s first Prime
Minister, holding the position between 1721 and 1742. But the title was not
then official and his contemporaries used it pejoratively, criticising Walpole for
holding too much power and influence. Frequently satirised and mocked, in
Gulliver’s Travels he is Flimnap, the scheming treasurer of Lilliput, and in John
Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, 1728, he is simply a thief.49 Walpole’s nickname—
The Great Man—was not necessarily flattering, and even an admirer, Queen
Caroline, the wife of King George II, noted ‘that gross body, those swollen legs,
and that ugly belly.’50
At the time of Walpole’s birth in 1676, his family were well established in
northwest Norfolk, having owned Houghton since 1307. But no previous family
member had acquired such prominence and he chose to recast the estate in his
image. Walpole’s new garden was largely realised by 1720, when he decided
to demolish the existing house and commission a new one. The construction of
Houghton Hall began in 1722, soon after he became Prime Minister. Campbell
and James Gibbs provided the initial designs, Thomas Ripley supervised con-
struction and William Kent was commissioned to design the interiors of the piano
nobile in 1725.51 Celebrating Walpole’s achievement in the year that construction
was completed, Ware’s The Plans, Elevations and Sections; Chimney-pieces, and
Ceilings of Houghton in Norfolk, 1735, was the first architectural book dedicated
to a single British house.52
With his political career in London, Walpole’s visits to Houghton followed
a fixed pattern from around 1725. His summer visits were mostly private,
lasting for about a fortnight after the close of the parliamentary session in late
May or early June. In November, he entertained friends and allies at a month-
long ‘Norfolk Congress’ that combined hunting with political intrigue, social
life and cultural patronage. Walpole’s expenditure was lavish. In the vaulted
ground floor Arcade where hunting parties would gather, silver taps served
‘Hogan,’ a particularly strong beer. John Hervey, second Baron Hervey, wrote
in 1731: ‘In public we drank loyal healths, talked of the times and cultivated
popularity; in private we drew plans and cultivated the country.’53 In 1728,
a pamphlet mocked the extravagant ‘merry-making,’ equating Walpole to the
French monarch and Houghton to his ‘Palace’: ‘the two most eminent Persons
of this our Day are now hunting; one of them at Fountainblow and the other
in Norfolk.’54

19
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

William Kent, The Stone

Hall, Houghton Hall, 1731.
Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

After climbing a flight of external stairs, esteemed visitors arrived at Kent’s

Great Door on the first floor of Houghton Hall’s east elevation, which was then
the main entrance to the house.55 Entering into the Stone Hall, they passed first
under sculptures of Neptune and Britannia and then under figures represent-
ing Peace and Plenty, emphasising Walpole’s guardianship of a prosperous sea-­
trading nation that would become the dominant European naval power within 30
years.56 The focus of Kent’s Stone Hall is John Michael Rysbrack’s bust of Wal-
pole on the north wall. Combining Roman and British iconography, it depicts the
Prime Minister in a toga adorned with the Garter Star, celebrating his election as
a Knight in 1726. England’s lineage as a former Roman colony was increasingly
recalled after 1688, implying a shared commitment to democracy and liberty.
Republican Rome was more frequently referred to than imperial Rome, indicating
the monarch’s diminished power.57 Ancient Rome offered Britain a model to sur-
pass as well as emulate. Walpole’s bust is placed slightly higher than that of the
ancient busts that line the room, including Roman emperors such as Commodus,
Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian. The Latin inscription beneath the Prime Minister’s
bust translates as ‘Robert Walpole, Prince of the British senate, who established,

20
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

dwelt in, and made famous this house’.58 His contemporaries would have known
that the title princeps senatus was conferred on the first Roman Emperor Augus-
tus, who ‘had partly redeemed himself by giving the Empire a long peace after
a century of recurring civil wars, by supporting the arts, by attempting to restore
old standards of public and private morality and respect for the gods’, writes
Philip Ayres.59 But contemporary accounts more often associated Walpole with
the corruption, intrigue and hedonism of ancient Rome than its liberty, virtue and
stoicism. Recalling ancient Rome’s class structure, only aristocratic and wealthy
Britons benefitted from the analogy of one empire to another.

The architect Earl

During his long political career, the timing and duration of Walpole’s visits seem to
confirm that the pleasures of the landscape, apart from hunting, were insignificant
to him. In 1743, one year after his retirement as Prime Minister, with all of his
extensive painting collection now displayed at Houghton, Walpole poignantly ac-
knowledged his isolation far from London as well as his estate’s dual attractions.
Prioritising the piano nobile rather than the park, he concludes: ‘my flatterers here
are all mutes, the Oaks the Beeches and the Chestnuts … Within doors we come
a little nearer to real life and admire upon the almost speaking Canvas.’60
An early eighteenth-century park typically included a collection of garden
buildings that received short, leisurely visits from the landowner’s family and
guests. But the Water House is the only garden building specifically created for
the park at Houghton. Supplying water to the Hall, it is an elegant but unu-
sual example of English Palladianism, in that it has a practical if not agricul-
tural purpose. Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, who his contemporaries
nicknamed the ‘Architect Earl’, is credited as the Water House’s designer. In An
Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture, 1728, Robert Morris describes him as
one of the ‘principal Practitioners and Preservers’ of the Palladian revival in early
­eighteenth-century England.61 Pembroke was a friend of Walpole, and his most
ardent advocate was Walpole’s son Horace, who claimed in 1762 that ‘No man
had a purer taste in building than Earl Henry’, remarking that his designs, includ-
ing ‘the water-house … at Houghton, are incontestable proofs’ of this.62 Buildings
and structures credited to Pembroke include a bridge, a memorial column, four
houses—Marble Hill, Twickenham; White Lodge, Richmond; Westcombe, Black-
heath; Wimbledon House, Surrey—and the Water House.63
Indicating that he went on the Grand Tour and will have seen some of P
­ alladio’s
buildings, the words ‘My Lord Herbert came last Saturday’ were written by Mr Cole,

21
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

the English minister in Venice, in a report addressed to the Secretary of State in

London and dated 5 February 1712.64 In the same year, Pembroke met Kent in
Rome and Shaftesbury in Naples.65 Pembroke’s designs consistently adhere to an
austere Palladianism that is more restrained than that of Kent, the architect who is
most associated with the second Palladian revival even though his influences were
Roman as much as Venetian. In addition to Palladio, Pembroke was indebted to
Palladio’s associate Scamozzi. Jones was an obvious influence because, together
with John Webb, he had designed the Cube Room, Double Cube Room and South
Front at Wilton House, the ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke.
The first building in which Pembroke had a design involvement was Pembroke
House, a villa for his own use on the Thames at Whitehall, although Campbell
claims credit for the design in Vitruvius Britannicus.66 James Lees-Milne recog-
nises similarities between the Water House and the central, porticoed section of
Pembroke House, as does John Harris, who also assumes that the Water House’s
east and west elevations may have been adapted from Campbell’s design for Burl-
ington House, while Rosemary Bowden-Smith suggests that they may have been
modelled on the side elevations of Chiswick House, which was begun in 1725 to
the designs of Burlington and Kent.67 Lees-Milne also speculates that Pembroke
may have visited Palladio’s villas in the Veneto and provided a survey drawing on
which Campbell based his Pembroke House design.68 Whatever influence Camp-
bell and Pembroke had on each other, their principal inspiration was undoubtedly
Palladio, whether his completed buildings or his designs in The Four Books.69
Emphasising the inventiveness of Roger Morris, Pembroke’s frequent architectural
collaborator, which he contrasts with both Campbell and Pembroke, John Harris
concludes with regard to the Water House: ‘Whatever may be the attraction of this
little Palladian jewel set upon a hill, it cannot be originality.’70 But I believe this
assessment to be inaccurate. Palladio reimagined ancient Roman architecture.
The Water House is, in turn, an imaginative reinterpretation of Palladio.

The Water House

Two drawings of the Water House suggest Pembroke’s skill as a designer and
draughtsman. Horace Walpole pasted them into a folio album that includes man-
uscript material for his account of his father’s painting collection Aedes Walp-
olinae, 1747, and Ware’s Plans, Elevations, Sections of Houghton.71 On one
drawing he has handwritten: ‘The Water-House in the Park; design’d by Henry
Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke,’ which confirms that it was designed
before Herbert acquired his father’s title in 1733.72

22
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Henry Herbert, ninth Earl

of Pembroke, Water House,
Houghton, c. 1732. South
elevation. Courtesy of
Houghton Hall Archives.

Obscured by trees, the Water House is not visible from Houghton Hall, 400
metres away. Immediately to the west of the Hall, Walpole’s new garden recalls
the sequence of ‘rooms’ in a seventeenth-century garden. Its focus is an axial
broadwalk extending from the Hall and edged by rows of conical topiary to the
north and south. Further to each side, high hedges partly obscure the trees in two
‘wilderness’ gardens.73 At the western end of the broadwalk, the principal view
extends westwards across fields. Beech trees frame a broad avenue leading north,
which terminates at the strong vertical presence of the distant Water House.74
The land rises slightly and the trees recede so that the Water House sits in iso-
lation on a gentle brow with long views in all directions. The principal building
material in northwest Norfolk is Carrstone, a rust-coloured sandstone, while a
combination of brick and flint predominates to the east of Houghton. None of
these materials are visible on the Water House, implying that its status is more
than local. Its most prestigious building material is a Middle Jurassic sandstone
from Aislaby, near Whitby in Yorkshire, which also faces Houghton Hall. Aislaby
stone was employed in many civic buildings in London as well as Yorkshire such
as Guisborough Priory and Whitby Abbey. Due to its strength and resilience, it
was also suitable for the harbour walls at Margate, Ramsgate, Whitby and else-
where.75 The stone’s pale, buff colour and sharp delineation provide a strong
architectural contrast to the abundant trees, lush lawns, grazing animals and
game birds. This image does not fade, as the stone does not weather easily. As
in Renaissance designs, the Water House affirms the hierarchy of the immaterial

23
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

over the material through ideal geometries expressed, however imprecisely, in

materials that are comparatively resistant to decay.
Nearly 10 metres square in plan and over 12 metres high, the Water House
has four symmetrical elevations. Those to the north and south are identical to
each other, as are those to the east and west. On the ground floor, the brick-
work walls are all clad in rusticated Aislaby stone. Keystones surmount three
recessed blank arches on the north and south façades. Equally impenetrable, the
east and west façades each have a central solid timber door within an archway.
In the eighteenth century, underground pipes from the Pump House and Well
400 ­metres to the north fed the Water House. Around the water tank, which oc-
cupies most of the ground floor, a narrow staircase climbs upwards.76 The upper
floor is rendered. The east and west elevations have coupled Tuscan Doric pilas-
ters to the sides and a Venetian window at the centre. The Venetian window’s side
openings are blank; the central one is open, unglazed and protected by a stone
balustrade in front of a narrow, deep terrace. Stone balustrades run the full width
of the north and south façades, delineating two large terraces, which are enclosed
by high walls to the sides and rear. Coupled Tuscan Doric columns occupy the
edges of these façades and two single columns are towards the centre. A pedi-
ment completes each of the four façades, covering the two large terraces so that
5 metres high porticoes face north and south. Equal in size, these terraces have
different microclimates. To the south, the enclosing walls, floor and ceiling create
a sunny external room in warm weather. The north terrace is pleasant only on the
hottest days, in contrast to the benefits of a cool terrace in a Vicentine summer.
The small east and west terraces are mostly in shade, except at sunrise and sun-
set. As Walpole’s summer visits were brief, the terraces would have seen little use.
Pembroke followed Palladio’s model in locating a symmetrical room at the
centre of his design, but it is of much smaller dimensions than expected. The sin-
gle internal room on the first floor piano nobile is as high as the porticoes, but just
1.7 metres square in plan. Its four solid timber doors, one on each elevation, are
usually closed and the room is pitch black. Very occasionally, when the doors are
left open to the four terraces, dark becomes light and the originality of the design
starts to be evident. Standing in front of each façade of the Water House, it is pos-
sible to look straight through the building’s solid heavy form to the sky beyond. As
it is exactly aligned north-south and east-west, the Water House frames the dusk,
the dawn and the midday sun. In certain seasons, when the sun is at the ap-
propriate angle, the dark shadow on the ground has a sunlit oblong at its centre.
The Water House is a very particular home. In English, French and Italian,
respectively, the words window, fenêtre, finestra are all derived from the wind.

24
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

The Water House has no glazed windows because there is no inhabitant to light
and ventilate. The large ground floor room is pitch black and mostly full of water.
The small first floor room is usually dark, but occasionally full of light. The mute
and windowless base deters entry and implies that no one lives within. The broad
and deep porticoes invite inhabitation, but no one is seen there. By differing means,
both floors imply that daily life is absent. Who or what does the Water House house?

The Air House

In common with other Renaissance architects, Palladio was indebted to Hippo-

crates and conceived a villa as an aid to health. Born in the fifth century BC and
known for the treatises Airs, Waters, Places and Breaths, Hippocrates assumed
that illnesses are seasonal, varying according to the astronomical calendar and
physical environment.77 The Hippocratic tradition was acknowledged by Vitruvius
and widely disseminated in the Renaissance, notably by Alberti.78 The influence
of climate on health and the assumption that a good body and a good building
share good proportions were essential to the Hippocratic tradition, which particu-
larly emphasised the benefits of air movement, assuming that the character of a
people depends upon the air they inhale. Noting that a fierce wind or a stagnant
air was considered to be unhealthy and a delicate breeze was favoured instead,
Barbara Kenda refers:

to the ancient myth of the god Aeolus who guarded the imprisoned winds in a
cave on the island Aeolia. Mythological winds have their origin in the etymology
of the Greek word pneuma which derives from pnein, to blow, and means ‘breath’
or ‘wind’ as well as the vital spirit, the soul.

Ancient Greece conceived pneuma ‘as an essence animating the universe and the
true originator of human existence.’79 Consequently, Renaissance architects con-
ceived a building as analogous to a living being and a means to mediate between
the soul of an individual and that of the world, facilitating gentle air movement as
an aid to physical and spiritual well-being. In The Four Books, Palladio praises
the underground ‘prison of the winds’ that controls air movement in Francesco
Trento’s Villa Eolia, Longare di Costozza, 1760, near Vicenza.80 At Palladio’s hill-
top Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 1569, cool air circulates horizontally between the four
axially located entrances and vertically between the underground chamber and a
floor grating in the central hall. As the dome’s oculus was originally open to the
sky, vertical and horizontal ventilation extended throughout the villa.81

25
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

Andrea Palladio,
Villa Rotonda,
­Vicenza, 1570. ­Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

The four elements were a familiar design theme in Renaissance villas. In the
second century AD, the Roman physician Galen drew an analogy between the
heart and the hearth, so that the fiery air of the vital spirit—pneuma zoticon—
originated at the centre of the body and the building. But reflecting on The Four
Books, Paul Emmons and Marco Frascari write:

Palladio chose not to include chimneys in his treatise because he represented

not the physical building but an ideal design. In the pneumatic dreamland of
Palladio’s treatise, unlike actual building, the air is always perfect so there is no
need for chimneys to expel bad air.82

Given that Palladio included fireplaces in his constructed villas and Pembroke did
not add one, the Water House can be understood as an ideal house as well as
a mythological one. The mythological narratives of classical antiquity were alive
with meaning in sixteenth-century Italy and in early eighteenth-century Britain.
Giorgio Vasari concluded that Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te, Mantua, c. 1530,
was designed ‘more for gods than men’, possibly repeating the architect’s own
words.83 The Water House has a cold bath but no fire while the deep well con-
nects it to the earth. The first floor room is dark when the doors are shut, en-
trapping the winds. But when the doors are open, the four terraces funnel and

26
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

accentuate breezes so that the winds are set free and the Water House becomes
the Air House. Interpreted as a domestic structure as well as an ideal and a
mythological one and a dialogue between the immaterial and the material, the
Water House is a house of the elements as well as the gods and a meeting place
between mortals and immortals.
In Palladio’s sixteenth-century oeuvre and its early eighteenth-century E
­ nglish
revival, architecture’s relations with climate were a stimulus to the imagination,
fuelling practical and poetic narratives of the ideal, the mythological and the every-
day. But allegiance to Platonic ideals ensured that the effects of time, nature and
weather on buildings were deemed to be negative. As the building was analogous
to the body, the ruin was associated with dismemberment, decline and decay,
and was not a significant design theme. Following the model of sixteenth-century
Vicenza, early eighteenth-century Palladian architects and patrons reimagined the
monuments and not the ruins of ancient Rome.

Notes

1 Ackerman, Palladio, pp. 20–25; Aureli, pp. 49–50; Beltramini, pp. 9–32, 37–38;
Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, p. 128; Tavernor, pp. 16–22.
2 The full title is L’antichità di Roma di M. Andrea Palladio, raccolta brevemente da gli
auttori antichi, e moderni.
3 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 3.
4 The Four Books of Architecture is the title of Isaac Ware’s seminal English translation
of 1738, but Palladio’s treatise has also been translated as The Four Books on Archi-
tecture. Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Dedication’, p. 3, ‘Foreword
to the Readers’, p. 5.
5 Raphael, p. 181.
6 Barkan, pp. 37–42. Refer to Choay, ‘Alberti: The Invention of Monumentality and Mem-
ory’, pp. 99–105; Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, pp. 27–39.
7 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 4, ch. 17, p. 64.
8 Nagel and Wood, pp. 13–18.
9 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 91
10 MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 215–216.
11 Ackerman, Palladio, pp. 171–172.
12 Alberti, p. 7.
13 Plato, p. 121.
14 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Foreword to the Readers,’ p. 5.
15 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 1–10, pp. 6–16; bk. 2, ch. ­12–15,
pp. 45–68.
16 Palladio, quoted in Tavernor, p. 96.
17 Tavernor, p. 40.

27
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

18 Cornaro, quoted in Tavernor, p. 22.

19 Ackerman, Palladio, p. 22. Refer to Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 89–107; Tafuri, Venice
and the Renaissance, pp. 142–158.
20 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42; Barrell, pp. 8–9, 36–39; Jankovic, pp. 16–22, 137;
Langdon, pp. 9–13.
21 Pliny, ‘Letter to Gallus,’ translated in Castell, pp. 1–15.
22 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 89; Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 12, p. 45.
23 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 6.
24 Boucher, p. 138, refer to pp. 90–91.
25 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 12, p. 46; Alberti, p. 23.
26 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 8, p. 47.
27 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 16, p. 69; Vitruvius, bk. 3, ch. 5,
p. 12.
28 Aureli, p. 60; Boucher, pp. 121–122.
29 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ‘Foreword’, p. 5. Refer to Tafuri, Inter-
preting the Renaissance, pp. 178–179.
30 Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, p. 10, refer to p. 129.
31 The rejected architects included Jacopo Sansovino and Sebastiano Serlio from Venice,
Michele Sanmicheli from Verona and Giulio Romano from Mantua.
32 Beltramini, pp. 43–47, 62, 67.
33 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 3, ch. 20, p. 41.
34 Published between 1537 and 1547, the seven books of Serlio’s architectural trea-
tise were posthumously published as L’architettura in 1584 and republished as Tutte
l’opere l’architettura et prospetiva in 1619. Serlio’s third book influenced Palladio’s
understanding of ruins.
35 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 3, ch. 20, pp. 42–43.
36 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 8.
37 The first two volumes had already been published separately but were substantially
revised for the 1711 three-volume collection.
38 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 1, pp. 77–78, 118–119.
39 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 3, p. 207.
40 Published in the second edition, ‘A Letter Concerning The Art, or Science of Design’ was
written in 1709.
41 Robert Morris, Lectures on Architecture, p. 72.
42 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 157.
43 Ackerman, The Villa, p. 157.
44 Cosgrove, ‘Airport/Landscape’, p. 222.
45 Campbell, vol. 3, p. 1.
46 Swift, pp. 165–167.
47 The Four Books had earlier appeared in instalments between 1716 and 1720 in a dual
English and French edition, with Leoni and Nicholas Dubois providing the respective
translations.
48 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 157–158.
49 Swift, p. 39.

28
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

50 Queen Caroline, quoted in Speck, p. 12.

51 Moore, ‘The Making of Houghton Hall’, pp. 59–63.
52 Without mentioning Gibbs and Campbell and attributing only chimney pieces
and ­ceilings to Kent, Ripley is credited as the architect and Ware as the draughtsman.
53 Hervey, 21 July 1731, quoted in Plumb, p. 88.
54 Anonymous, The Norfolk Congress, pp. 4, 3.
55 The stairs were later demolished. Refer to John Harris, ‘The Architecture of the House,’
p. 23.
56 The Stone Hall was probably inspired by Jones’ Queen’s House, Greenwich, 1635.
Refer to Cornforth, p. 17.
57 Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 10.
58 ‘ROBERTUS WALPOLE/SENATUS BRITANNICI PRINCEPS/QUI/HASCE AEDES/CON-
DIDIT INCOLVIT ILLUSTRAVIT’. Refer to Angelicoussis, pp. 24–30.
59 Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 18, refer to pp. 36–41, 55–56.
60 Walpole, quoted in Kemp, p. 135.
61 Robert Morris, An Essay in Defence of Ancient Architecture, p. xiii.
62 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 4, pp. 228–229.
63 Horace Walpole attributes Marble Hill to Pembroke, which John Harris states is un-
certain, but Lees-Milne confirms Pembroke as the designer as does Julius Bryan, who
adds that Campbell and then Roger Morris assisted Pembroke. Since Lees-Milne and
Harris’s texts were published in 1962 and 1969, respectively, drawings in the Wilton
House archive have credited Pembroke as the designer of his villa at Blackheath, c.
1729, and Wimbledon House, Surrey, c. 1732, built for Sarah, Duchess of Marlbor-
ough. Bryan, p. 1; Bowden-Smith, p. 31; John Harris, ‘The Amateur Intervention in
Architecture’, p. 6; John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300; Lees-Milne, pp. 79–82;
Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 4, p. 228.
64 Cole, quoted in Lees-Milne, p. 61.
65 Connor.
66 Campbell, vol. 3, p. 48.
67 John Harris, ‘The Water Tower’, p. 300; Campbell, vol. 3, pp. 48, 23–24; Bowden-
Smith, p. 33.
68 Lees-Milne, p. 70.
69 Lees-Milne cites the influence of Palladio’s unbuilt design for Giulio Capra’s palazzo in
Vicenza. Lees-Milne, p. 87; Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 3,
pp. 20–21.
70 John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300.
71 The drawings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Refer to Bowden-
Smith, p. 30; John Harris, ‘The Water Tower,’ p. 300.
72 Referring to Rev. J.H. Broome, Houghton and the Walpoles, 1865, Bowden-Smith
suggests that Walpole may have been involved in the design of the estate’s water supply
system and fitting out the Water House. Bowden-Smith, pp. 9–10.
73 As Walpole commissioned a new garden before a new house and chose a construction
site slightly to the east of the old house, the diagonal paths cutting through the wilder-
ness gardens no longer converge at the centre of the west elevation.

29
 m onum en t s t o Rom e

74 The Water House appears in two maps drawn in the 1730s. Bowden-Smith, pp. ­14–15;
Tom Williamson, The Archaeology of the Landscape Park, p. 35; Tom Williamson, ‘The
Planting of the Park’, pp. 42, 44–45.
75 Powell, p. 6.
76 The water tank was later removed, but my analysis focuses on the Water House’s con-
dition in the early eighteenth century.
77 It is uncertain whether Hippocrates wrote the influential treatises attributed to him.
78 Vitruvius, pp. 170–171; Alberti, pp. 9–11.
79 Kenda, ‘Aeolian Winds’, p. 3.
80 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 1, ch. 27, p. 60.
81 Kenda, ‘Aeolian Winds,’ pp. 11–13.
82 Emmons and Frascari, pp. 96–97.
83 Vasari, quoted in Mayernik, p. 142.

30
 2
the first ‘ruins’
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Lovers and monsters

As a metaphor for time, the ruin was acknowledged in ancient Rome but not
painted or constructed. However, Watkin suggests: ‘If any ancient Roman did
erect a ruin, then it surely would have been Hadrian whose Villa at Tivoli con-
tained buildings and landscapes designed to recall those in different parts of
the Empire.’1 Extensive travels and a pleasurable retreat in a sweeping setting
encouraged Hadrian’s architectural experimentation. Juxtaposing diverse and
contrasting forms and spaces, the Villa developed through an additive and
subtractive process in which a new building was often adjusted during con-
struction and occupation, and then altered in response to later buildings. The
resulting, episodic, evolving assemblage of buildings, pavilions and gardens
offered multiple, alternative journeys in which the past was resonant in the
present. Rather than direct reproductions of places he had visited, William L.
MacDonald and John A. Pinto conclude that Hadrian was interested ‘in his-
torical transference, in creative renovation of the past’ by formal, spatial and
topographical means: ‘the Villa was a place where views and arrangements
of natural and man-made forms often alluded to the mythical, literary, and
historical past.’2

Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli,

second century AD. The
Thermal Baths. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

32
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Humanist scholars understood the ruin in terms of evolving historical cycles.

In Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (The Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), 1550, Vasari remarks that art in
classical antiquity:

from a small beginning, climbed to the greatest height, and how from a state
so noble she fell into utter ruin, and that, in consequence, the nature of this art
is similar to that of the others, which, like human bodies, have their birth, their
growth, their growing old, and their death.

Vasari then celebrates ‘the progress of her second birth and of that very per-
fection whereto she has risen again in our times.’3 Implicit in any architectural
monument was its potential ruination, which could become a catalyst to future
development, as Raphael proclaimed in his letter to Pope Leo X.
Whether a building or a sculpture, the works of classical antiquity that survived
to stimulate the Renaissance were nearly always fractured, not intact, providing
fissures through which to reinterpret the past. Adding disjunction to disjunction,
the Renaissance appreciation of ancient fragments recalled the equally decontex-
tualised experience of imperial plunder in ancient Rome. Although Renaissance
artists and scholars strived to formulate complete and convincing reconstructions
of ancient artefacts, the surviving fragments offered ‘a set of enigmas with mul-
tiple answers or no answers,’ writes Barkan.4 The Renaissance appreciation of
classical antiquity drew attention to the broken as well as the complete. Even an
ancient text was more often a ‘reconstruction’ than a definitive record, according
to Heather Hyde Minor:

Classical texts underwent considerable changes over time. Renaissance book

hunters scoured libraries for forgotten manuscripts of ancient texts, making cop-
ies for scholars all over Europe. They sought out the oldest extant versions of
ancient texts, collating them in an attempt to create complete editions. With the
advent of print, these texts underwent further changes.5

In that it helped to further the ‘intoxication with ruins,’ Watkin highlights Franc-
esco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499,6 which following Alberti’s Ten
Books was the second architectural book by a Renaissance author and the first to
be printed with illustrations, establishing the multimedia interdependence of text
and image that has been essential to architectural books ever since. A fictional
narrative illustrated with pictorial drawings, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili offers an

33
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

alternative model to the analytical manifesto justified through principles and ex-
amples and illustrated with orthogonal drawings, as in Palladio’s The Four Books.
In Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, love is lost and won in a sylvan landscape among
monuments and ruins that are themselves erotic and not just locations for lust
and desire.7 Some of ­Colonna’s designs may have been invented while others
were adapted from ancient and Renaissance sites in Italy, Greece and Asia Minor.
The most impressive structures are composites. The largest consists of varied
forms mounted one on top of the other: a plinth, a pyramid, a stone cube, an ob-
elisk and finally, a winged statue ‘revolving easily at every breath of wind, making
such a noise, from the friction of the hollow metal device, as was never heard
from the Roman treasury.’8

Francesco Colonna,
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
1499. Illustration of ‘The
Three Doors’. Courtesy of
Aldus Manutius edition/
De Agostini Picture Library/
Bridgeman Images.

34
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Some fragments of Colonna’s design narrative were familiar, but the total
assemblage was not. In contrast to the authority accorded to an ancient Roman
structure and Vitruvius’ treatise, there were no surviving ancient gardens and very
limited literary references such as Pliny the Younger’s letter and a few agricultural
treatises. Luke Morgan concludes that:

the obscurity or almost complete absence of classical models for landscape de-
sign in the sixteenth century should be regarded as liberating in effect. With only
the slightest hints to go on, designers and writers such as Colonna developed a
garden type that was an authentic product of the Renaissance but involved little
revival or ‘rebirth’.9

Noting that the Renaissance conceived the living earth as analogous to the living
body and citing garden sculptures with water spouting from mouths, eyes and
other orifices, Morgan remarks that ‘the representation of bodily fluids in Re-
naissance landscape design foregrounds the body as a living, breathing, organic
entity, not unlike, in fact, the garden itself.’10 Quoting John Dixon Hunt—‘It is
doubtful whether any garden of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries avoided
some appeal, specific or general, to Ovid’—Morgan remarks: ‘Ovid’s poetic de-
vice, which depends on the ambiguity or contrast between a tranquil, idealized
landscape and the frequently barbarous violence of the narrative, occurs again
and again in the Metamorphoses.’11 Morgan acknowledges ‘the Renaissance gar-
den’s complexity and contradictoriness’ and concludes:

The giant, the grotesque hybrid, the monster, the ruin, and the wilderness were
thus figures of fear, yet they were all represented in Renaissance landscape de-
sign … If it is a vision of Arcadia, then it presents, surely, an image of Arcadia as
fragile and perpetually under threat. Yet perhaps this is what Arcadia has always
been—a dualistic concept that, in its reflection on an ideal, requires its opposite.
Without the threat of the dark wood, the rapacious harpy, the murderous giant,
or the entrance to hell itself, Arcadia has no definition. If so, then the monsters
and giants may be necessary to the idyll.12

Emphasising the ruin’s status as an intermediary between culture and nature and
the inevitability of human and natural decay, the first building known to have
been constructed as a ruin was the Barchetto, c. 1530, which Girolamo Genga
created as a hermitage for Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, in
his park at Pesaro.13 In the same decade, Giulio Romano incorporated ruined

35
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

elements into the Palazzo Te, notably in the dropped triglyphs in the courtyard
frieze and the collapsing columns in the frescoes of the Sala dei Giganti. Created
between 1552 and 1580, the Sacro Bosco at the Villa Orsini, Bomarzo, includes
fabricated ruins such as the Etruscan tomb and leaning house, Casa Pendente,
alongside the carved monsters and giants that populate the wooded landscape.
But these were exceptions to the rule and the ruin was still a comparatively minor
design concern in the sixteenth century.

Giulio Romano, Palazzo Te,

Mantua, c. 1530. Fresco in
the Sala dei Giganti, detail
of the destruction of the
giants by Jupiter’s thun-
derbolts, 1536. Courtesy
of Palazzo Te/Bridgeman
Images.

Pirro Ligorio, Sacra Bosco,

Bomarzo, 1552–1580.
Courtesy of Danica O. Kus/
RIBA Collections.

36
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Et in Arcadia ego

Seventeenth-century Rome had half as many people as the most populous Italian
city, Naples, and occupied less than half of the land within the Aurelian walls of
ancient Rome, which were constructed in the third century AD. But Rome was
the focus of the Grand Tour and the artistic capital of Europe. Visiting patrons,
painters, sculptors and architects admired the ancient Roman structures and texts
and drew inspiration from contemporary attempts to emulate and surpass clas-
sical antiquity. Important patrons for an ambitious artist included local nobility,
visiting gentlemen on the Grand Tour, the pope, who ruled the Papal States, and
the cardinals, who as princes of the Roman Catholic Church lived as lavishly as
secular princes.14
At the start of the seventeenth century, Italian painters focused on histori-
cal, literary, mythological and biblical themes, which were held in the highest
esteem because they referred to philosophical discourse on humanist themes.
Countryside mostly appeared as a background setting, indicating the hierarchy
of humanity over nature. Landscape painting was a minor genre because it was
assumed to merely copy nature and not offer imaginative interpretations of human
narratives as in history painting.
Northern European artists, who appreciated nature as a subject in its
own right, notably included Paul Bril, a Flemish painter who moved to Rome
in 1582 and died there in 1626. But there was no equivalent attention to
landscape in the work of an Italian at that time. Bril’s contemporaries, the
Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and his pupil Domenichino, depicted a
more restrained and serene nature as a setting for human narratives, inno-
vatively combining landscape and history painting. Claude Gellée first visited
Rome around 1613 and lived there from 1627, settling in the area around the
Piazza di Spagna favoured by foreigners resident in Rome. Reliant on litera-
ture from classical antiquity, Claude’s chosen humanist themes indicated his
assimilation as a Roman artist, but the name by which he became known—
Claude Lorrain—emphasised his home region to the north, which was un-
der French influence but not yet incorporated into the nation. Bril and other
northern European artists resident in Rome influenced the close observation
of nature in the paintings of Claude, who depicted a composed landscape
indebted to Carracci. Bril also came under Carracci’s influence as did Nicolas
Poussin, who was born in France but spent most of his career in Rome. While
landscape paintings were a small part of Carracci and Poussin’s artistic pro-
duction, Claude focused on the genre.15

37
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The new attention to landscape painting indicated a subtle shift in hierarchies.

Many eminent patrons, including kings, princes, popes and cardinals, commis-
sioned Claude, the best-known landscape painter of the time, together selecting
themes that were resonant to the patron and the painter. Claude portrayed human
narratives, but his figures were diminutive in comparison to those in most history
paintings. The criticism he received for his depiction of human form, which he
accepted, did not hinder the high esteem in which he was held. Rather than view
nature from an interior and as a background setting, Claude depicted people, archi-
tecture and nature within a landscape, inhabiting and sharing the same space. Re-
calling the amphitheatres of classical antiquity and the close association of gardens
and theatres in Renaissance Italy, he portrayed a pastoral landscape as a stage for
human action, with people in the foreground, a magnificent tree or classical struc-
ture just beyond them, hills, temples and trees to the sides and a wilder landscape
in the distance, whether mountains or the sea. Giving equal prominence to a tree,
a hill and a classical structure implied that they were of comparable status. More
than any other painter before him, Claude made appreciation and experience of
landscape the means to understanding, emphasising an emotional bond between
humanity and nature.16 He carefully studied and sketched the countryside of the
Roman Campagna as well as the temples and ruins of ancient Rome such as the
Pantheon, which appears in a number of his paintings. But such recognisable im-
ages were absorbed within compositions that mostly depict imaginary, not actual
places. Claude challenged the assumption that landscape painting was merely an
imitation of nature and depicted an ideal landscape instead.
References to narratives of rural life in classical antiquity such as Horace, Ovid
and Virgil validated Claude’s attention to landscape.17 Virgil’s Georgics praises the
virtues of a simple, hard country life and gives less emphasis to an idyllic, rural
existence.18 In comparison, the Eclogues evokes a blissful, bucolic life in the lush
Italian landscape, but Virgil uses a name—Arcadia—from ancient Greece to give
his vision an otherworldly as well as a familiar air.19 Depicting a pastoral ­Arcadia
of classical temples, rolling hills and relaxed inhabitants, Claude’s paintings evoke
the Eclogues rather than the Georgics, appealing to wealthy patrons who could
afford a rural life as an antidote to an urban one like their ancient predeces-
sors. In classical antiquity and again in the Renaissance, nature was conceived
as female. Representing male sensual experience, shepherds populate Claude’s
paintings not farm labourers.20 His figures are notably comfortable and content
in their landscape setting. Claude’s patrons wished to emphasise their bucolic
vision of country life, rather than the experience of those that they employed to
work the land.

38
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Poussin devised each painting as a thematic tableau with specific meanings

to be understood by the viewer, but Claude seems to have invited multiple asso-
ciations and personal responses.21 According to Filippo Baldinucci, who knew
Claude and provided the second account of his life in Notizie de’professori del
disegno, which was written before 1696 and published in 1728: ‘one sees things
from his hand which, going beyond all imagination, can by no means be de-
scribed.’22 This assumption is supported by Claude’s decision to conceive over
half of his paintings as ‘pairs’ to be seen side by side, in which contrasts are as ap-
parent as similarities and interpretations are subject to a complex inter-reading.23
Although Claude was not didactic, it is likely that there were specific mean-
ings known only to the painter and his patron and others that were widely recog-
nised. Humphrey Wine emphasises that Claude ‘employed landscape motifs or
composition as metaphor,’ like the painters who influenced him such as Carracci.
For example, ‘the twisted trees’ in Landscape with Hagar, Ismael and the Angel,
1668, ‘seem expressive of Hagar’s grief.’ The ‘difference between the Arcadians
and the Trojans is expressed by one wooded and one unwooded bank’ in Land-
scape with the Arrival of Aeneas before the City of Pallanteum, 1675. And ‘the
most striking use of landscape composition as metaphor is the gulf that divides’
the two protagonists in Claude’s final painting Landscape with Ascanius Shooting
the Stag of Sylvia, 1682, which ‘may also allude more generally to the destruction
of love or innocence of which the deer was symbolic.’24

Claude Lorrain, Landscape

with Ascanius Shooting
the Stag of Sylvia, 1682.
­Courtesy of Ashmolean
­Museum, University of
­Oxford/Bridgeman Images.

39
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Claude’s landscapes are idyllic but not timeless. They are specific to a season
and a time of day. Their temporal metaphors include the weather and weathering,
youthful beauty and old age, entire and ruined structures, gilded antiquity and im-
perial decline, hunts, myths, pilgrimages and voyages.25 Reference to the seasons
of a year and the seasons of a life suggest both a cyclical concept of time from
one spring to the next, in which death renews life, and a linear concept of time
from one year to another. A northern European painter responding to the history,
landscape and light of Rome, Claude focused on warmer seasons. His memorial
at Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the church high above Piazza di Spagna, notably
acknowledges his expertise in depicting ‘the rays of the rising and setting sun’ in
coastal and seaport scenes.26 According to Marcel G. Roethlisberger: ‘Claude’s
concern with time fits into the dazzling array of representations of time—narrative
or allegorical—which characterizes Italian and northern art of this period.’27 But
comparing Claude to his contemporaries, Roethlisberger concludes:

Since every mythological and religious theme calls up the past in the widest sense
of the term, one might argue that it is nearly impossible to imagine an oeuvre
in landscape painting without the dimension of time … but there is nothing like
the consistent recurrence of the time element that we find in Claude … the
representation of the passage of time can be taken as the leitmotif of his art.28

Claude Lorrain, Pastoral

Landscape with the Arch
of Titus, 1644. Courtesy of
Private Collection/Bridgeman
Images.

40
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The ruin was one of Claude’s most frequent metaphorical devices.29

­Seventeenth-century painters and writers employed the ruin as an image of time
and as a mediator between nature and culture. Claude often placed ruins to the
sides of his paintings, merging with the hills and trees or closer to the centre
and covered with vegetation. Pastoral Landscape with the Arch of Titus, 1644,
depicts shepherds and grazing animals in an imaginary setting. The ruined Arch
of Titus from the first century AD is to the right and reflected in a small lake; the
trees to the left frame the view of a dilapidated aqueduct, beyond which a river
leads into the distance. In Landscape with an Old Man by the Sea, 1667, a figure
stares towards the horizon and the dying evening light, emphasising that a watery
reflection is a metaphor for mental reflection. Broken classical ruins overgrown
with vegetation and a waiting boat further indicate that the end of life is close.
In the Eclogues, Virgil emphasises the presence of mortality even in an idyllic
setting. According to Erwin Panofsky, Virgil’s Arcadia was irrelevant in ‘the Middle
Ages, when bliss was sought in the beyond and not in any region of the earth.’30

In the Renaissance, however, Virgil’s—not Ovid’s or Polybius’—Arcady emerged from

the past like an enchanting vision. Only, for the modern mind, this Arcady was not so
much a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in space as a Utopia of bliss and beauty
distant in time. Like the whole, classical sphere, of which it became an integral part,
Arcady became an object of nostalgia that distinguishes the real Renaissance from all
those pseudo- or proto-Renaissances that had taken place during the Middle Ages.31

Guercino (Giovanni
­Francesco Barbieri), Et in
Arcadia ego, c.1621–1623.
Courtesy of Palazzo
­Barberini, Gallerie Nazionali
Barberini Corsini, Rome/
Bridgeman Images.

41
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Nostalgia is frequently derided as negative and passive. But it can instead

stimulate imaginative responses to the past that influence the present and the
future. Panofsky states that it was through Jacopo Sannazaro’s poem Arcadia,
1502, ‘that the elegiac feeling—present but, as it were, peripheral in Virgil’s
Eclogues—became the central quality of the Arcadian sphere.’32 The phrase ‘Et
in Arcadia ego’ first appeared as the title of Guercino’s painting, c.1621–1623,
in which two young Arcadian shepherds discover a ‘torso’ of a decaying masonry
surmounted by a skull, which looks up towards them so that it appears to be in
conversation, declaring ‘Even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway.’ Panofsky remarks
of the painting:

there is little or nothing elegiac about it … In short, Guercino’s painting turns out
to be a medieval memento mori in humanistic disguise—a favourite concept of
Christian moral theology shifted to the ideal milieu of classical and classicizing
pastorals.33

Guercino left Rome around 1623. Arriving in the city a year or two later, Poussin
dedicated two paintings to the theme Et in Arcadia ego in which figures stand
before a tomb, the first around 1630 and the second about five years later. A skull
appears in the first painting but is missing from the second, of which Panofsky
remarks:

Here, then, we have a basic change in interpretation. The Arcadians are not
so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow
meditation of a beautiful past. They seem to think less of themselves than of
the human being buried in the tomb—a human being that once enjoyed the
pleasures which they now enjoy, and whose monument ‘bids them remember
their end’ only in so far as it evokes the memory of one who had been what
they are. In short, Poussin’s Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic en-
counter with Death but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality.
We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised
elegiac sentiment.34

Rather than death inhabiting Arcadia, the painting emphasises that we may
live in Arcadia. But the tomb’s inscription reminds us that our stay will come to
an end like that of the person buried within. Panofsky concludes that Poussin’s
second Et in Arcadia ego painting ‘could lead to reflections of an almost opposite

42
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Nicolas Poussin, Et in
­Arcadia ego, c. 1635.
Courtesy of Louvre, Paris/
Bridgeman Images.

nature, depressing and melancholy on the one hand, comforting and assuaging
on the other; and, more often than not, to a truly “Romantic” fusion of both.’35
The figures and the tomb fill the canvas in Poussin’s two Et in Arcadia ego
paintings. The landscape is comparatively insignificant, although it is more prom-
inent in some of his other works. In Claude’s paintings, the figures are small but
the landscape is consistently large and worthy of painterly attention both in its
own right and as a setting for human narratives, ensuring that he was the greater
influence on the early eighteenth-century English landscape. Claude painted
when empiricism was in its infancy, but his paintings resonated with a slightly
later, increasingly secular and empiricist era that associated human understand-
ing with experience of the natural world and emphasised the pleasures of the
present more often than the eternal joy of the afterlife. The emergence of a secular
understanding of time, and the subsequent adoption of the Gregorian calendar’s
uniform timescale in place of the Julian calendar, which reflected the seasonal
rhythms of farming, gave greater emphasis to distinctions between the past, pres-
ent and future.36 Claude did not forefront an insistent memorial metaphor such as
a tomb, but the mood of his paintings is elegiac because the temporal metaphors
such as the setting sun ruined buildings and decaying vegetation are immersed
within a verdant and bucolic setting in which the figures are carefree, so that we
empathise with their pleasure and know it to be fleeting.37

43
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The recovery of Eden

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the Enlightenment—the natural light of

reason—was founded on the assumption that humanity and nature are subject to
the same laws of divine reason. Derived from empeiria, the ancient Greek term for
experience, the principal British contribution to Enlightenment theory was empiri-
cism, which made reason specific rather than generic. Empirical investigation was
applied extensively, notably to the natural world and the operations of the mind.
According to Carolyn Merchant: ‘The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream
narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans
have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth.’38 Characterising
nature as female, as in the Biblical narrative, the influential early empiricist Fran-
cis Bacon interpreted the recovery of Eden as mankind reaffirming its God-given
dominion and thus its right to cultivate and improve nature.39 Promoting reasoned
analysis of the natural world in publications such as Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natu-
ral History, in Ten Centuries, 1627, he set the tone for investigations later in the
seventeenth century. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer identify the seeds
of self-destruction in the Enlightenment’s association of reason with the myth of
domination: ‘Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over
which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dicta-
tor toward men.’40 However, the concern for natural reason also engendered a new
respect for nature, encouraging greater attention than before to both cultivated and
uncultivated nature. With the development of modern scientific instruments such as
the microscope and the telescope, detailed observation and analysis focused more
on the properties of natural objects and less on their immediate value to humans,
although this concern was never distant. Empirical science also investigated the
relations between natural objects, which had previously been primarily measured
against a human standard. Astronomers, botanists and zoologists classified planets,
plants and animals, while geologists established the earth’s age. In 1683, Anton
van Leeuwenhoek declared ‘that there were more animals in his own mouth than
there were people in the United Provinces’ of the Netherlands.41 The discovery of
new plants, places and creatures, and a greater understanding of those already
known, stimulated appreciation of the natural world. A concern for all the earth’s
creatures is a characteristic of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it was mostly latent
until the second half of the seventeenth century, when scientists concluded that any
natural object, however humble, could be admired if it fulfilled a purpose.
The Royal Society was founded in 1660 after Wren’s inaugural lecture, and
received a royal charter two years later with the purpose to advance scientific

44
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

knowledge through empirical investigation. Addressing its concern for the deple-
tion of natural resources due to the demands of trade and industry, the Royal So-
ciety’s first official publication, John Evelyn’s Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees,
and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions, 1664, marked a
more sensitive attitude to the modification of nature than before, acknowledging
the effects of deforestation on climate and the need for forestry science, conserva-
tion and sustainable development.42
In a similar vein, Evelyn’s Fumifugium: or The Inconveniencie of the Aer
and Smoak of London Dissipated, 1661, was the first book to consider the city’s
atmosphere as a whole, as well as the first to recognise mitigation and adap-
tation as responses to human-induced—anthropogenic—climate change three
centuries before these principles were widely accepted. Distinguishing between
­London’s agreeable setting and the ruinous effects of its polluted atmosphere,
Evelyn advocates modern science as well as the medical tradition of ancient
Greece, which considered health and disease holistically and the interdepend-
ence of the body, soul and environment. Recalling the principle that the air—the
breath—is ‘the Vehicle of the Soul, as well as that of the Earth,’ he recounts
Hippocratic’s opinion that the character of a people depends upon the air they
inhale.43 Offering a ‘Remedy’ for the ‘Nuisance’, Evelyn suggests a number of
practical and poetic measures, including the relocation of coal-burning trades,
butchers and burials to the east of the city, so that the prevailing westerly winds
would carry the smoke away from London and the rivers and groundwater would
be unsullied.44 Emphasising the allegorical, poetic and practical significance of
his treatise, Evelyn proposes that the edges of London are to be forested with trees
and planted with fragrant shrubs so that wood could replace coal as the princi-
pal fuel and the whole city would be sweetly perfumed.45 Evelyn’s remedy—an
aromatic botanical garden—advocates good health due to the known medicinal
properties of certain plants and also promotes associations with Heaven and the
Garden of Eden.46 Noting Evelyn’s detailed, holistic attention to aesthetics, cli-
mate, horticulture, natural history and human experience, Mark Laird concludes
that ‘he reflected on how gardens gratify all five senses through tinctures, redolent
scents, delight of touch, fruit gusto, and warbling birds and echoes.’47

Things of a natural kind

Evelyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, as was John Locke seven
years later. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Locke describes
diverse beliefs to emphasise that ideas and values are provisional not universal,

45
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

and indicates that his travels enabled him to reach this conclusion. Dismissing
the search for ultimate truth, he accepts that there are limits to what we can know
and argues that conclusions must be in proportion to the evidence: ‘Our business
here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.’48 Countering
the Platonist and Cartesian traditions in which knowledge is acquired by the mind
alone, Locke assumes that personality and morality develop through an evolving
dialogue between the setting, senses and mind. This environmental appreciation
led him to record the daily temperature, barometric pressure and winds for many
years.49 Wishing not to deny creativity but to moderate it, Locke concludes that
understanding grounded in experience encourages the mind to develop an exten-
sive association of ideas, which can foster good, responsible judgement.50 The
assumption that ideas and values must be repeatedly tested through experience is
fundamental to empiricism and its influence on the eighteenth-century landscape.
As physician and secretary to the first Earl, Locke attended the birth of the
future third Earl of Shaftesbury, who described Locke, his tutor, as my ‘foster-­
father.’51 Shaftesbury affirmed Locke’s appreciation of liberty and reason but tem-
pered his empiricism and egalitarianism. Unlike the tutor, the pupil acknowledged
an ideal order, reasserting Renaissance Italy and its respect for the ‘immutable
truths’ of classical antiquity: ‘Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all Fundamentals,
threw all Order and Virtue out of the World.’52
Associating contemporary Britain with ancient Rome,53 Shaftesbury poses as a
Roman senator in the 1714 frontispiece to the second edition of Characteristicks.54
Leaning on a book-laden pedestal, he stands in front of a neoclassical arch, which
frames the third, second and first natures—regular parterres, abundant orchards
and distant hills—collectively theorised in the Renaissance.55 In the sixteenth cen-
tury, a barren wilderness was considered to be brutish and deformed, and the im-
material soul, ‘as a visitor in matter,’ could not ‘be truly at home in nature,’ remarks
Ernest Tuveson.56 Recuperation in a wild landscape was not a new theme, but it
acquired enhanced meaning in the early eighteenth century when nature and moral
virtue were linked for the first time. Acknowledging an ideal order but departing
from Plato, Shaftesbury conceived nature not as debased but as a means to con-
template the divine. Expanding ideas that he had developed in the previous decade,
the second volume of Characteristicks praises weather and nature:57

HOW comfortable is it to those who come out hence alive, to breathe a purer AIR!
To see the rejoicing Light of Day! And tread the fertile Ground! How gladly they
contemplate the Surface of the Earth, their habitation heated and enliven’d by
the Sun, and temper’d by the fresh AIR of fanning Breezes!58

46
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind;
where neither Art, nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoil’d their ­genuine
­Order, by breaking in upon that primitive State. Even the Rocks, the mossy
­Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken Falls of Waters, with all
the horrid Graces of the Wilderness it-self, as representing NATURE more, will be
the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery
of Princely Gardens.59

The 1714 frontispiece suggests the formality of Shaftesbury’s garden at Wimborne

St Giles, Dorset, rather than the flowing lines of the picturesque.60 But in addition to
stimulating a Palladian architectural resurgence, he influenced its landscape setting
whether or not he predicted it. Locke required a degree of critical detachment from
the natural world.61 Shaftesbury’s purpose was more profound, stimulating a newly
spiritual engagement with nature as a means to self-understanding.
Informed by Locke’s concern for everyday experience and the association
of ideas and Shaftesbury’s appreciation of wild nature and classical precedent,
Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope furthered the philosophical and literary ges-
tation of the early eighteenth-century garden. Addison published essays on ‘The
Pleasures of the Imagination,’ 1712, in The Spectator, the journal that he edited
with Richard Steele. Previously, nature was studied in paintings and books, but
Addison concluded that this appreciation was secondary to the primary pleasure
of direct experience, which could cultivate a healthy body, an alert mind and a
sociable manner.62 References to the weather’s influence on conversation, behav-
iour and health appear throughout his essays. Citing the Pantheon in Rome, he
appreciates architecture’s ability to evoke a single, vast idea, notably the divine.63
But Addison reserves his most significant praise for nature because he assumes
that it offers a multitude of ideas for association and is thus especially conducive
to the imagination. Rather than the natural world per se, he focuses on the art of
making a garden appear natural, drawing a parallel with the cultivation of natural
behaviour: ‘The fashionable world is grown free and easy; our manners sit more
loose upon us: nothing is so modish as an agreeable negligence.’64

There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of
Nature, than in the nice Touches and Embellishments of Art. The Beauties of the
most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass, the Imagination immedi-
ately runs them over, and requires something else to gratifie her; but, in the wide
Fields of Nature, the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed
with an infinite variety of Images, without any Stint or Number.65

47
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Concluding that the ‘artificial rudeness’ of a garden modelled on nature ‘gives us

a nobler and more exalted kind of Pleasure,’ Addison suggests that it can be more
widely applied: ‘why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden.’66
His purpose was political and social as well as cultural. A single landscape com-
position naturalised class relations, implying that the landowner’s family and
guests belonged among the lawns and the farm labourers belonged in the fields.
Ascribing the picturesque to both natural landscape and natural behav-
iour, Pope conceived buildings, gardens and paintings as means to express
good ­character: ‘A Man not only shews his Taste but his Virtue, in the Choice of
such Ornaments.’67 Echoing Shaftesbury, he praised ‘the amiable simplicity of
­unadorned nature’ and sought justification in classical precedent: ‘this was the
taste of the ancients in their gardens.’68 Rather than a direct and literal transposi-
tion, his concern for classical antiquity was intended to cultivate principles suited
to Britain. Similarly, he translated Homer to make him ‘speak good English.’69
At Twickenham, adjacent to the River Thames, Pope’s garden offered numer-
ous means to entice the visitor—meandering and formal routes, a grove of lime
trees, a circular lawn, a viewing mound, a shell temple, a vineyard, an orangery,
an obelisk, urns and statues—and varied views within and beyond the garden.
As his house and garden were on opposite sides of a road, he created a tunnel
to connect them, which became its most famous feature, the grotto begun in
around 1719. The first grottoes were caves in which shrines to the water spirits
were constructed in ancient Greece. Built on the site of a natural spring, Pope’s
grotto included a sequence of varied watery environments abundant with ver-
dant mosses. Encrusted surfaces glistened with shells, flints, crystals, corals and
fossils from many countries, either found by Pope or donated by his friends. The
lamp hanging at the centre caused light to flicker around the grotto, distorting the
size of the chambers as the flame swayed and fluctuated in the breeze.
Grottoes were popular in Italian gardens and not new to England. But Pope’s
fame drew attention to his grotto, inspiring others to construct similar spaces and
offering a poetic model for garden buildings that celebrated nature and weather. In
a letter to Ralph Allen, the noted supplier of Bath stone, Pope writes:

I told you my Grotto was finished, and now all that wants to the Completion of my
Garden is the Frontispiece to it, of your rude Stones to build a sort of ruinous Arch
at the Entry into it on the Garden side.70

But Pope’s grotto was too rigid and rectilinear to be truly picturesque in the man-
ner later developed by his friend, Kent, who visited and sketched the garden.

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Another of Pope’s friends, Burlington, funded the publication of The Villas

of the Ancients Illustrated, 1728, in which Robert Castell provided an English
translation alongside Pliny’s original Latin account of his gardens. One of Pliny’s
villas occupied a rolling site in the Tuscan Apennines, while the other took full
advantage of its dramatic coastal setting near Rome:

The Country on both Sides affords a great Variety of Views; in some Places the
Prospect is confin’d by Woods, in others it is extended over large and Spacious
Meadows … The Shore is adorn’d with a grateful Variety … Which sometimes is
soften’d by a long Calm, but is more often harden’d by the contending Waves.71

Implying a classical precedent for the eighteenth-century landscape garden,

­Castell’s commentary on Pliny’s Tuscan villa identifies a formal garden, a n
­ atural
garden and one that combines the two, ‘whose Beauty consisted in a close
­Imitation of Nature; where, tho’ the parts are disposed with the greatest Art, the
Irregularity is still preserved; so that their Manner may not improperly be said to
be an artful Confusion, where there is no Appearance of that Skill which is made
use of, their Rocks, Cascades, and Trees, bearing their natural Forms.’72

Georgic England

In a further elegy to classical antiquity, the Georgics was translated into English in
1697 and adopted as a model for early eighteenth-century Britain.73 According
to Deist philosophy, which was then influential, God made the natural world for
­human benefit and offered no further intervention, leaving it in trust to h
­ umanity.
In Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of
­Natural Philosophy), 1687, Isaac Newton concluded that material objects possess
mass and are dependent on forces of attraction and repulsion as in a mechanical
system. As nature was conceived as a machine, mankind could have been its
driver and engineer, making technical adjustments to improve performance. But
in an era that associated power and prestige with land ownership and was yet to
face the full force of industrialisation, the gentleman farmer was an appropriate
model for the enlightened management of nature and society. John Wootton’s
portrait, Sir Robert Walpole, c. 1725, depicts the Prime Minister as the model
country squire surrounded by his dogs, who boasted ‘that he read letters from his
gamekeeper before those of his Cabinet ministers,’ writes William Speck.74
Pope’s poems such as Pastorals, 1709, and Windsor-Forest, 1713, are indebted
to Virgil. But James Thomson’s The Seasons, 1730, was the most influential Georgic

49
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

poem of the eighteenth century, presenting human activity in dialogue with an evolv-
ing natural world to a greater extent than Pope’s more restrained poetry.75 Thomson
celebrates ‘profusely wild’ nature and also proclaims: ‘Ye generous BRITONS, culti-
vate the plow!’76 The Seasons’ popularity was immediate and enduring, resulting in
over 300 editions between 1750 and 1850. Here, he describes the spring:

Clear was the temperate air; an even calm

Perpetual reign’d, save what the zephyrs bland
Breath’d o’er the blue expanse; for then nor storms
Were taught to blow, nor hurricanes to rage;
Sound slept the Waters; no sulphureous glooms
Swell’d in the sky, and sent the lightning forth:
While sickly damps, and cold and autumnal fogs,
Sat not pernicious on the springs of life.77

Sharing Thomson’s sensitivity to the contrasting seasons, Kent provided four

illustrations for the first edition of The Seasons, no doubt recognising parallels be-
tween the evocative flow of Thomson’s poetry and his own developing gardening
concerns. Kent depicted seasonal shifts in nature, behaviour and architecture too.
Between ‘Spring’ and ‘Winter,’ a benign sky, a placid bay, relaxed inhabitants and
a Palladian villa are transformed into an aggressive storm, turbulent sea, cowering
figures and a rustic farmhouse.
In classical antiquity, there were two distinct attitudes to atmospheric phe-
nomena, one a theory of airborne particles expressed in Aristotle’s M
­ eteorologica,
c. 350 BC, the other a catalogue of weather signs exemplified in the Georgics. In
the early eighteenth century, scientific study of the atmosphere was in its infancy,
and both methods continued to find support. Interpreting changes in nature that
foretell impending weather such as the behaviour of insects and birds, plants and
skies, the Georgics is a weather guide as well as a weather poem, inspiring both
literary forms. Characteristic of the English Georgic tradition, attempts to resolve
scientific analysis and practical interpretation were evident in guides as well as
poems.78 One of the best-known farming guides was written by John Claridge in
1670 and republished in 1744 as The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules To Judge of
the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years Experience, with the subti-
tle ‘A Rational Account … on the Principles of Newtonian Philosophy.’ ­Thomson’s
‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ was published with The
­Seasons, alongside a drawing of Kent’s pyramidal monument to the scientist,
which was installed in Westminster Abbey in 1731.

50
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

The early eighteenth-century picturesque estate was conceived holistically

in social, aesthetic, agricultural and ecological terms. Although it was separate
from the farm, the park was productive as well as pleasurable, providing food
and income through forestry and hunting, which were considered gentlemanly
pursuits unlike the manual labour and muck spreading of arable farming. Noting
the attention given to parks and gardens as well as farms and fields, John Barrell
concludes that the English Georgic tradition allowed ‘its inhabitants a life of work
and play together’ and was ‘concerned to soften as much as to recommend the
hard moral lessons of Virgil’s original Georgics’ in which ‘rewards and pleasures
are always in the future.’79 Although industriousness was a virtue for rich and
poor, the prosperous were far more likely to be rewarded with recreation and
repose. The farm labourer’s day was exhausting, extending from 6am to 6pm in
summer and sunrise to sunset in winter. In the 1680s, the average life span in
England was 30, while it was still only 42 in the 1750s.80 Prosperous members
of society lived longer; Walpole died in his 60s, as did Kent.
For the landowning family and their guests, the picturesque estate was an
amalgam of the Georgics and the Eclogues, agriculture and Arcadia. Landowners
appreciated the Georgics as an effective model for their management of the land
and the nation. But, like Claude’s patrons, they celebrated the Eclogues, wishing
to emphasise their idyllic life in the park and not the daily grind of labourers toiling
in the field.

Arcadian England

Acknowledging contrasting interpretations of Et in Arcadia ego among eighteenth-

century nations, Panofsky refers to the painting Mrs Bouverie and Mrs Crewe,
c. 1770, in which Joshua Reynolds emphasised the continuing relevance of
­Guercino’s theme by placing two ladies rather than two shepherds beside a tomb-
stone with the famous inscription. Recalling King George III’s interpretation of
the painting, Reynolds remarked: ‘He saw it yesterday and said at once: Oh
there is a tombstone in the background: Ay, ay, death is even in Arcadia.’81
Panofsky states that this ‘grammatically correct interpretation’ remained familiar in
­eighteenth-century England, developing into a national ‘tradition which tended to
retain the idea of a memento mori’, an object emphasising the inevitably of death.
But it was forgotten in the rest of Europe and replaced by ‘the elegiac interpreta-
tion ushered in by Poussin’s’ painting.82
Many of Claude’s patrons were French or Italian, but as Martin Sonnabend
remarked in 2011: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that nearly all his paintings,

51
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

drawings, and—to a lesser extent—prints have been in British collections at

one time or another, or are still there today.’83 Shaftesbury owned one Claude,
while Walpole had two in his collection. Among the 22 paintings of primarily
­seventeenth-century artists who influenced the early eighteenth-century English
landscape, Thomas Coke, first Earl of Leicester, displayed seven by Claude—far
more than any other painter—in the Landscape Room at Holkham Hall, which
was built to Kent’s design on the Norfolk coast ten miles northeast of Houghton.84
Reynolds’ painting and Claude’s popularity indicate that both interpretations of Et
in Arcadia ego were present in eighteenth-century England: the inevitable men-
ace of death and the elegiac appreciation of life.
In England, more than in any other European country, the garden and the
park became the means to contemplate the passage of time, transience of life and
delights made sweeter because they were fleeting. Dependent on the ­seasons and
the weather, gardens emphasise that life and death and creation and ­ruination are
necessary to one another. Kent even intended to plant dead trees in the grounds
of Kensington Palace as an aid to temporal awareness.85 The English excused
and relished their cantankerous and contrary behaviour by reference to their
fickle and sullen weather.86 In 1745, Abbé Le Blanc expressed a widely held
­opinion: ‘It is to the fogs with which their Island is nearly always covered that the
­English owe both the richness of their pastures and the melancholic spirit of their
­temperament.’87 As Charles Baudelaire later concluded: ‘Romanticism is a child
of the North … dreams and fairy tales are children of the mist’.88

Sublime England

A Neapolitan, who arrived in Rome around 1635 when he was 20, Salvator
Rosa painted nature as threatening and raw, vibrant and alive and gnarled and
dead, in contrast to the gentler landscapes depicted by his contemporaries Claude
and Poussin. Rosa was inspired by the tradition of scholarly retreat in classical
antiquity and Christian theology, but his fulsome appreciation of wild nature was
distinct from these models and drawn from experience, as he recounted in 1662:

Oh God, when I saw some of those utterly desolate hermitages which we could
spot from the road, how many times I longed for them, how many times I cried
out for them! … I saw at Terni (that is four miles off the road) the famous falls
of the Velino, the river of Rieti; however hard to please a man may be, his heart
could not fail to be inspired by its terrifying beauty, the sight of a river hurling itself
off a precipice half a mile above and tossing its spray as high again.89

52
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

Salvator Rosa, Landscape

with Arch and Waterfalls,
c. 1630–1673. Courtesy of
Palatine Gallery, Pitti Palace,
Florence/Finsiel/Alinari Ar-
chives reproduced with the
permission of Ministero per
i Beni e le Attività Culturali/
Bridgeman Images.

Rosa was a successful artist in his lifetime, but he acquired his high reputa-
tion in the eighteenth century when his depictions of rugged landscapes with an
isolated human presence appealed to patrons stimulated by growing accounts of
the sublime. Few English collectors purchased Rosa’s art in his lifetime, but he
became popular later; Shaftesbury owned two of his paintings and Walpole had
four.90 Shaftesbury’s praise ‘for Things of a natural kind’ recalls Rosa even more
than Claude:

Even the Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grotto’s, and broken
Falls of Waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness it-self, as representing
NATURE more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence be-
yond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.91

Written in the first century AD, Dionysius Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (On the Sub-
lime) refers to oratory not nature. Combining the pleasant and the frightening,

53
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

the contradictory pleasures of the sixteenth-century garden ‘may have ­resembled

those of the sublime,’ according to Morgan.92 But sublime nature did not r­eceive
extensive praise until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth c­ enturies. To
reach Italy, many Grand Tourists experienced both a sea voyage and a ­journey
across the Alps. Battered but resilient, a mountain was equated to a ­majestic,
­monumental ruin and became a subject of awe, reverence and spiritual
­appreciation. In ­addition to Rosa’s art, early literary evocations of sublime nature
­include Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth),
1681–1689; John Dennis’ account of his 1688 journey in which he equates
mountains to wondrous, terrifying ruins, published in Miscellanies in Verse and
Prose, 1693; Defoe’s An Historical Narrative of the Great and Tremendous Storm
Which ­Happened on Nov. 26th, 1703, 1704; and Addison’s ‘The Pleasures of
the Imagination,’ 1712.93
Avalanches, earthquakes, fires and storms stimulated the eighteenth-century
obsession with ruins. The Great Storm caused havoc on land and at sea, sinking
hundreds of vessels and killing thousands of people. But amidst the devastation,
Defoe ascribes its ‘wonderful effects’ to divine intervention and acknowledges
‘that pleasure may be mixed with terror, and astonishment!’94 Just 15 years after
his account of the Great Storm, Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, 1719, tied his
protagonist’s fate to the sea, emphasising its overriding importance in the psyche
of an island nation engaged in trade across waters that cover seven-tenths of the
Earth. Seven years earlier, Addison remarked that:

of all the Objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my Imagina-
tion so much as the Sea or Ocean. I cannot see the Heavings of this prodigious
Bulk of Waters, even in a Calm, without a pleasing Astonishment; but when it is
worked up in a Tempest, so that the Horizon on very side is nothing but foaming
Billows and floating Mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable Horror
that rises from such a Prospect.95

The sublime was an established concept well before Edmund Burke’s ­Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, but
his achievement was to compile a system that provided a coherent argument
for the sublime. Transforming the analogy of a body to a building, he empha-
sises ­sensations rather than proportions. Undermining the classical ­tradition that
­prioritises harmonious, formal beauty, Burke equates the sublime with darkness,
vastness and even deformity. While the beautiful is merely pleasant, the sublime is
magnificent.96 Its pleasure derives from initial terror and subsequent reassurance:

54
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

‘When danger or pain presses too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight,
and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and certain modifications, they
may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday experience.’97 Furthering the fas-
cination for uncultivated nature, Burke not only identifies the sublime with deso-
late and expansive landscapes that are subject to the drama of natural forces; but
he also attributes it to human constructions, stimulating artistic and architectural
speculations on the sublime. Distinguishing between the natural and the man-
made, he concludes: ‘Designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always
the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great, but as
it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature only.’98 In response to
Burke’s recognition of the imagination’s sublime potential, Immanuel Kant argues
in Critique of Judgement (1790) that humanity’s ability to remain rational in the
presence of terrifying phenomena is itself sublime.99
The end of the Enlightenment and beginning of romanticism are sometimes
associated with the violent aftermath of the French Revolution in 1789, which
undermined faith in reason and reasonableness. But the limits of reason were
debated throughout the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution in the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century is also cited as a catalyst for the romantic
appreciation of nature. But the nation’s citizens had experienced London’s intense
pollution at least a hundred years earlier and wild landscapes were appreciated
decades before the focus of production shifted from agriculture to industry.
Rather than distinct and sequential, the Enlightenment and romanti-
cism were evolving and interdependent philosophical traditions evident in the
­eighteenth-century landscape. One reasoned with nature and remained detached
and the other combined the rational and the irrational to eulogise nature as a
means of spiritual self-revelation. Together, they conceived a dynamic world, cher-
ished a mythical past, appreciated life more than the afterlife, promoted personal
liberty and the potential of the imagination and stimulated a fascination for ruins.

Notes

1 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 5. Refer to MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 6–23.

2 MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 195, 60.
3 Vasari, pp. 21–22.
4 Barkan, pp. 127–128, refer to pp. 119–133.
5 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 108.
6 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ p. 5. Refer to Lefaivre, p. 23; Macaulay, pp. 15–16.
7 The first part of Colonna’s title—Hypnerotomachia—derives from three Greek words,
hypnos, eros and mache, which respectively mean sleep, love and strife, so that they

55
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

roughly translate as the ‘strife of love in a dream’. The second part—Poliphili—refers to

the principal character, Poliphilo, who has a restless night after being rejected by his
love, Polia. An English translation appeared as The Strife of Love in a Dreame, 1592,
but its influence was limited due to a mediocre translation and poor image quality.
8 Colonna, p. 24.
9 Morgan mentions the agricultural treatises of Cato, Varro and Columella. Morgan, p.
15; refer to pp. 175–176, n. 58
10 Morgan, p. 89.
11 Hunt, Garden and Grove, p. 42; Morgan, p. 5. Refer to Brunon, p. 7.
12 Morgan refers specifically to Sacro Bosco. Morgan, pp. 168, 171.
13 Morgan, pp. 135–163, 171–172; Watkin, ‘Built Ruins,’ pp. 5–6.
14 Brindle, p. 91; Scott, pp. 15–18.
15 Langdon, pp. 9, 65; Whiteley, p. 57; Whitfield, pp. 83–84; Wine, pp. 11–12, 63.
16 Askew, ‘Introduction’, p. 9; Roethlisberger, ‘More Drawings by Claude Lorrain,’ p. 412.
17 Eight of Claude’s works specifically refer to themes taken from Virgil, of which six
belong to the period between 1672 and his death in 1682. Wine, p. 47, refer to
p. 31.
18 Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42; Barrell, pp. 8–9, 36–39; Jankovic, pp. 16–22, 137;
Langdon, pp. 9–13.
19 The name derives from a bare, rocky region of the Peloponnese peninsular. Panofsky,
‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, pp. 299–300. Refer to Ackerman, The Villa, pp. 39–42.
20 Lagerlöf, pp. 6–9, 35; Wine, p. 29.
21 Puttfarken, pp. 201–227; Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude
Lorrain,’ p. 91; Wine, pp. 55–56.
22 Joachim von Sandrart wrote the first account in 1675. Baldinucci, quoted in
­Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings, vol. 1, p. 56.
23 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ pp. 83–84;
­Russell, p. 67; Wine, p. 38.
24 Wine, pp. 21, 52.
25 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ p. 88.
26 Dedication by Claude’s nephews, Jean and Joseph, translated and quoted in Langdon,
p. 157.
27 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ p. 88.
28 Roethlisberger, ‘The Dimension of Time in the Art of Claude Lorrain,’ pp. 88, 73.
29 Chiarini, pp. 20–23; Damisch, pp. 38–39; Langdon, p. 21; Roethlisberger, ‘Claude
Lorrain: Some New Perspectives,’ pp. 47, 78.
30 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 302.
31 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 302–303.
32 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ p. 304.
33 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’, pp. 309–310.
34 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 313.
35 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 318–319. Refer to Clark, pp. 93–97.
36 Following continental Europe, in 1752 Britain and its colonies introduced the Gregorian
calendar in place of the Julian calendar. Before 1752, New Year’s Day was 25 March

56
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

rather than 1 January. For example, a date that would have been classified as 3 March
1715 in 1752 would have been 3 March 1714 before then.
37 Panofsky does not discuss Claude in his essay ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.’
38 Merchant, p. 2. Refer to Karsten Harries, ‘Building and the Terror of Time,’ p. 59.
39 Bacon, ‘Novum Organum,’ pp. 52–447. Refer to Merchant, pp. 74–75.
40 Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 9, refer to p. xvi.
41 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 174, 243, referring to Dobell.
42 Clarence C. Glacken also mentions Sylva and the French Forest Ordinance of 1669,
initiated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV. John Croumbie Brown, French
Forest Ordinance of 1669; Evelyn, Sylva, pp. 112–120; Glacken, p. 485. Refer to
Emmons, ‘Architecture before Art,’ pp. 277–280.
43 Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 18, 11–13.
44 Evelyn mentions A Discourse on Sympathetic Powder, 1658, in which Kenelm Digby
was probably the first person to attempt an explanation to the detrimental effect of
atmospheric pollution on health, noting that the airways to the lungs are narrowed in
pulmonary diseases. Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 3, 28, 34–37.
45 Evelyn, Fumifugium, pp. 47, 49.
46 Evelyn’s enduring fascination for horticulture led him to cultivate an analogy between
the domestic and urban scales, avidly tending his garden at Sayes Court, Deptford,
which included an arbour and medicinal plants, like his proposition for London. ­Evelyn,
‘An Abstract of a Letter’, p. 559, reporting on the winter of 1683. Refer to Jenner,
pp. 544–546.
47 Laird refers to Evelyn’s Elysium Britannicum: or, The Royal Gardens, which Evelyn be-
gan in 1653 but never completed due to its vast scale. It was only published in 2001.
Laird, p. 329.
48 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 46. Refer to
Porter, Enlightenment, p. 9.
49 Locke, ‘A Register of the Weather for the Year 1692,’ p. 1919. Refer to Jankovic,
pp. 35–36; Nebeker, p. 11.
50 The chapter ‘Of the Association of Ideas’ appears in the fourth edition of 1700, although
it was written somewhat earlier. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
bk. 2, ch. 33, pp. 394–401. Refer to Ballantyne, ‘First Principles and Ancient Errors,’
pp. 144–145; Forty, Words and Buildings, pp. 208–209; Hunt and Willis, ‘Introduc-
tion,’ pp. 37–38; Taylor, pp. 159–176; and Tuveson, p. 75.
51 Shaftesbury, quoted in Ayres, ‘Introduction,’ p. xiv.
52 The Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More—author of An Antidote Against A ­ theism,
1652, and The Exploration of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, 1660—­informed
­Shaftesbury’s understanding of classical antiquity and spiritual appreciation of nature.
Shaftesbury, The Life, p. 403.
53 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 1, p. 118.
54 The second edition is dated 1714, but it actually appeared in 1715.
55 Hunt, Greater Perfections, pp. 32–33.
56 Tuveson, p. 11.
57 The Moralist, A Philosophical Rhapsody was written in 1705 and published in 1709.

57
 t he f ir s t ‘r uins’

58 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 94.

59 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 101.
60 Leatherbarrow, p. 353.
61 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 46; bk. 2, ch. 2,
pp. 119–121.
62 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 21, 23 and 25 June 1712, no. 411,
412, 414.
63 Addison also ascribes this attribute to mountains. Addison, in Addison and Steele,
vol. 2, 26 June 1712, no. 415.
64 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 1, 17 July 1711, no. 119.
65 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414.
66 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414. Refer to Cosgrove,
Geography and Vision, p. 1; Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape,
p. 15.
67 Pope, 30 April 1736, quoted in David Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 208. Refer to Hunt,
‘Landscape Architecture’, pp. 366–367; Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe,
pp. 16–17.
68 Pope, 1713, quoted in Hussey, ‘Introduction,’ p. 21. Refer to Jackson, The Necessity
for Ruins and Other Topics, p. 4; Jackson, ‘The Necessity for Ruins,’ pp. 89–102.
69 Sir William Trumball, in Pope, The Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 45–46.
70 Pope, quoted in Brownell, p. 144.
71 Pliny, ‘Letter To Gallus,’ translated in Castell, pp. 1–15.
72 Castell, p. 116–117. Refer to Giles Worsley, ‘Taking the Ancients Literally: ­Archaeological
Neoclassicism in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ 1988, unpublished conference ­paper,
quoted to Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 126.
73 The translator was John Dryden.
74 Speck, p. 12. Refer to Edwards, Moore and Archer, p. 104.
75 Barrell, p. 7; Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 228; David B. Morris, Alexander
Pope, pp. 116–119, 123–125, 130.
76 Thomson, The Seasons, p. 10.
77 Thomson, The Seasons, p. 20, refer to pp. 8–15.
78 Curry, p. 161; Golinski, p. 72; Jankovic, pp. 153–155.
79 Barrell, pp. 36–37.
80 Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Britain, p. 13.
81 Reynolds, quoted in Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ p. 295.
82 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego,’ pp. 310, 318.
83 Sonnabend, p. 17.
84 Shaftesbury, Second Characters, pp. 139, 157; refer to Manwaring, pp. 17, 65.
85 Hussey, The Picturesque, p. 130; Kames, vol. 2, p. 335; Price, An Essay on the
Picturesque, pp. 186–187; Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening,
p. 59; Michael Wilson, William Kent, p. 221.
86 Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 10.
87 Abbé (J. B.) Le Blanc, Lettres de Monsieur Abbé Le Blanc, rev. ed., 1751, quoted in
Coffin, The English Garden, p. 3.

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88 Baudelaire, ‘What is Romanticism?’, p. 53.

89 Rosa, 1662, quoted in Scott, p. 139, refer to pp. 36, 70–71, 139, 223–224.
90 Manwaring, p. 65; Scott, p. 225.
91 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, vol. 2, p. 101. Refer to Scott, p. 225.
92 Morgan, p. 168. For further early precedents for the sublime, refer to Eck, Bussels and
Delbeke, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 1–10.
93 Dennis, p. 139.
94 Defoe, An Historical Narrative of the Great and Tremendous Storm, pp. 49–50. Refer
to Nicolson, pp. 38–43; Wheeler, pp. 419–427.
95 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 3, 20 September 1712, p. 489.
96 Burke genders the sublime as masculine, beauty as feminine. Burke, pp. 39–40,
72–73, 102–104, 144–147, 124. Refer to Perry, pp. 110–112.
97 Burke, pp. 39–40.
98 Burke, p. 76.
99 Kant, part 1, pp. 94–117. Refer to Crowther, p. 52; Wiedman, pp. 25–26.

59
 3
architecture in
ruins
 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

Villa and ruin

The early eighteenth century is associated with a significant transformation in

the English landscape when the picturesque came to the fore. As a counter-
point to an austere Palladian villa or pavilion, found or fabricated ruins were a
feature of many estates, offering contrasting temporal metaphors. Rather than
attempt to transcend materiality in the universal geometries of ideal forms, an
alternative design strategy celebrated broken and decayed structures. On the one
hand, the eighteenth century continued to characterise the immaterial as timeless
and distinct from the material, and on the other, it discovered the immaterial in
the material. Associating self-understanding with the experience of objects and
places subject to the weather, the eighteenth century conceived the immaterial
as temporal and experiential not only in the actual absence of matter—material
decay—but also in the perceived absence of matter seen through mist and rain.
A found or fabricated ruin acknowledged the effects of time and place, emphasis-
ing symbiotic relations with its ever-changing immediate and wider contexts and
celebrating the creative influence of natural as well cultural forces. In a signifi-
cant design innovation, the picturesque instigated a more intense, profound and
temporal dialogue with nature. Adopting the ruin as its emblem, the picturesque
stimulated a burgeoning environmentalism with a subtle debt to earlier centuries
and a profound influence on subsequent ones.
In drawing greater attention to the conditions that inform self-­understanding,
the early eighteenth century fundamentally transformed the visual arts, its ob-
jects, authors and viewers. In Britain, the architect associated with disegno
was in its infancy when another appeared alongside it, exemplifying a new
type of design and a new way of designing that valued the ideas and emo-
tions evoked through experience. Although the pleasures and liberties of the
picturesque were limited to the educated and prosperous, notable principles
were established. Rather than refer to universal ideas, forms and proportions,
design could draw forth ideas that were provisional, changeable and dependent
on experience at conception, production and reception. Rather than follow an
inflexible vision, the garden was designed in detailed response to site conditions
and creative adjustments were made during construction. Rather than being
conceived according to the rules of geometry in a distant studio, the garden was
designed the way it was experienced, by a figure moving across a landscape
and imagining future movements while special attention was given to drawings
that explored the relations between site and experience. Kent represented his
garden designs—and often his garden buildings, too—in perspectives, but he

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depicted his building designs in orthogonal drawings. In his letter to Pope Leo X,
c. 1519, Raphael associated the picture with the painter and the plan with
the architect, confirming an opinion earlier expressed by Alberti.1 However, the
heightened value given to experience in the eighteenth century made this dis-
tinction less convincing.
The new design practice focused first on gardens and not on grand buildings,
because they were more clearly subject to time and the changing natural world.
Rather than a complete and timeless object, a garden building was understood
as an incident in an environment with which it conversed. At first, this innovative
and lyrical design practice was specific to the garden and the park, but it soon led
to a much wider engagement with the natural world.

Factual fiction

Combining painterly and literary aspirations, the early eighteenth-century land-

scape was conceived according to ut pictura poesis (as with painting, so also
with poetry), a concept that originated in classical antiquity and acquired con-
temporary resonance due to philosophical and literary advances, such as Locke’s
concern for the association of ideas and its influence on morality. Addison recom-
mended that his readers maintain a diary, extending a literary practice favoured
by Evelyn and Locke, who placed great emphasis on empirical methods that led to
personal development.2 People have written about themselves for millennia, but
the formation of modern identity is associated with a type of writing that Michel
Foucault describes as a ‘technology of the self,’ a process of ­self-­examination by
which moral character and behaviour are constructed and maintained in con-
junction with other social forces.3 Objectivity may be an aspiration, but no diary
is entirely truthful and the diarist must inevitably edit and reinvent life while
reflecting upon it, altering the past as well influencing the future. According to
Paul de Man:

We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its conse-
quences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical
project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer
does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus
determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?4

Addison and Steele encouraged diary writing, a conversational literary style and
engagement with contemporary culture, but their attempt to direct the course of

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English literature was undermined by a new development they did not foresee. In
valuing direct experience, precise description and a sceptical approach to ‘facts,’
which needed to be repeatedly questioned, the empirical method gave greater
emphasis to the distinction between fact and fiction, creating a fruitful climate in
which the everyday realism of a new literary genre—the novel—could prosper as
‘factual fiction.’5 In contrast to the epic or romance, which incorporated classical
mythologies, the novel concentrated on the lives of everyday people in eighteenth-
century society and the individualism they professed. Empirical description and
analysis was applied to the novel, which emphasised specific times, peoples
and places and sought justification through a combination of reasoned explana-
tion and intuitive experience. The uncertainties and dilemmas of identity were
ripe for narrative account. Countering Locke’s call for moderation and restraint,
subjectivity was exploited for its creative literary potential. Focusing on the fate
of individuals, the early diaries (autobiographical fictions) developed in parallel
with the early novels (fictional autobiographies), in which the author claimed
merely to be the narrator. According to Inger Sigrun Brodey: ‘As architects had
to pose as archaeologists, pretending to have discovered, rather than built, such
“authentic” monuments, authors too pretend to have discovered what they actu-
ally write.’6 Often described as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe, 1719, is a fictional autobiography, as is Defoe’s other famous novel Moll
Flanders, 1722. In each case, the principal character is complex and conflicted
and one voice among others in a changing society.7
Defoe describes Moll Flanders as ‘a private History’ and Roxana, 1724, as
‘laid in Truth of Fact’ and thus ‘not a Story, but a History,’ a claim echoed by other
novelists throughout the eighteenth century.8 History’s uncertain status supported
authors’ claims that the first novels were in fact histories. In the sixteenth ­century,
history’s purpose was to offer useful lessons; accuracy was not necessary. In
subsequent centuries, empiricism’s emphasis on the distinction between fact and
fiction began to transform historical analysis, diminishing the pre-eminence of
ancient literary sources in favour of tangible, verifiable evidence. Rather than
Vasari’s attention to individual achievements, the modern historian employed a
methodical, comparative method to characterise changing cultural, social, po-
litical and economic processes in which the deeds of specific protagonists were
contextualised. But the transformation from one type of history to another was
gradual. Many eighteenth-century histories inherited some of the rhetorical ap-
proach of earlier histories and were not so distinct from novels, implying that the
truth does not always depend on facts alone.9

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The eighteenth century instigated the simultaneous and interdependent

emergence of new art forms that were creative and questioning responses to
empiricism’s detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural
world: the English novel, the analytical history and the picturesque landscape.
Kent and his patrons probably read the first novels because the authors such
as Defoe and Swift were well known to them. Kent prepared a sketch of the
‘Exorcism of Don Quixote’s Library’, c. 1725, and contributed an illustration
to a 1738 Spanish edition of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don ­Quixote, 1605–1615,
which is often described as the first European novel.10 Self-­reflection trig-
gered fractured narratives, alternative scenarios and myriad ­digressions in
the garden as well as the novel, although the landscape designer emphasised
classical mythologies alongside current events. Conveying new thoughts and
values as well as the contemporary meaning of the ideas, forms and mythol-
ogies of classical antiquity, the picturesque garden was both a novel and a
romance, two genres that sometimes merged in eighteenth-century fiction.11
Equally, the picturesque garden was equivalent to a history, questioning and
reimagining the past in classical reconstructions, antique sculptures and
­Mediterranean trees.
As ancient Rome was a model for Georgian Britain, classical forms were of
contemporary relevance and simultaneously ancient and modern. For an early
eighteenth-century architect or patron, classical buildings in an Arcadian setting
would have conjured associations with the architecture and landscape of ancient
Rome—including those depicted by seventeenth-century painters—translated
and improved for a different time and site. But for many visitors, a picturesque
estate that now seems quintessentially English would also have seemed shock-
ingly new.
Kent designed according to the genius loci, a principle that originated in
classical antiquity. In eighteenth-century England, the genius of the place was
made as much as found: the fusion of new ideas, forms and spaces with those
already in place, which were sometimes the results of earlier migrations. The
picturesque came to fruition in England, but given its precedents in classical an-
tiquity, Chinese landscape drawings and seventeenth-century continental paint-
ings and compatibility with French and German rococo and varied development
internationally, it cannot be described as exclusively English. The hybridisation of
historical and geographical references is characteristic of the picturesque. Indeed,
its diverse origins were appreciated in the eighteenth century and in subsequent
centuries because of their association with liberalism.

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A technology of the self

Many ideas and individuals influenced the gestation of the early eighteenth-­
century picturesque, but Kent was its principal exponent. Born in Yorkshire in
1685, the son of a joiner, Kent had little formal education but his drawing skill
was soon recognised. Supported by various patrons, he left London in 1709 to
study in Italy, remaining there for ten years. Kent travelled widely but spent most
of his time in Rome, where he studied under the painter Giuseppe Chiari, who
he referred to as ‘my master.’12 Chiari was a pupil of Carlo Maratti and both were
indebted to the mature Raphael. An early patron encouraged Kent to be ‘Raphael
secundus’, but he was no more than a capable painter.13 Aware of his friend’s
hedonism, ­humour and greed, Pope later concluded that ‘he must expect not to
imitate ­Raphael in anything but his untimely end.’14
Kent briefly encountered Shaftesbury in 1712 and met Burlington two years
later, to whom he remained close throughout his life. In 1714, Kent began a
visual and textual diary, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.’, which records
his journeys around Italy.15 Equivalent to a diary, the process of design, from one
drawing to the next iteration and from one project to another, is itself an autobi-
ographical ‘technology of the self’, formulating a design ethos for an individual
or a studio. De Man concludes that the autobiography ‘veils a defacement of the
mind of which it is itself a cause.’16 Having changed his name from Cant, Kent
continued a means of reinvention that Palladio had favoured in which the archi-
tect designs the architect.
The opening pages of Kent’s diary refer to his travels with Coke.17 Given
the liveliness of Kent’s drawings and his friends’ frequent references to his he-
donism, the diary is at first a surprisingly sober account of buildings, paintings
and gardens. Sometimes written in English, at other times in Italian, it includes
small drawings and diagrams in the margins and text. Arriving in Venice on
22 July, Coke and Kent first visit Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, 1565. L
­ eaving
the city on 18 August, Kent separates from Coke’s party at Padua and pro-
ceeds to Vicenza, where he stays just one day. Kent admires Palladio’s Teatro
­Olimpico, 1585, which he illustrates with a tiny plan that identifies the elliptical
seating, empty stage and perspectival street scenes. Elsewhere in the city, he
refers merely to ‘several other palaces’, offering no mention of Palladio’s Villa
Rotonda.18
The most evocative descriptions refer to gardens. At the Medici villa at
­Pratolino, north of Florence, Kent acknowledges ‘a very fine Situation & very
fine Grotos adorn’d with Shells & pietrified stone work with pretty water works a

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

Andrea Palladio with

Vincenzo Scamozzi, Teatro
Olimpico, Vicenza, 1585.
Courtesy of Architec-
tural Press Archive/RIBA
Collections.

Galatea coming out of her Grotto drawn by Delfini.’19 At the Palazzo Te, he ad-
mires the collapsing columns in the frescoes, remarking that the ‘Room ye Giants
a fighting with ye gods ye finest of all Julio Romanos works,’ and notes that ‘in
grotta at end of ye garden are very fine grottesque.’20 Kent is also known to have
admired the Renaissance gardens at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati and must
have been a frequent visitor to the gardens of the Villa d’Este, Tivoli, and the Villa
Borghese, Rome.21 His earliest surviving design for a garden building appears in
a 1715 letter to an early patron. Remarking that his design should be ‘agreeable
to our climate,’ Kent was already considering how he could translate his Italian
experiences to a different culture and setting.22
Later in his Italian diary, he excitedly mentions ‘in ye church of St J­ uliano ye
first proof of my painting in fresco’ and turns his attention to artistic techniques: ‘to

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William Kent, Italian

Diary (‘Remarks by way
of Painting & Archit’),
1714–1717, fol. 26r. Kent’s
reworking of a drawing in
Giulio Troili, Paradossi per
pratticare la prospettiva,
1683. ­Courtesy of Bodleian
Library, ­University of Oxford.

paint a tempera one egg with white & yolk to-gether & tow eggs of water, after put
stalk of fig leaves, or lemon pel.’23 The most impressive section is the final one,
which contains delicate illustrations of perspective techniques in line and wash.24
Kent refers to two guides, Giulio Troili’s Paradossi per pratticare la ­prospettiva,
1683, and Pietro Accolti’s Lo inganno de gl’occi, Prospettiva p
­ ratica, 1625,
which respectively consider perspective in terms of paradox and deception. In his
diary, Kent copied numerous drawings and quotations from Troili, who was an
expert in quadratura, a specialism of Bologna where Carracci had also worked.
Meaning ‘squaring’ in English, quadratura is a technique to devise and represent
complex spaces on a two-dimensional surface. In frescoes, it was often used to
create the illusion that illustrated architectural elements were part of the built
architecture. Adding to the deception, the painted architecture sometimes framed
a view of painted nature and the light was convincingly depicted.
In the Roman studio of Maratti’s former pupil Benedetto Luti, Kent met Giovanni
Paolo Panini.25 Panini had trained as a quadraturista and stage designer under
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, an architect and the author of L’architettura civile (Civil
Architecture), 1711, who was born in Bologna and a pupil of Troili. In place of the
single central vanishing point in conventional stage design, Bibiena innovatively ad-
vocated the scena per angolo, which permitted multiple, oblique perspectives and a
resultant, multidirectional spatiality that was suggestive of alternative scenarios and

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Giovanni Paolo Panini,

Gallery of Views of Ancient
Rome, 1758. Courtesy of
Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman
Images.

journeys.26 In 1711, Panini moved to Rome. Regarded as an important artist in his

lifetime, his paintings were already being sold in London auctions in 1724. Panini
was admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1719, which Federico Zuccari
had founded in 1577 to gather together the most eminent architects, painters and
sculptors, and he later became its Principal. Panini became a member of the French
Academy in Rome in 1732 and was subsequently its Professor of Perspective and
President. Ruins were familiarly depicted in the background of paintings, but Panini
placed them in the foreground. More than any painter before him, ruins were the
subjects of his art. Employing techniques of baroque stage design, Panini depicted
low, oblique vanishing points, the angled sidelight of a setting sun and diminutive
figures to accentuate the ruins’ grandeur.27 Elisabetta Cereghini concludes that Kent
would later apply his knowledge of the quadraturisti to garden designs:

Instead of devising a space based on a single perspective line, along which the
eye of the spectator travelled from a fixed viewpoint in a formally organized se-
quence (as in the Baroque garden), Kent adopted a technique based on the
use of oblique perspectives comprised of two or more axial lines converging from
points outside the ‘scene’, which no longer corresponded with the line of vision of
the spectator. This prompted the spectator to seek out viewpoints independently
rather than be confined to any single perspective prescribed by the architect.28

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As his sketchbooks are lost, Kent’s diary only gives a partial impression of his
time in Italy, covering just a few years and focusing on his travels rather than
his studies in Rome. He mentions many painters in his diary, including Carracci,
Domenichino, Guercino, Maratti, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Antonio da ­Corregio,
Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano.29 Kent also admired Rosa, Poussin and
Claude, who he had an opportunity to study in the 1720s when William Caven-
dish, second Duke of Devonshire, acquired Claude’s Liber Veritatis for the l­ibrary
of his London residence, Devonshire House, which was close to Burlington
House, where Kent resided after his return to England in 1719.30 Keen to expose
imitations that began to appear in the 1630s, Claude prepared a complete cata-
logue of his sold works, with each painting recorded in a corresponding drawing
in Liber Veritatis. The opportunity to study Claude in detail was timely because
Kent was soon to acquire his first garden commissions.

More than picturesque

Meaning ‘in the manner of painters’ and suggesting a method of laying on paint
in bold and irregular strokes to depict not simply a detailed copy of nature but
something closer to the experience of nature, the term ‘picturesque’ was first ap-
plied to paintings and only later to gardens.31 William Shenstone mentions Kent’s
‘picturesque gardening’ in ‘Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening,’ 1764, while
Henry Home, Lord Kames, in Elements of Criticism, 1762, and Horace ­Walpole
in The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, 1771, remark that Kent’s gar-
dens are composed like paintings.32 For eighteenth-century advocates of the
picturesque, garden design’s status as an art depended on its relations with land-
scape painting.33 But in the opening line of Observations on Modern Gardening,
Illustrated by Descriptions, 1770, Thomas Whately writes that ‘GARDENING, in
the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place
of considerable rank among the liberal arts. It is as superior to landskip painting,
as a reality to a representation.’34 Later, he adds that paintings ‘must be only used
as studies, not as models’ for gardens.35
The picturesque is a deceptive term because it emphasises one aspect of
the eighteenth-century garden to the detriment of its other qualities such as the
importance of the senses and the seasons to design, experience, understanding
and the imagination. The association with painting is relevant, but references to
­open-air theatres and other settings for human discourse and action are as impor-
tant. Whether a woodland glade or a curving hillside, many of Kent’s garden draw-
ings show nature in the form of a stage, recalling the amphitheatres of classical

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antiquity and the close association of gardens and theatres in Renaissance Italy
and Claude’s paintings. The roles of actor and spectator were interchangeable
in Kent’s gardens, as they were when actors and spectators danced together at
the end of Jones’ court masques, which were also indebted to Italian gardens
and a further influence on Kent. Frequently incorporating ruins, the landscapes
depicted in Jones’ masques conform to a classicised Bril, who was coming under
­Carracci’s influence when the architect made his last visit to Rome in 1614.36
The picturesque garden is more than a painting or a play in that it is ex-
perienced not in a concentrated time period but in motion and over days and
seasons, linking appreciation of the changing natural world to journeys in self-­
understanding. In classicism, the gaze and the body follow the same path. But
in the picturesque, they diverge. The eye is drawn to a distant object, but the
path is not direct or singular. Immersion within a garden stimulates a questioning
attitude to vision in which self-reflective viewers perceive themselves viewing and
observe others doing the same, so that their experiences are both personal and
social. The picturesque draws attention to the problems as well as the pleasures
of vision, which is no more than ‘intelligent guesswork’ ‘from limited sensory
evidence,’ writes Richard Gregory. Consequently, informed by memory, ‘percep-
tions are hypotheses. This is suggested by the fact that retinal images are open
to an infinity of interpretations.’37 What we see is affected by what we touch,
feel, taste, smell and hear. Even when the garden visitor is static, physical and
perceptual movement is implicit, because any previous or subsequent journey is
understood in relation to other potential journeys and is but one part of a complex
and changeable whole in which the past, present and future collide.

England in ruins

Celebrating the history, landscape and climate of an island nation in which in-
cessant rain, strong winds and frequent frost damage stimulate decay, the ruin
provided a dialectical means to negotiate between culture and nature and was
synonymous with the fluctuating fate of the nation. Enveloping vegetation nat-
uralised and affirmed the ruin, equating architecture to an enduring geological
formation. But nature was also a means of architecture’s destruction. Evoking
life and death in a single object, the ruin of a building was linked to the ruin of a
person or a place as well as their potential for survival and renewal.
Few classical ruins survived from the Roman occupation, but gothic ruins
were familiar because, beginning in 1536, the Dissolution of Monasteries had
disbanded religious houses and transferred their assets to the English monarch

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Henry VIII, leading to the sale or destruction of many buildings. Some monaster-
ies were turned into houses while others were scavenged for building materials.
A playwright before he became an architect, John Vanbrugh conceived archi-
tecture for dramatic effect. In 1709, anticipating picturesque theory later in the cen-
tury, he argued that the medieval remains of ‘ancient Woodstock’ manor should be
retained for their historical association and visual impact when seen from ­Blenheim
Palace, then being constructed for John Churchill, first Duke of M
­ arlborough. To-
gether, the ruins and their setting ‘wou’d make One of the Most Agreeable Objects
that the best of Landskip Painters can invent.’38 Clearly unappreciative, Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough, dismissed Vanbrugh’s request as ‘ridiculous.’39
Pope’s design for the 1745 frontispiece to his An Essay on Man, 1733–1734,
depicts a seated figure surrounded by broken and overgrown structures of ancient
Rome, which are means to contemplate morality and mortality. Pope imagined the
future decline of his poetry, recognising ‘that time would inevitably render his dic-
tion obscure, his allusions uncertain, his topical references impenetrable,’ writes
David B. Morris.40 But Pope also acknowledged the creative association of the ruin
with the fragment and the recuperative potential of ruination and decay: ‘See dying
vegetables life sustain, / See life dissolving vegetate again: / All forms that perish
other forms supply.’41 While he was preparing An Essay on Man, Pope remarked:
‘I have many fragments which I am beginning to put together.’42 According to
Morris: ‘Unlike other poems which begin in such a piecemeal fashion, An Essay
on Man never completely loses the fragmentary nature of its origin. As Pope’s
frontispiece reminds us, fragments are the natural setting of the philosophical
mind.’43 An Essay on Man was indebted to Bacon, who appreciated ­‘Aphorisms’
that ‘representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to enquire farther.’44
Pope advocated classical references in architecture, landscape and litera-
ture. But in 1721, in conjunction with Allen Bathurst, first Earl of Bathurst, he
designed the first purpose-built gothic ruin in England, King Alfred’s Hall deep
within the woods of his friend’s Cirencester estate. A few years later, Bathurst and
Pope were delighted when a visiting antiquarian assumed it to be a genuine his-
torical relic.45 Adding to this fascination in New Principles of Gardening, 1728,
Batty Langley suggests the fabricated classical ruin as a garden monument and
includes illustrations based on Jakob von Sandrart’s views of Rome, 1685, to
support his proposition for:

Ruins of Buildings, after the old Roman Manner, to terminate such walks that end in
disagreeable Objects; which Ruins may be either painted upon Canvas, or actually
built in that Manner with Brick, and cover’d with Plaistering in Imitation of Stone.46

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, The Vale

of Venus, Rousham,
1737–1741. Courtesy of
Charles Cottrell-Dormer.

The ruin and the multiple perspectives came to dominate the picturesque
because they refer to temporal experiences, the choices open to individuals
and the effects of nature and chance upon art and life. One of Kent’s signifi-
cant design skills was to create a subtle dialogue between a garden structure
and a setting so that each visitor seems to discover them for the first time,
concealed and then framed by nature. At Rousham in Oxfordshire, he created
an intimate garden in which distinct spaces, dense planting and varied routes
provide contrasting areas of light and shadow, and erotic love and mortal
decay are the principal themes. Kent and his client General James Dormer
owned several copies of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and many of Kent’s py-
ramidal buildings were based on illustrations in Colonna’s book.47 In 1738,
Kent remarked that even though Dormer had severe ‘Goute he is still bronzo
mad.’48 A statue—probably of Antinous, Hadrian’s lover who was deified after
his death—terminates the Long Walk as it opens onto the Vale of Venus.49 The
serpentine rill in the Watery Walk leads to the Cold Bath and the Grotto, which
was associated with Proserpina, the abducted wife of Pluto, the ruler of the
underworld who presided over the afterlife.50 Kent had originally wanted Peter
Scheemaker’s sculpture Dying Gladiator to be mounted on a sarcophagus, an
emphatic reference to Dormer’s declining health, who died in 1741 just as
the garden was completed.
Addison imagined an estate as a garden, but Horace Walpole remarked that
it was Kent who ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’51 To
the west, he constructed a ha-ha, a sunken ditch, to separate lawns from fields

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Rousham,

­1737–1741. ­Detail
of ­Antinous at the end of the
Long Walk. ­Courtesy of
­Jonathan Hill.

William Kent, Rousham,

1737–1741. Watery Walk
and Cold Bath. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, Rousham,

1737–1741. Detail of Peter
Scheemaker’s sculpture,
Dying Gladiator. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

but maintain their visual connection. Recalling Claude, Kent moulded the slop-
ing site and planted trees to frame views from the enclosed lawns and glades
to the open fields beyond the ambling curve of the River Cherwell to the north.
An inhabited eye-catcher in a nearby field, the Temple of the Mill was based
on an earlier cottage, which Kent’s additions give the impression of a partially
ruined medieval monastery transformed into a house, with two arched side but-
tresses supporting broken stumps of roughly hewn stone. Further to the west,
he realigned the road to reveal Heyford Bridge, which partly dates from the
thirteenth century. Emphasising General Dormer’s military campaigns, a further
eye-catcher, the Triumphal Arch, is silhouetted on a distant ridge to the east.
Recalling an ancient Roman tradition but with a pointed profile, it confidently
combines the classical and the gothic, which the victors of 1688 understood to
be their dual political and cultural heritage.
In ‘Of the Seasons’, the final chapter in Observations on Modern Garden-
ing, Whately argues that gardens must be designed for the weather’s ‘transitory
effects’ and those that are more predictable: ‘The seasons thus become sub-
jects of consideration in gardening … Different parts may thus be adapted to
different seasons; and each in its turn will be in perfection.’52 Just as each sea-
son has its particular pleasures, so do the seasons of a life. One of Rousham’s

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 ar chi t e c t ur e in r uins

William Kent, The Temple of

the Mill and the Triumphal
Arch beyond the Gardens,
Rousham, 1737–1741.
Courtesy of Charles
Cottrell-Dormer.

principal themes—the cycles of life and death—is explicit in the iconography

of garden monuments, tangible in plants and trees and apparent in sculptures
and buildings as they decay and stain, accumulating lichen and moss. The
hunched figure and discarded sword of the Dying Gladiator refer to impending
death, and the sculpture slowly ages as it accumulates a covering of living
vegetation. In 1750, two years after Kent’s death, John Macclary, wrote to the
General’s heirs, enticing them to visit Rousham while the garden was most
verdant and thus on the cusp of decay. By then Rousham’s steward, he was
previously its gardener, responsible for implementing Kent’s abundant planting
instructions:

In one of the noblest Green Serpentine Walks, that was ever seen, or even made,
view narrowly as you walk along, and youl perhaps see, a greater veriaty of ever-
greens, and Flowering Shrubs, then you can posably see in any one walk in the
World, at the end of this walk stands a four Seat Forrist Chair, where you set down
and view what, and where, you have walked a long, their you see the deferant
sorts of Flowers, peeping through the deferant sorts of Flowers, peeping through
the deferant sorts of Evergreens, here you think the Laurel produces a Rose, the
Holly a Syringa, the Yew a Lilac, and the sweet Honeysuckle is peeping out from
every Leafe, in short they are so mixt together, that youd think every Leafe of the
Evergreens, produced one flower or a nother’.53

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William Kent, Elysian Fields,

Stowe, c.1735. The bust of
John Locke in the Temple of
British Worthies. Courtesy
of Jonathan Hill.

Just as the daily weather was part of a larger weather pattern, the ­eighteenth-
century garden was a means to engage the social as well as the self. History, pol-
itics, love and death were all represented and discussed among garden glades. A
member of a leading Whig family and, like Dormer, once a general in the Duke of
Marlborough’s army, Richard Temple, first Viscount Cobham, conceived Stowe—
the grandest early eighteenth-century English garden—as a political and cultural
statement. In Kent’s Elysian Fields, which is named after the paradise dedicated
to the heroes of classical antiquity, the Grotto provides sylvan, watery views from
its dark, damp interior. Nearby, the Temple of British Worthies is reminiscent of
a semi-circular Roman shrine, with a pyramid at its centre and busts of Whig
heroes such as Bacon, Locke and Pope to the sides. On the rear elevation of the
Temple of British Worthies, a stone carving extols the exemplary virtues of Signor
Fido. Only at the end of the inscription is it apparent that the subject of such
praise is a dog.

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Villains also featured in Stowe’s Elysian Fields, which was indebted to one
of Addison’s essays in The Tatler. Comparing temples discovered on an imagi-
nary woodland walk, he writes that the elegant ‘Temple of Virtue … was planted
on each side with laurels, which were intermixed with marble trophies, carved
pillars, and statues of lawgivers, heroes, statesmen, philosophers, and poets.’ In
contrast, the poorly built ‘Temple of Vanity’ ‘stood upon so weak a foundation,
that it shook with every wind that blew’ and ‘was filled with hypocrites, pedants,
free-thinkers, and prating politicians.’54 Kent’s pristine Temple of Ancient Virtue,
c. 1736–1737, was one of the first attempts to precisely recreate a British copy
of an ancient classical building, the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. The adjacent Temple
of Modern Virtue was built as a gothic ruin and housed a headless sculpture of
Walpole, who Cobham opposed when he was a government minister, implying
Britain’s moral decline under the prime minister. The two Temples suggest distinct
hierarchies—the pristine above the ruined and the classical above the gothic—but
it is more accurate to understand their relations as dialectical. As a young man on
the Grand Tour in Rome, Addison had observed ‘Buildings the most magnificent
in the world, and Ruins more magnificent than they.’55 At Stowe as at Rousham,
there was a desire to draw inspiration from classical and medieval cultures. The
Temple of British Worthies includes busts of King Alfred and the Black Prince, and
James Gibb’s Temple of Liberty, c. 1748, is gothic, which was associated with
the north and not the south and nature more than culture, emphasising an island
nation’s historical independence.
Recognising the value of his Italian experience to his English reputation, Kent
scattered Italian terms and phrases throughout his letters and was happily known
as ‘Signor,’ ‘Giuglielmo,’ ‘Kentino.’ In January 1720, barely a month after return-
ing to England, he complained that his ‘Italian constitution’ could not endure the
winter weather of ‘this Gothick country.’56 But his remark was largely in jest,
given his enthusiasm for gothic. Teasingly, Pope even called Kent a ‘wild goth,’
alluding to his northern upbringing.57 Kent’s enthusiasm for gothic was expressed
in his long-held admiration for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, 1595, an
Elizabethan poem that recalled the epic narratives of classical antiquity but fea-
tured chivalrous medieval knights rather than ancient Greek heroes. Most likely
introduced to the poem by Pope, Kent reportedly acquired ‘his taste in Gardening
from reading the picturesque descriptions of Spenser.’58 Depicting scenes from
The Faerie Queene, Francesco Sleter’s murals decorated the interiors of two of
Kent’s pavilions at Stowe—the Temple of Venus and the Hermitage—and Kent’s
32 illustrations for a new edition of Spenser’s poem emphasised his fascination
for the gothic alongside the classical.59

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William Kent, Richmond

Hermitage, 1731. Section
drawn by John Vardy
in William Kent, Some
Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones
and Mr. ­William Kent,
1744. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

William Kent, Arcadian

Hermitage with Satyr and
Shepherdess, c. 1730.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Concern for a primitive life in nature generated a fashion for the hermit
and the hermitage as a place of play and display. Completed in 1731 to Kent’s
design, the Richmond Hermitage—a Greek cross in plan—contained a central
octagonal room culminating in a dome and oculus, which was furnished with
comfortable couches and incorporated arched niches with busts of British he-
roes such as Locke and Newton. A section shows two elegant side rooms, one
with a decorative tent and the other with an elaborate bookcase.60 In contrast,

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the exterior, similar to the Stowe Hermitage, was faced in roughly hewn stone
and placed low on its site without a plinth or steps. In one of Kent’s design
sketches for the Richmond Hermitage, c.1730, a grove of trees frames a rustic
building, which has the inscription ‘Arcadia’ carved above the keystone. In the
foreground, a satyr kneels before a shepherdess who may be Queen Caroline,
wife of George II, who commissioned the building. In a 1738 engraving of the
Richmond ­Hermitage, the exterior is more ruinous, with the rear pediment sig-
nificantly broken. A contemporary observer described the building as ‘a heap of
stones thrown into a very artful disorder, and curiously embellished with moss
and shrubs,’ and representative of ‘rude Nature.’61 The exterior’s archaic primi-
tivism may refer to the dialogue between artifice and nature that Kent observed
in Italy, notably in the work Raphael and his pupil Guilio Romano, or it may
suggest a crude classicism of the north in contrast to that of the south. Alter-
natively, Hunt suggests that the Hermitage’s ruined façade, rough stonework
and sunken appearance ‘all implied a more’ gothic and ‘British ancestry, which
the ­politico-philosophical message of course underlined,’ concluding that the
­Hermitage ‘announced, as do all ruins, the determining effects and contributions
of nature and chance rather than art.’62
The term ‘ruin’ is derived from the Latin ruina and ruere, meaning to fall
or collapse. But by the eighteenth century, its connotations were more complex
and positive. The concern for ruination came to fruition due to empiricism’s
detailed observation of life and death in plants and creatures, the attention to
subjective experience and fragmented identity in an increasingly secular society,
the heightened historical awareness in the Enlightenment’s concern for origins
and archaeology and the value given to nature, time and the imagination in the
picturesque and romanticism. The temporal appeal of ruins is subtle and com-
plex because they ‘are emblematic of both transience and persistence,’ writes
Wu Hung.63 Diminishing objects physically, ruination was understood to ex-
pand architecture’s metaphorical potential, triggering reflections on the past and
the future: ‘for imperfection and obscurity are their properties; and to carry the
imagination to something greater than is seen, their effect,’ concluded What-
ely in 1770.64 In the early eighteenth century, whether in a painting, a novel
or a garden building, the unfinished and the fragmented were means to both
stimulate and question the author and invigorate and challenge the reader or
the viewer’s imagination. The ruin draws attention to what is absent and was
once whole, and implies a possible return to that condition. Alternatively, the
ruin is a precursor to innovation and change. In revealing not only what is lost,
but also what is incomplete, the ruin indicates that the present situation is not

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inevitable and implies an alternative future. Relating the present to a particular

past—imagined or real—the ruin can evoke a lost idyll that will never be re-
peated, transfer gravitas and authority from one era to another or imply that the
successes of today will surpass those of yesterday. A hybrid of architecture and
landscape and nature and culture, the ruin represents the unfinished as well as
the undone, growth as well as decay, potential as well as loss and the future as
well as the past.

Notes

1 Raphael, p. 188; Alberti, p. 34. Refer to Carpo, pp. 17–19.

2 Beginning in the late sixteenth century and increasing by the 1640s, devout Christians,
especially Protestants, prepared diaries in which they assessed their daily spiritual pro-
gress. Webster, p. 50.
3 Foucault mentions ‘four types of technologies’ that ‘hardly ever function separately’:
technologies of production, sign systems, power and the self. Foucault, ‘On the Gene-
alogy of Ethics,’ p. 369; Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self,’ pp. 18–19.
4 De Man, p. 69.
5 Davis, p. 213. Refer to Watt, p. 62.
6 Brodey, p. 117.
7 Bellamy, p. 193; Downie, pp. 30–45; Guilhamet, pp. 198–200; McKeon, pp. 2–3;
Watt, p. 63.
8 Defoe, Moll Flanders, p. 3; Defoe, Roxana, p. 21.
9 Garnham, pp. 1–10; Hawes, pp. 64–67.
10 Richietti, pp. 15–18; Savage, ‘Kent as Book Illustrator,’ pp. 430, 436.
11 Scott Black, ‘Romance Redivivus,’ p. 247.
12 Kent, letter to Burrell Massingberd, 24 November 1714, quoted in Michael Wilson,
­William Kent, p. 252. Refer to Brindle, pp. 91, 95, 105, n. 30; Cereghini, p. 320;
John Harris, William Kent, p. 4; Hunt, William Kent, p. 11; Jourdain, p. 30; Mowl,
pp.­  29–30; Sicca, ‘The Making and Unmaking of John Talman’s Collection of D ­ rawings’,
pp. 43–44; Sicca, ‘On William Kent’s Roman Sources,’ p. 136; Michael Wilson, William
Kent, pp. 12, 252.
13 Burrell Massingberd, draft letter to Kent, 5 July 1714, quoted in Mowl, p. 46.
14 Pope, quoted in John Harris, William Kent, p. 2.
15 The diary continues into 1715 and briefly mentions 1717. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of
Painting & Archit.’, ff. 1–36.
16 De Man, p. 81.
17 Listing all his master’s expenses, including over 70 while they were in Venice, Edward
Jarrett, Coke’s treasurer and valet, provided an alternative account of their journey with
a slightly different chronology. Jarrett, ‘Account of Thomas Coke’s Grand Tour’. Refer to
James, p. 189.
18 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 13.

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19 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 3.

20 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ f. 14.
21 Brindle, p. 100; Hunt, William Kent, p. 26; Sicca, ‘On William Kent’s Roman Sources,’
p. 140.
22 Kent, letter to Burrell Massingberd, 12 October 1715, quoted in Hunt, William Kent,
p. 140.
23 Kent refers to his principal painting commission in Rome, the ceiling of San Giuliano del
Fiamminghi, a baroque church designed by Antonio Maria Borioni, one of Gian Lorenzo
Bernini’s assistants. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.’, f. 24.
24 Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting & Archit.,’ ff. 25–36.
25 Panini is sometimes referred to as Pannini. Cereghini, p. 320.
26 Mayor, ‘The Bibiena Family,’ pp. 35–37.
27 Marshall, p. 140; Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 110; Wixom and Linsey, p. 263;
Wunder, p. 54.
28 Cereghini, p. 320.
29 As well as painting on his own, Annibale Carracci collaborated with his brothers
­Agostino and Ludovico, who Kent mentions. Kent, ‘Remarks by way of Painting &
Archit.,’ f. 5.
30 John Harris, ‘Architectural and Ornamental Draftsman’, p. 155; John Harris, ‘­William
Kent’s Drawings at Yale,’ pp. 143–144; John Harris, William Kent, p. 13; Hunt,
­William Kent, pp. 41–42; Kitson, p. 29. Roethlisberger, Claude Lorrain. The Paintings,
vol. 1, p. 37.
31 The first French reference to the picturesque appears in Roger de Piles’ codification
of pictorial order Cours de peinture par principes, 1708, which was translated into
­English as The Principles of Painting, 1743.
32 Shenstone, quoted in Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, p. 26; Kames, vol. 2,
p. 327; Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, pp. 43–44.
33 The term ‘landscape’ initially referred to land managed and cultivated by an agrarian
community. Expanding its meaning, by the sixteenth century it also referred to a picture
of nature and in the eighteenth century it was further applied to a prospect of actual
nature.
34 Whately, p. 1.
35 Whately, p. 147.
36 Peacock, pp. 174–177, 314–322.
37 Gregory, p. 5, 10. Refer to Harrison, p. 215.
38 Vanbrugh, pp. 231–232.
39 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, quoted in Vanbrugh, p. 232.
40 Morris refers to Pope’s satirical poem The Dunciad, which was first published
a­ nonymously in 1728 and appeared in its complete, expanded form in 1743.
­
David B. ­Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 275.
41 Pope, An Essay on Man, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, pp. 174–175.
42 Pope, 6 December 1730, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 165.
43 Pope, An Essay on Man, 1745 frontispiece, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander
Pope, p. 165.

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44 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605, quoted in David B. Morris, Alexander

Pope, p. 165, refer to pp. 166–172.
45 Batey, Alexander Pope, pp. 47–48; David B. Morris, Alexander Pope, pp. 157–159.
46 Langley, pp. 193, xv. Refer to Watkin, ‘Built Ruins’, pp. 8–9.
47 Brindle, p. 109, no. 145; Gordon, pp. 71–72.
48 Kent, letter to Burlington, 28 November 1738, quoted in Tipping, p. 209.
49 In an unpublished analysis of Rousham written in 1902, Frances Elizabeth Cottrell
­Dormer refers to the statue as Antinous, implying that the family accepts this attribu-
tion. It has also been suggested that the statue is of Apollo or Mercury. Cottrell Dormer,
p. 38. Refer to Coffin, ‘The Elysian Fields of Rousham,’ pp. 416–418; Hunt, ‘Verbal
and Visual Meanings in Garden History,’ p. 179; Mowl, p. 241; William White, letter to
Sir Clement Cottrell, quoted in Gordon, p. 65; William White, letter to General ­Dormer,
29 November 1739, quoted in Müller, p. 185; William White, quoted in Gordon,
p. 102; Michael Wilson, William Kent, p. 214; Woodbridge, p. 289.
50 ‘Letter from John Macclary’, 1750, in Batey, ‘The Way to View Rousham by Kent’s
Gardener,’ pp. 127–132.
51 Addison, in Addison and Steele, vol. 2, 25 June 1712, no. 414; Walpole, The History
of the Modern Taste in Gardening, p. 43.
52 Whately, pp. 245, 242–243.
53 Clary is sometimes referred to as MacClary or Macclary, his original surname, which
he shortened when he realised that Clary was the surname of a seventeenth-century
landowner at nearby Steeple Aston. ‘Letter From John Macclary,’ in Batey, ‘The Way
to View Rousham by Kent’s Gardener,’ p. 129. Refer to Buck, pp. 132–136; Hunt,
‘Landscape Architecture,’ p. 382.
54 Addison, vol. 4, The Tatler, 21 January 1709, no. 123, pp. 131–133. Refer to
­Woodward, ‘Catalogue’, p. 19; John Martin Robinson, Temples of Delight, pp. 86–87.
55 Addison, quoted In Nicolson, p. 319.
56 Kent, 30 January 1720, quoted in Hunt, William Kent, p. 51.
57 Pope, quoted in Batey, Alexander Pope, p. 103.
58 William Mason, The English Garden, 1811, quoted in Batey, Alexander Pope, p. 103.
59 Thomas Birch’s 1751 edition of Spenser’s poem was published three years after Kent’s
death.
60 Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. William Kent, p. 33.
61 Caleb D’Anvers (a pseudonym for Nicholas Amhurst) or Henry St John, first Viscount
Bolingbroke, 1735, quoted in Hunt, ‘Landscape Architecture,’ p. 374.
62 Hunt, William Kent, pp. 64–65.
63 Wu, p. 21.
64 Whately, p. 131. Refer to Hetzler, pp. 51–55; Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, pp. 256, 262.

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 4
speaking ruins
 sp e ak in g r uins

Architetto veneziano

The fascination for ruins developed through a dialogue between disciplines

and nations. Painters informed philosophers, writers stimulated ­architects
and Italy inspired Grand Tourists. The influence of British empiricism on
­eighteenth-century European thought was extensive, stimulating a­ ppreciation
of nature and its relations with architecture. The principal texts of Locke,
­Shaftesbury, Burke, Kames and Whately were translated into French and
­German soon after they first appeared in English. But just as Kent was the
principal exponent of the early eighteenth-century picturesque, Giovanni
­Battista Piranesi was largely responsible for the fascination for ruins coming
to fruition as a design practice.
Styling himself architetto veneziano, Piranesi emphasised that he was first
an architect, even though he built little and a Venetian even when in Rome.
In Venice, he had studied Palladian architecture with Matteo Lucchesi (his
uncle) and Giovanni Scalfarotto, who were colleagues in the Magistrato della
acque, the state organisation responsible for Venetian sea defences, and thus
conscious of parallels with the monumental public structures of ancient Rome.1
Piranesi acquired an understanding of Roman history from his elder brother,
a Carthusian monk, and studied etching and perspective with Carlo Zucchi.
Within this cultural milieu, he was aware of the influence of the Venetian Carlo
Lodoli and the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, who were indebted to ‘their com-
mon master, Francis Bacon,’ writes Joseph Rykwert.2 Lodoli advocated ancient
Roman architecture, rational ornamentation and the English landscape garden.
Equally appreciative of ancient Rome, Vico exemplified a newly analytical at-
tention to history and also recognised imagination as a means to understand
the past in Scienza nuova, which was first published in 1725 and revised in
1730 and 1744. Cultural exchange with Vienna ensured the impact on Venice
of Fischer von Erlach’s comparative compendium Entwurff, Einer Historischen
Architectur, 1721, which includes detailed archaeological reconstructions and
his own designs.
More than any other eighteenth-century Italian city, Venice successfully en-
couraged cultural tourism, developing a strong trade in the veduta and capriccio,
of which Piranesi became a skilled exponent. Rather than distinct, these two
techniques—the documentary record of an existing site and the imaginary juxta-
position of diverse architectural and archaeological forms—were creatively interde-
pendent. The capriccio’s popularity was partially indebted to Hypernerotomachia

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Poliphili, 1499, which was published in Venice, where its author Colonna was
a resident. Referring to the Venetian ‘tradition of ruins in a landscape,’ Peter
Murray remarks that one of Colonna’s woodcut illustrations, depicting receding
layers of broken arches and columns among lush vegetation, ‘explains a lot about
­Piranesi.’3 Two centuries after Colonna, Marco Ricci and Canaletto were influen-
tial in Venice, while Panini was the most noted exponent of the capriccio in the
first half of the eighteenth century.
Piranesi studied stage design with Giuseppe and Domenico Valeriani, who
admired Bibiena, Troili’s pupil and Panini’s tutor. One of Piranesi’s most in-
fluential drawing series, the Carceri, were begun in 1745, first published in
1750 and reissued in 1761, considerably reworked. Employing diagonal stair-
cases to accentuate multiple, oblique perspectives, the Carceri were indebted
to Bibiena, Filippo Juvarra and baroque stage design in general, in which a
prison scene was a familiar theme. Allowing forms to collide, wrap and frame
one another, Piranesi depicted huge arches, massive buttresses and circular
openings in dark, dramatic shadows. Such impressive skill led him to boast
to Pope Clement XIII: ‘It is as easy for me to engrave a plate as it is for Your
Holiness to give a benediction.’4

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Carceri, 1761. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

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Una nouva architettura antica

Piranesi first visited Rome in 1740, aged 20, as a draughtsman accompanying the
Venetian Ambassador’s delegation to Pope Benedict XIV, and soon studied engraving
and etching there with Giuseppe Vasi.5 Making his intentions clear, he incised the
graffito ‘Piranesi 1741’ into Hadrian’s Villa, which received far more antiquarian, archi-
tectural and artistic attention in the eighteenth century than before. In 1747, Piranesi
made Rome his permanent base and frequently returned to Hadrian’s Villa, preparing
preliminary sketches for vedute that emphasised the grandeur of both massive archi-
tecture and brooding, entangled vegetation. In the 1750s, he began to survey the site
with the assistance of Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clérisseau, among others. In
1765, a further graffito highlights the labour required: ‘G. B. Piranesi restudied these
ruins to discover and draw the plan … an almost impossible task because of the great
exertion and suffering it entailed.’6 Piranesi converted a small ruin—a tomb—into
his living quarters for extended visits as he was preparing a substantial account of
the Villa, which was unfinished at his death.7 Piranesi’s decision to live on site was
practical, but it also indicated the poetic potential of an inhabited, monumental ruin.
Continuing Piranesi’s work, his son Francesco published the impressive 1:1000 plan
of Hadrian’s Villa in 1781, which covers six sheets with a total length of over three
metres.8 Piranesi’s analysis of the site surpassed all previous attempts, establishing
him as its most influential interpreter and advocate.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Vedute di Roma, 1770.
Great Baths at Hadrian’s
Villa, Tivoli. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

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If Watkin is correct in speculating that Hadrian conceived his Villa as a ruin,

its eighteenth-century admirers observed a ruin of a ruin, doubling its signifi-
cance. According to Palladio, the ancient Roman ruins’ primary purpose was
to facilitate drawn and built reconstructions. But Piranesi appreciated ruins as
ruins. And more than anyone else, he stimulated the principle that a building can
be designed and constructed as a ruin. Recalling the title of Giuseppe ­Bibiena’s
Architetture e prospettive, 1740, Piranesi’s first publication, Prima parte di ar-
chitetture e prospettive, (First Part of Architectures and Perspectives), 1743,
consists not of diligent reconstructions of ancient monuments but works of the
imagination inspired by ancient ruins, in which he remarks: ‘these speaking ruins
have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of
the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying, though I always
kept them before my eyes.’9 Most of the plates illustrate intact buildings but the
first—the title page—depicts ruins, the catalyst to Piranesi’s architectural imag-
ination. A broken, leaning stone tablet is inscribed with the publication title and
name of the author and surrounded by ruined structures partially covered with
vegetation. When Piranesi later expanded Prima parte, he included more images
of ruined buildings than intact ones, indicating an increasing emphasis.10 An-
other drawing series, first published in 1747 and expanded in later editions, the
Grotteschi depict skeletons among ruins, emphasising that associations between
human, architectural and societal decay and renewal was a recurring theme of
Piranesi’s oeuvre.
Publications on ancient monuments had been familiar since the Renaissance,
but the actual physical structure was usually considered to be less important than
its narrative and iconography, and was frequently depicted without accuracy, con-
text and dimensions. Adding further ambiguity, as ‘eighteenth-century definitions
of “monument” were broad enough to include buildings, sculptures, texts and or-
dinary objects, there was little consensus on what kind of monuments were most
worthy of publication,’ writes Maria Grazia Lolla. Referring to Johann Joachim
Winckelmann’s Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished Ancient Monuments),
1767, she remarks:

What made a monument into a monument worth publishing were its literary allu-
sions and what set his collection above other similar repositories were the author’s
insights into the literary content of monuments and his superior command of the
literature of the ancients.11

Galvanising an alternative approach, the Enlightenment’s concern for empirical

evidence stimulated archaeological investigations and questioned the reverence

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for classical literary sources, which were dismissed as lacking in analytical pre-
cision. While Renaissance humanists prioritised literary sources because they
trusted individual written opinion, antiquarians favoured material remains,
whether a building or a coin, because they valued public testimony. An intact
material remnant was considered to be a reliable record because it ‘could serve as
a primary source, unchanged from past to present,’ while a surviving ancient text
was most likely a copy of a copy, writes Minor.12
As ancient sites were recorded in lavish volumes, archaeological research
and print culture were increasingly interdependent, stimulating each other. The
book-buying public for these volumes was a wealthy, classically educated elite.
The price of a book in relation to an average income was significantly higher
than today, and profusely illustrated, architectural and archaeological books were
particularly expensive. Illiteracy as well as finance limited the readership; school
attendance was minimal and many people could not read.
In studying ancient sites as well as ancient texts, Piranesi employed
­archaeological rigour and humanist scholarship, a combination that was not
unusual among educated architects and patrons but rarely achieved with
such accomplishment.13 The size and complexity of his later publications
required the skills of a number of people, including engravers and printers,
and the degree to which other writers may have assisted him is disputed. But
such collaborations did not diminish Piranesi’s authorship, because as Minor
notes: ‘This was a working method used by scholars all over Europe in the
1700s.’14 Piranesi treated ancient structures and texts ‘as incomplete material
objects’ to be appreciated and appropriated. His publications are ‘marked by
an insistence that everything is a fragment,’ even modern images and texts,
which can be disassembled and reassembled with earlier material to construct
something that is new as well as old.15 Piranesi conceived the four volumes
of Antichità romane (Roman Antiquities), 1756, as a detailed archaeological
record as well as a stimulus to the contemporary architectural imagination,
encapsulating his concern for tradition and innovation in the phrase ‘una
nouva architettura antica.’16 In his dedication to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari,
dated 20 July 1748, in Antichità romane, Piranesi praises ‘the vastness of
a profound and sublime literature,’ probably referring to Longinus’ treatise on
the sublime, which he had studied in Venice after it was translated into Italian
in 1733.17 Through his connections with the French Academy in Rome, it is
likely that Piranesi also read Abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Réflexions critiques
sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 1719, which applied Longinus’ appreciation
of the sublime to the visual arts.18

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Piranesi’s working method was focused and thorough. In preparation for a new
image, he carefully studied and sketched his subject in differing weather and light
conditions, including moonlight. In the preface to Antichità romane, he writes:

When I first saw the remains of the ancient buildings of Rome lying as they do in
cultivated fields or gardens and wasting away under the ravages of time, or being
destroyed by greedy owners who sell them as materials for modern building, I
determined to preserve them forever by means of engraving.19

Piranesi’s depictions of ancient Rome are the most eloquent and memorable exam-
ples of the genre, fuelling travellers’ expectations and informing actual experiences
of ancient sites. Arriving in Rome for the first time, viewers saw not only what was
before them, but also recalled the images that stimulated their visit, and were led
to compare one to the other. Emphasising how widely disseminated images enter
collective memory, Goethe remarked after his first visit to Rome in 1786: ‘Wherever
I go I find something in this new world I am acquainted with; it is all as I imagined,
and yet new.’20 William Beckford commented on the Pantheon in 1780: ‘I was very
near being disappointed, and began to think Piranesi and Paolo Panini had been a
great deal too colossal in their view of this venerable structure.’21 In 1795, the diarist
Joseph Farington recalled the visit to Rome of his friend, the neoclassical sculptor
John Flaxman: ‘and when he came among the ruins of ancient building he found
them on a smaller scale, and less striking than he had been accustomed to suppose
them after having seen the prints of Piranesi.’22 Unable to prevent further decay,
Piranesi represented a ruin at a specific moment in time, preserving its image while
the actual ruin continued to age. But the structures he depicted were often distorted
from reality. Just as Palladio’s drawn reconstructions of ancient sites had inspired
architects and patrons to reimagine ancient Roman architecture for a new era and a
new setting, the desire to recall and repeat Piranesi’s sublime images led architects
to build designs that referred not just to ancient Rome but Piranesi’s ancient Rome,
creating their own versions of his dramatically ruined forms.

Forms from other forms

The Enlightenment’s concern for origins and analysis sometimes led to con-
flicting conclusions. In the mid-eighteenth century, continental journeys and
archaeological investigations drew increasing attention to the ruins of ancient
Greece, stimulating a critical reappraisal of their elemental Doric grandeur.
Viewing the Vitruvian origins of architecture through Enlightenment eyes,

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Marc-Antoine Laugier concluded that the primitive hut is perfect because it

follows the reason inherent in nature and humanity alike, which he depicted
in idealised form as four tree trunks supporting a pediment of branches in the
frontispiece to the 1755 second edition of Essai sur l’architecture, 1753.23
Asserting the primacy of ancient Greece, Laugier concluded that its architec-
ture possessed a simplicity and truthfulness that was lost in ancient Rome.
Adding impetus to this theme in a somewhat less didactic manner, ­Winckelmann
praised ‘the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ of Greek architecture in
Geschichte der Kunst des Altherthums (History of Ancient Art), 1764.24
Winckelmann’s attempt to organise ancient art into historical eras according to
formal criteria was a milestone in the development of art history, but his bias to-
wards ancient texts and ancient Greece limited the effectiveness of his treatise.

Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai

sur l’Architecture, 1753.
Frontispiece to the second
edition, 1755. Courtesy of
RIBA Collections.

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Challenging the assumption that ancient Greek architecture was superior

to that of ancient Rome and a better model for eighteenth-century architecture,
Piranesi published Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani (On the
­Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans), 1761, in direct response to
Allan Ramsay’s anonymous essay ‘Dialogue on Taste’ in The Investigator, 1755,
and especially Julien-David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de
la Grèce, 1758. While Le Roy argued that early Greek architecture developed in
perfect isolation, Piranesi concluded that it depended on cultural exchange and
had been open to improvement. Following Pierre-Jean Mariette’s critical review
of Della magnificenza in the Gazette Littéraire in 1764, Piranesi published a
three-part riposte in 1765, beginning with Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi
sopra la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette. The second part, Parere sull‘architettura
(Opinions on Architecture) involves a dialectical debate between two contrast-
ing architects. Piranesi includes a quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to em-
phasise his opposition to a perfect, originating model and justify his support for
creative reinvention instead: ‘Nature, the great renewer, ever makes up forms
from other forms.’25
Piranesi was indebted to other theorists who critiqued the classical
canon. Notably, Claude Perrault measured ancient Roman buildings and,
identifying no consistent proportions, questioned the absolute authority of
the architectural orders in Ordnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la
méthode des anciens (A Treatise on the Five Orders of Columns in Archi-
tecture), 1683.26 Instead of a formulaic and consistent language, Pirane-
si’s study of ancient sites acknowledged the variety and invention of ancient
Roman architecture and its divergence from Vitruvian principles, offering a
catalyst to e­ ighteenth-century innovation. In reaching this conclusion, he was
also influenced by Venice’s cosmopolitan heritage as a trading Empire, which
combined appreciation of ancient Rome and other cultures, preparing him to
respect complexity and diversity. Piranesi admired Venetian and other Ital-
ian Renaissance architects who, rather than emphasise a singular origin in
ancient Greece, acknowledged the varied influences of differing regions in
pluralist combination. Contending the primacy of ancient Greece, Piranesi
emphasised an alternative lineage derived from Etruscan architecture, which
recalled Alberti’s Ten Books as well as the influence of Lucchesi and Bibiena.27
Ancient Greece constructed columns and lintels, while Etruscan architecture
employed massive stone vaults and walls. Continuing in ancient Rome, ar-
chaic and rustic expression was appreciated as a metaphor for the city’s hon-
esty, directness and strength. Reaffirming this heritage, Alberti appreciated ‘a

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certain rugged air of antique severity,’ while his Florentine contemporaries set
semi-circular arches in massive rusticated walls as in the early and influential
example of Michelozzo di Bartolomeo’s Palazzo Medici, c. 1444.28 The term
opera rustica first appeared in print in Serlio’s fourth book on architecture,
1537, which includes a ‘Diagram of the different kinds of rustic work.’29 In
the Villa Madama, Rome, c. 1516, and Palazzo Te, 1530, respectively, Raph-
ael and Guilio Romano conceived the wall as a three-dimensional sculpted
element and contrasted finely chiselled and roughly hewn stone to emphasise
the dialogue between artifice and nature. These qualities are less evident in
Palladio’s designs, but rusticated walls and arches appear at the centre of the
principal façade of Villa Pisani, Bagnolo di Lonigo, 1542. Representative of
his later villas, roughly hewn stone is relegated to the rear façade of Villa Fos-
cari, La Malcontenta, 1560, while columns and a pediment sit at the centre
of the front façade.30
Piranesi’s preference for ancient Roman architecture and its Etruscan heritage
led him to emphasise massive walls and arches and not elegant columns and
lintels. He employed a number of strategies to emphasise and exaggerate the
monumentality of ancient Roman architecture. Often choosing a low viewpoint,
Piranesi illustrated sturdy components and materials, either depicting an ancient
structure under construction or in partial ruin. Usually ignoring familiar building
materials such as brick and concrete, he depicted ruins of solid stone and not just
a layer of marble cladding. Exposing the construction sequence that was previ-
ously concealed within a structure, ruination was a means to excavate and reveal
temporal layers and not simply destroy them. Rather than empty, he dotted the
ruins with figures that reflect the diversity of eighteenth-century life, diminutive
against the architecture’s vast scale. Reflecting the grandeur of his subject, he
produced prints of size and complexity unmatched by his predecessors or con-
temporaries. Piranesi concluded that a monumental ruin exemplified the majesty
and emotive power of architecture more eloquently even than a complete building
because it indicated not only the destructive force of nature, but also heroic resist-
ance to decay and the continuing relevance of ancient forms, which he depicted
as broken and denied of absolute authority, and thus a greater stimulus to the
imagination.
Ruination is evident in the method as well as the subject of Piranesi’s
images, as he innovatively combined engraving and etching with dry point,
burnishing, rubbing and scraping. The older technique of engraving requires
a sharp, hard, metal implement to incise lines into a softer metal surface. In
etching, a metal plate is first covered with an acid-resistant wax. The artist

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scratches lines into the wax to complete a drawing before the plate is dipped
in acid, which cuts into the exposed metal surface. After the remaining wax
is cleaned away, the plate is next covered with ink and then wiped clear so
that only the incisions contain ink. A high-pressure printing press transfers
the inked lines to paper. Piranesi appreciated ‘copper, as this is the metal
that resists the injuries of time.’31 But each plate can only be used a limited
number of times until it starts to wear and fade and the printed lines become
crude. As the plates eroded, Piranesi sometimes reworked the incisions so
that further prints could be made, darker than the originals, until the plates
were no longer viable.
Piranesi’s practices as an archaeologist and an etcher-engraver were anal-
ogous in that they both excavated a material surface, one to better reveal or
reconstruct a structure that had succumbed to ruination and the other to generate
an image of such a site. As these techniques and processes were well known in
the eighteenth century, the conjunction of memorialisation and ruination in the
subject and the method of Piranesi’s etchings were understood and appreciated.
As a monument to an artist, ink printed on paper may outlast a copper plate or a
marble structure, or perish like a life or a reputation.

A past, present and future Rome

Ancient Roman ruins appear in many of Piranesi’s etchings, but none was more
thoughtfully considered than the Forma Urbis Romae, c. 203–211 AD. A plan
of ancient Rome, with the outlines of streets, squares and buildings incised into
a grid of 150 marble slabs at 1:240 scale, was originally displayed on a wall of
the Forum Pacis and held in place by iron clamps. The surviving fragments were
rediscovered in 1562, and Giovanni Battista Nolli was commissioned to reas-
semble and display them on the walls of the Capitoline Museum’s main stairway
in 1741, a process in which Piranesi was involved.32 As the remains of a once
entire artefact, the Forma Urbis is analogous to a single ruin, while as a collec-
tion of excavated ruins it is comparable to the scattered remains of the ancient
city. In its exhibited state, it is a juxtaposition of gaps as well as a juxtaposition
of fragments. The viewer is tempted to interpret the surviving fragments and,
guessing what is missing, reconstruct or make anew the gaps, the relationship of
one element to another and the whole plan. Eyes roam backwards and forwards,
and up and down and between the fragments and the gaps in a manner analo-
gous to the way a body occupies a building or a city, forming an understanding
through movement.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

Giovanni Battista P
­ iranesi,
Le Antichità romane,
1756–1757, vol. 1. Plan
of Rome based on Forma
Urbis Romae, c. 203–211
AD. Courtesy of UCL Library
Special Collections.

Depicted in Antichità romane, the Forma Urbis influenced Piranesi’s Il

Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma (The Field of Mars of Ancient Rome), 1762,
an erudite, bilingual publication in Italian and Latin dedicated to one ancient
site. Located outside the original city boundary, the Campus Martius was
named after Mars, the god of war, and as Palladio remarks: ‘Here they used
to have musters and other military events.’33 Although subject to flooding in a
low-lying bend of the Tiber, the flat plain was deemed suitable for large public
buildings. The river meanders diagonally across the Ichnographia, Piranesi’s
master plan of the site, which features contrasting monumental structures and
includes more of the city than is normally associated with the Campus Martius.
Piranesi appreciated Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, which appears
to rise directly from the water. Referring to Campo Marzio, Pier Vittorio Aureli
remarks: ‘It is not difficult to imagine what sort of spectacle would be produced
when the area flooded—hundreds of monumental complexes would emerge
from the water like islands.’34
Piranesi collaborated on a reduced version of Nolli’s epic Nuova pianta de
Roma, 1748, and benefitted from the research.35 But it is likely that Campo
Marzio is a critique of the city depicted in Nolli’s plan in which irregular, urban
blocks are confined within a pattern of streets and squares and absorbed into the
city as a whole.36 In Campo Marzio’s aerial Scenographia, the ancient structures

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Il

Campo Marzio dell’ Antica
Roma, 1762. Ichnographia,
Louis Kahn’s own copy.
Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn
Collection, University of
Pennsylvania and the
Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission.

are shown in their ruined state and entangled by vegetation. But all superfluous,
later buildings are removed so that the ruins stand in juxtaposed magnificence,
affirming Piranesi’s urban concept.
Piranesi chose not to include some monumental structures in the
­Ichnographia such as the Aurelian Wall, AD 270, and incorporated others from
differing times such as the Mausoleum of Hadrian and the earlier Amphitheatre of
Statilius Taurus, which was constructed in Augustus’ era and destroyed in Nero’s
reign. In conclusion, Susan M. Dixon remarks: ‘These chronological inconsist-
encies, these anachronisms, would have been known by any reader of Il Campo
Marzio, for they are narrated in the accompanying text.’37 Wary of criticism, his
opening dedication identifies two specific influences on the reimagined Campo
Marzio: ‘Before anyone accuses me of falsehood, he should, I beg, examine the

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ancient (Marble) plan of the city … he should examine (the Villa) of Hadrian at
Tivoli’.38 Palladio ignored Hadrian’s Villa, but Piranesi applied it to the ancient
city. Depicting a city of juxtaposed, monumental forms, Campo Marzio is an
imaginary reconstruction of past Rome, a critique of present Rome and a propo-
sition for future Rome.39
Assembled on six panels that together measure 1.35 × 1.17 metres, the
Ichnographia appears as if it has been excavated and exhibited like the Forma
Urbis, presenting the illusion of an incised plan held in place by metal clamps
on an imaginary wall, with shadows indicating the marble’s broken edges.40
Continuing the illusion, a part of the Ichnographia copied from the Forma Urbis
is drawn in the same manner as one that is conjectural. But the Ichnographia’s
status as a new work is evident in Piranesi’s dedication to Robert Adam, who had
encouraged the plan’s development.
It is likely that Piranesi’s model was the Forma Urbis as it appeared in 1741
as much as the ancient city it depicts. The juxtapositions within and between the
surviving fragments inspired him, as did their means of display. The fracture and
excavation of the ancient plan ensured that the once complete forms incised into
its surface were broken instead. The Ichnographia depicts entire forms, but each
has a distinct composition and scale and an ambiguous, fractured juxtaposition
with its neighbours, so that the whole design can be understood as a ruin as well
as a construction.

Piranesi as architect

Due to the fame and influence of his images, Piranesi’s fascination for ruins is
usually associated with his activity as an engraver and an author, but it is also
evident in his other practices to differing degrees. Serving a thriving trade stim-
ulated by the Grand Tour, Piranesi was a dealer in antiquities. Created for Sir
William Hamilton and named after his nephew, George Greville, second Earl of
Warwick, the monumental Warwick Vase is nearly two metres high and about
two metres in diameter. In his catalogue, Vasi, candelabra, cippi, sarcophagi,
tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi, 1778, Piranesi claims that the Warwick
Vase is ‘the perfection of the arts in the age of Hadrian.’41 It includes fragments
excavated from Hadrian’s Villa around 1770, but they constitute less than a
third of the total object. Despite the contemporary fascination for ruins, collectors
preferred the appearance of entire rather than broken artefacts, and Piranesi
imaginatively assembled new and antique fragments—salvaged or excavated

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from ancient Roman sites—into a convincing, seamless whole with no distinc-

tion between ancient and modern. The Warwick Vase does not display the for-
mal, spatial and temporal juxtapositions apparent in Piranesi’s engravings and
publications.
In 1761, Piranesi relocated his studio and showroom from a site oppo-
site the French Academy in Palazzo Mancini to a more prestigious setting, the
­Palazzo Tomati, close to the Convent of Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the church
high above Piazza di Spagna. A visitor’s description in 1770 indicates that
­Piranesi’s sensibility for fragments and ruins continued in his home, which was
also known as his museo and juxtaposed the numerous objects, books, images,
antiquities and artefacts of his domestic and working life: ‘The Cavalier’s house
is really the most Curious thing that Ever was Seen, I really Wonder it does
not Tumble down, the Landlord with reason has Entered a Protest in Case of
Accidents.’42
As an architect, Piranesi built little. In the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome,
he designed the funerary monument to his friend James MacDonald, a Scottish
Baronet who died of malaria in 1766, aged just 24, after travelling to Naples
earlier that year with the novelist Laurence Sterne. In ­mid-eighteenth-century
Rome, Catholic funerary monuments were mostly placed in churches, while an
open-air burial was reserved for other faiths, including Protestants. ­According
to Pinto, the monument’s ‘location and context’ informed the design, which
recalls ancient Roman ‘milestones and columnar markers’ and stands just
50 metres from the Pyramid of Gaius Cestius that Piranesi depicted a num-
ber of times.43 The austere monument consists of a square travertine plinth
supporting a plain, reused Roman column, which is encircled by two tabulae
­ansatae—votive tablets with dovetail handles—that form a projecting stone
band divided into two. From a distance, the two halves appear the same, but
on closer inspection there is a clear hierarchy. One tablet contains the dedi-
cation, while the other is blank, so that the viewer faces the inscribed tablet
and sees the looming Pyramid beyond, which is incorporated into Piranesi’s
design as a backdrop. The MacDonald monument’s square plinth and circular
column are in dialogue with the larger funerary monument, evoking the ge-
ometric purity of ideal forms. Piranesi’s design continues the ancient tradition
in which a broken column symbolises death, doing so in an abstract rather
than a literal manner as the top of the column is smooth not rough. A broken
column to a broken life, the MacDonald monument combines ancient and
modern elements to stand as a pristine, new ruin alongside an ancient ruin.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

MacDonald Monument,
Non-Catholic Cemetery,
Rome, 1766, with the
Pyramid of Gaius Cestius in
the background. Courtesy of
Jonathan Hill.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Detail of MacDonald Monu-
ment, Non-Catholic Ceme-
tery, Rome, 1766. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek.

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It is possible that Piranesi received few building commissions because he was

not Roman, but this had not hindered many architects from the Italian peninsular.
Promoting a fellow Venetian, the wealthy Rezzonico family were among his prin-
cipal patrons. In 1758, Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico became Pope Clement XIII. Six
years later, he commissioned Piranesi to design the new sanctuary at San Giovanni
in Laterano, Rome, but the project was not constructed. Also in 1764, the Pope’s
nephew Monsignor Giambattista Rezzonico, Grand Prior of the Knights of Malta and
later a Cardinal, asked Piranesi to redesign Santa Maria del Priorato, which was
completed in 1766, like the MacDonald monument a short walk away. After his
death on 9 November 1778, Piranesi was buried in his only completed building.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Piazzale dei Cavalieri di
Malta, Rome, 1766. The
enclosing wall with obelisks
and monuments. Courtesy
of Izabela Wieczorek.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Piazzale dei Cavalieri di
Malta, Rome, 1766. The
entrance screen. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek.

Nolli’s plan of Rome depicts the Order’s complex of buildings immediately to

the south of the Tiber on the Aventine Hill at the periphery of the city. An avenue of
seventeenth-century laurel trees leads north to frame the distant dome of St Peter’s.
Further within the complex, the existing church is on the site of Piranesi’s replace-
ment. Piranesi also designed the expansive entrance forecourt, the Piazzale dei
Cavalieri di Malta, which is defined by a high wall on three sides. Commemorative
monuments and obelisks rise above the wall as massive sculptural elements, mak-
ing adjacent people seem diminutive. Although they are symmetrically disposed,
the monuments and obelisks recall the tombs along the Via Appia in ancient Rome
and the wall of sarcophagi and urns close to the Villa Corsini, which all appear
in Antichità romane.44 In comparison to the muscular structures surmounting
the wall, Piranesi’s new entrance screen on the north side of the square is crisply
ornamented, planar and flat. Its arched, central gateway meets the southern end
of the avenue of trees, revealing and celebrating the view of St Peter’s for those
permitted to enter. No other properties are accessed from the forecourt and there
are no other openings in the three sides of the surrounding wall.45 Together, the
entrance screen, empty forecourt, blank wall and overscaled monuments generate
an austere, silent and expectant grandeur equivalent to an empty stage.
As the new church was built on the site of an earlier one, Piranesi considered
exposing and exhibiting the diverse ruined fragments uncovered during construc-
tion, but they do not appear in the completed design.46 The planar surface and flat-
tened ornamentation of the church façade is reminiscent of the entrance screen.47
In contrast, the interior is sculptural, notably the altar. From the entrance to the altar,
the successive changes in floor level are reminiscent of Venetian churches and not

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The front of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

Roman ones, which emphasise spatial continuity instead. Also unusual in Rome,
the raised high altar sits significantly forward of the apse. Noting a disregard for
structural and spatial coherence ‘in the Roman tradition,’ Rudolf Wittkower writes:

Piranesi, by contrast, breaks the traditional continuity because he has primarily

the subjective optical experience of the beholder in mind. Once again this points
to Venice, to Palladio and to Longhena who were intent on scenographic relation-
ships from space to space.48

Upon entering the church, the visitor is drawn to the altar, which is illuminated
by ‘the large window in the centre of the apse, an utterly un-Roman feature,’ con-
tinues Wittkower.49 As the roof lantern is small, the apse window is the principal
light source, but it is at first unseen, concealed behind the altar it illuminates.
Clerestory windows also light the church, but the two bays closest to the altar are
left blank to accentuate the light from the apse window. Facing the congregation,
the base of the altar consists of superimposed forms reminiscent of ancient sar-
cophagi with a central, elliptical oculus and reliefs depicting the Madonna and
the Lamb of God. Completing the composition, an upper sarcophagus supports
an exuberantly sculptural depiction of The Apotheosis of St Basil of Cappadocia
drawn to heaven on a globe surrounded by angels and putti.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The elliptical
oculus in the front of the
altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The chamber
and passage within the base
of the altar, with the organ
currently blocking the
arched opening in the altar’s
rear elevation. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

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Within the base of the altar, the elliptical oculus leads to a small chamber
and a low, narrow passage decorated with a Maltese cross that terminates in a
lintel and an arched opening in the altar’s rear elevation. Piranesi’s preparatory
drawings are ambiguous in that they alternatively show the oculus as light or
dark.50 Photographs consistently depict the oculus as a black void, and an organ
currently blocks the arched opening in the rear elevation of the altar. But if the
organ is absent, light from the apse window passes within and through the altar
so that the oculus illuminates St Basil from below, accentuating his elevation from
earth to heaven. Emitting an easterly morning light, the low altar oculus mirrors
the one high above the doorway in the entrance façade, which casts a westerly
evening light.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. The rear of
the altar. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

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The strong east light invites the viewer to visit the rear of the altar, which is
comfortably forward of the curved apse wall. In juxtaposition to the public front of
the altar, which is encrusted with figures and seen in silhouette and shadow, the
apse window brightly illuminates the rear of the altar, revealing the pure, monu-
mental globe resting on the equally bare sarcophagus and stepped drum. Accord-
ing to Manfredo Tafuri, the altar equates to the dialogue between two contrasting
architects in Parere sull‘architettura in which ‘the author does not take sides, but
offers instead an agonising dialectic.’51

The light coming from the apse directly illuminates the back of the altar, accentu-
ating its hallucinating geometricism … As the hidden face of the altar, as a con-
cealed aspect to be discovered, in contrast with the triumphal exhibition of the
recto, the verso of the altar of the Priorato reveals completely the internal dialectic
of Piranesi’s ‘virtuous wickedness’. What is given as evident, as an immediate
visual stimulus from a common point of view, reappears purified, rendered pure
intellectual structure, on the reverse side, on the hidden side.52

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with a side
column. Courtesy of Izabela
Wieczorek/Sovereign Order
of Malta.

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The church is small, but such a prestigious commission would have sug-
gested marble decoration. Piranesi chose stucco instead, and an account book
indicates that the altar was completed to his satisfaction.53 Studied close from
the sides, the stucco decoration seems to continue around the altar. Piranesi’s
innovation is only apparent when the altar is seen fully from the rear in the
direction of the light, maybe as though the sun had bleached the stucco orna-
mentation and rendered the forms abstract. But the ornamentation does stop
consistently. The figures of Saint Basil, the angels and the putti are sculpted
in equal detail on all sides and the supporting decorative corbels continue
around the base of the altar. The globe is bare, and the ornamentation stops
sharply on the sides of the upper sarcophagus so that its rear face is blank.
Beneath, the sequential layers of stucco ornamentation on the stepped drum
do not stop suddenly in a hard vertical line but come to a halt in differing
ways. Some cease abruptly, while others break off in ‘mid-sentence’ or peter
out gradually. The lines inscribed into the altar’s monochromatic stucco sur-
face recall those incised in metal or wax and printed on paper in Piranesi’s
best-known medium. The altar is open to question and imaginative interpre-
tation. Is it nurtured or bleached by the light, sculpted or etched, unfinished
or ruined?

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar with the
apse window. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

Santa Maria del Priorato,
Rome, 1766. Detail of the
rear of the altar. Courtesy of
Izabela Wieczorek/Sovereign
Order of Malta.

Tafuri associates Piranesi with ‘the concept of architecture as ambiguous

­object … The observer becomes more and more the user who gives meanings to
the object or to the series.’ Identifying the origin of the ambiguous object in the
picturesque and citing the influence of William Kent, John Soane and N
­ icolas Le
Camus de Mézières, he concludes: ‘Architecture, from absolute object, becomes
in the landscaped context, relative value: it becomes a medium for the description
of an edifying play.’54 Tafuri’s remarks have a critical edge: ‘the disappearance of
the object hasn’t been replaced by a critical behaviour … The critical attention is
absorbed by involving the observer in a sort of mere game.’55 Observing ­Piranesi’s
ruinous world, Tafuri concludes that the eighteenth century condemned architec-
ture to ambiguity and incoherence—‘a universe of empty signs is a place of total
disorder’—that came to define ‘the entire Modern Movement.’56 But we should
not mourn the loss of a universal symbolic language with stable, specific ­meanings
that need no discussion. Ambiguity allows the imagination to roam, to ‘insensi-
bly lead to subjects, far distant perhaps from the original thought,’ as Whately
remarks of ruins.57 Rather than the ‘total disorder’ of ‘empty signs,’ P
­ iranesi em-
phasises the potential of his imagination and that of viewers to ­construct multiple,
alternative meanings, some personal and others shared.
As an engraver, an author, a restorer and an architect, Piranesi appreciated
the diversity of ancient architectures as an invitation to the contemporary imag-
ination. Responding to the stagnant economy and limited demand for grandeur

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and innovation in the Rome of his era, Piranesi concludes in Prima parte: ‘there
seems to be no recourse than for me or some other modern architect to explain
his ideas through his drawings.’58 Undoubtedly, Piranesi’s principal influence is
due not to the publications he authored, the objects he restored or the struc-
tures he designed, but the ruins he engraved, stimulating in others the desire
to construct a building as a monumental ruin. Understanding Piranesi’s work
collectively, however, it is possible to see the scalar and the thematic connections
between the illusion of entirety in a restored object, the juxtaposition of reconfig-
ured structures in a new plan of old Rome, the accumulation of fragments in a
publication dedicated to the imagination and the dialogues between emblematic,
unfinished, abstract and absent elements in a building. Piranesi suggests that the
whole is a ruin even if the forms are complete, and implies a design strategy that
combines ruination and construction, composed and fractured spatial relations,
broken remains and entire forms.

Notes

1 As the biographical details of Piranesi’s early life are uncertain, this is a plausi-
ble ­summary. Bevilacqua, ‘The Young Piranesi’, pp. 13–21; Cellauro, ‘Carlo Lod-
oli’, pp. 213–216; Cellauro, ‘New Evidence’, pp. 285–286; Consoli, pp. 195–210;
­Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 145–146, 247–258, 260–261, 275–276; Mayor, Piranesi,
pp. 1–6; ­Naginski, pp. 182–190; Rosenfeld, pp. 74–79; Pinto, Speaking Ruins,
pp. 45–49; Robison, pp. 9–15; Rykwert, The First Moderns, pp. 316–317.
2 Rykwert, First Moderns, p. 312.
3 Colonna, p. 238; referred to in Murray, p. 17.
4 Piranesi, quoted in Jacques-Guilluame Legrand, ‘Notice historique sur le vie et les
­ouvrages de J.-B. Piranesi,’ 1799, manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and
translated in Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 375.
5 Ambassador Francesco Venier was an early pupil of Lodoli. Cellauro, ‘New Evidence,’
pp. 279–287; Consoli, pp. 195–210; Rosenfeld, pp. 74–79.
6 Piranesi, quoted in Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ p. 467.
7 McCarthy, p. 672; Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ pp. 466–475; Pinto, Speaking
Ruins, pp. 150–155.
8 The plan is entitled Pianta delle fabriche esistenti nella Villa Adriana. MacDonald and
Pinto, pp. 246–265; Pinto, ‘Piranesi at Hadrian’s Villa,’ pp. 468–471.
9 Piranesi, ‘Original Text,’ p. 117. Refer to Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, p. 45; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, p. 4.
10 Robison, pp. 12–14, 65–112; Wendorf, pp. 166–168.
11 Lolla, pp. 432, 434, refer to pp. 436–437.
12 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 112.

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 sp e ak in g r uins

13 Kantor-Kazovsky contends that Wittkower’s 1938 essay ‘Piranesi’s ­Architectural

Creed’ ignores Piranesi’s debt to humanism and associates him with the Enlighten-
ment as a precursor ‘of modern rationalism and functionalism’ as well as romanti-
cism. ­Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 13–17, 20–21, 70–71, 78, 121; Wittkower, ‘­Piranesi’s
­Architectural Creed,’ p. 240. Refer to Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument,
pp. 42–43; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 109–112; Yourcenar, ‘The Dark Brain of
Piranesi,’ pp. 88–128.
14 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, p. 64, refer to pp. 54–55, 60–63.
15 Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 9, 80–91.
16 Piranesi, Antichità romane, quoted in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 8.
17 Piranesi, Antichità romane, translated by Pamela Stewart and quoted in Rosenfeld,
p. 87.
18 Rosenfeld, pp. 89–90; Rykwert, The First Moderns, p. 385.
19 Piranesi, Antichità romane, quoted in Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi, p. 35.
20 Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 104. Refer to Connerton, pp. 72–73; Cooper, pp. 107–108.
21 Beckford, vol. 1, p. 189. Refer to Cooper, p. 114.
22 Farington, p. 444. Refer to Cooper, p. 113.
23 Essai sur l’architecture was first published in English as An Essay on Architecture,
1755. Vitruvius, pp. 38–39, refer to pp. 13–16, 102–106; Laugier, pp. 128–129.
Refer to Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, p. 105.
24 Kantor-Kazovsky emphasises Laugier and Winckelmann’s debt to Pierre Jean Mariette’s
Traité des pierres gravée, 1750. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, pp. 327–339.
Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 30–35.
25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, quoted by Piranesi and translated in Pinto, Speaking ­Ruins,
p. 89. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 204–205; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words,
pp. ­125–142; Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 26–28; Wilton-Ely,
Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 87–89.
26 Translated into English in 1708. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 232–242.
27 Alberti, pp. 158–159. Refer to Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 146–147, 155, 176–177;
­Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 10–11; Wittkower, ‘Piranesi’s Architectural Creed,’
pp. 236–238.
28 Alberti, p. 192.
29 Serlio, quoted and discussed in Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 156–161, pl. 41.
30 Kantor-Kazovsky, pp. 167–168.
31 Piranesi, c.1756–1757, quoted in Minor, ‘Engraved in Porphyry,’ p. 130, refer to pp.
129–132; Robison, pp. 24–32; Rosenfeld, pp. 56, 84–85; Wendorf, pp. 176–177.
32 Bevilacqua, pp. 25–26; Connors, pp. 79–80; Dixon, ‘The Sources and Fortunes of Pira-
nesi’s Archaeological Illustrations’, p. 473; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 102–105.
33 Palladio, in Hart and Hicks, p. 68.
34 Aureli, pp. 137–138.
35 Bevilacqua, pp. 22–24; Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 53–54.
36 Aureli, p. 138; Connors, pp. 74–78; Dixon, ‘The Sources and Fortunes of Piranesi’s
Archaeological Illustrations,’ p. 473.

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 sp e ak ing r uins

37 Dixon, ‘Illustrating Ancient Rome,’ p. 120.

38 Piranesi, Campo Marzio, translated in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 144.
39 Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 29–38. Refer to Aureli, pp. 114, 138.
40 The same illusion of a plan incised into marble and held in place by metal clamps
appears in Piranesi’s plan of Hadrian’s Villa, 1781.
41 Piranesi, Vasi, candelabra, cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi,
translated in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 130, refer to pp. 127–129.
42 Thomas Jenkins, letter to Charles Townley, 12 December 1770, quoted in Bignamini
and Hornsby, vol. 1, p. 319. Refer to Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words, pp. 1–4.
43 Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 92.
44 Körte, pp. 16–33; Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 95, 115–117.
45 A short passageway off the forecourt leads to a further gated entrance to the Order’s
complex of buildings.
46 Diario Ordinario, 1765, referred to in Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 76.
47 Wilton-Ely, ‘Quella Pazza Libertà di Lavore a Capriccio’, pp. 63–69.
48 Baldessare Longhena designed Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, which was begun in
1631 and completed later in the century. Wittkower, ‘Piranesi as Architect,’ p. 255,
refer to p. 253.
49 ‘Noting many “north Italian parallels,”’ Wittkower mentions the window behind the altar
in Filippo Juvarra’s Church of Sant’Uberto, Venaria Reale, near Turin, 1729. Wittkower,
‘Piranesi as Architect’, p. 255.
50 Stampfle, p. 49, pl. 51, p. 111, pl. A5, refer to pp. xi, xv, xxiv–xxv, xxxii; Wittkower,
‘Piranesi as Architect’, p. 252.
51 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, p. 28.
52 Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 48–49. Refer to Kirk, pp. 268–269.
53 The stuccatore was Tommaso Righi. Refer to Pinto, Speaking Ruins, pp. 77–81; Small;
Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer, pp. 86–119; Wittkower, ‘Piranesi as
Architect’, pp. 250–251.
54 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 84, 82.
55 Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, pp. 94–96.
56 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, p. 19; Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture,
p. 84. Refer to Tafuri, ‘The Wicked Architect,’ pp. 39–43, 53–54.
57 Whately, p. 154.
58 Piranesi, ‘Original Text,’ p. 117.

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 5
ruin and rotunda
 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam of Dowhill

Scotland’s leading architect in the first half of the eighteenth century, William
Adam, also established the nation’s largest building firm and was a supplier
of building materials with warehouses in Leith, Edinburgh’s port. But in an
era before industrialisation, land ownership remained the principal indicator
of status, wealth and influence, and he came from just a minor landed family.
Professional and commercial success enabled William to purchase an estate
near Kinross in 1731 within a day’s journey from Edinburgh, to which he
added a new house later that decade. In 1740, he acquired the adjacent
Dowhill Castle to the north, adding both land and history to his estate. Em-
phasising his enhanced status, William associated his family with his estate
by renaming it Blair Adam, while his second son styled himself ‘Robert Adam
of Dowhill’ after he inherited the northern section of the estate on his father’s
death in 1748.
Built on a hill overlooking Loch Leven, the oldest part of Dowhill Castle was
an early sixteenth-century square tower.1 Sketched in pen and ink when Robert
Adam was just 16, Capriccio of a partially ruined tower on a small island or
isthmus, 1744, depicts a similar Scottish scene with a square castellated tower
and a single arched bridge connecting the island to the land.2 Ruins featured in
many of Adam’s sketches at this time. He also copied works by Ricci, Rosa and
Gaspar Dughet among others, developing his drawing skill and appreciation of the
picturesque interdependence of architecture and landscape in which Kent was
so accomplished.3 On a tour of England in 1750, Adam visited the gardens at
Richmond that Kent had created for Queen Caroline and sketched the Hermitage
there. Admiring the design, he acquired Kent’s sketch Arcadian Hermitage with
Satyr and Shepherdess, c. 1730.
William Adam’s most prestigious commission was to extend Hopetoun House
for Charles Hope, first Earl of Hopetoun, in 1721. Malcolm Bruce designed the
original building, having introduced classical architecture to Scotland in the
1690s along with James Smith. Aged just 20 when his father died, Adam and
his elder brother John continued their father’s practice, including further work at
Hopetoun House. William Adam owned an extensive architectural library, which
‘presented the Adam brothers with a conservative view of Italian classicism,
glossed by that of France,’ Scotland’s historical ally, writes A.A. Tait.4 Scotland
was an architectural backwater in comparison to England; its classical buildings
were mediocre and few in number. Despite the union of 1707, baroque architec-
ture and ­Palladianism were slow to spread northwards.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Bob the Roman

By 1754, the practice’s success enabled Adam to accumulate capital of £5,000

and cover anticipated expenditure of over £800 a year while on the Grand Tour.
Leaving Edinburgh on 3 October 1754, he arrived in London a week later, where
he spent over a week meeting friends and acquaintances, including Pembroke’s
collaborator Roger Morris. Travelling to France and then Brussels, he joined the
party of the Hon. Charles Hope, second son of the first Earl of Hopetoun and
brother of the second earl. Together, they proceeded on to Italy.5
Arriving in Florence on 30 January 1755, Adam was very fortunate to
meet Clérisseau. As a reward for winning the prestigious Prix du Rome in Paris,
­Clérisseau had enrolled at the French Academy in Rome in 1753, where he stud-
ied with Panini, who focused such attention on ruins. Appreciating its importance
to his future career, Adam’s response to the meeting was immediate and enthusi-
astic. In a letter to his brother James, he remarks: ‘I have found a gentleman who
I am to carry to Rome with me, who will put me on a method of improving myself
more in drawing and architecture than I ever had any ideas of.’6 In another letter,
he praises ‘Clérisseau who draws in architecture delightfully in the free manner I
wanted.’7 A diary entry indicates that Adam’s fascination for ruins preceded his
visit to Italy, acknowledging ‘a most valuable and ingenious creature called Cléris-
seau who draws ruins in Architecture to perfection.’8 Travelling south together,
they arrived in Rome on 25 February 1755. Within a month, Adam wrote to
his sister Peggy: ‘I am antique mad … I hope to invent great things … that’s my
ambition.’9 Intoxicated with the ancient city, he soon chose the nickname ‘Bob
the Roman.’10
Travelling with an aristocrat helped Adam present himself as a gentleman on
the Grand Tour, but he left Hope’s party soon after their arrival in Rome.11 Hope
was 45 in 1755, while Adam was 27 and closer in age to a typical Grand Tourist.
A gentleman on the Grand Tour travelled with a tutor and servants. General ar-
chitectural and artistic knowledge was a part of the curriculum, which may have
included instruction in drawing. Occasionally, an aristocrat such as Pembroke
designed buildings, but it was more typical for a wealthy traveller to acquire
understanding and expertise necessary to a patron rather than an architect, af-
firming Shaftesbury’s conception of the virtuoso as an enlightened influence on
culture and society.12 The Grand Tour was an invaluable and exclusive education,
but its pleasures were not exclusively refined, as Pope waspishly remarked: ‘Led
by my hand, he sauntered Europe round, / And gather’d ev’ry Vice on Christian
ground.’13

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam, Trompe l’œil

showing five drawings of
ruins composed as if they
are on overlapping sheets of
paper, c. 1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

According to Frank Salmon, ‘the standard itinerary’ for a gentleman on the

Grand Tour emphasised ‘movement between Italian cities at different times of the
year to take advantage of climatic conditions and to witness particular festivals.’14
In contrast, a visiting artist or architect travelled less due to the need to limit ex-
penditure and acquire specific artistic skills. Possible sources of income included
offering drawing lessons, acquiring antiquities for sale or acting as a guide and an
agent for a patron who wished to establish an important collection. Painters and
sculptors were more likely than architects to obtain commissions for work while in
Italy. For architects, connections made with potential patrons were most beneficial
on their return to Britain, which might lead to a commission for a house to display
a collection acquired on the Grand Tour. To gain recognition, British architectural
students entered competitions such as the Concorso Clementino organised by the
Accademia di San Luca in Rome. But gentlemen did not enter professional com-
petitions and Adam avoided them. Despite their disparity in wealth and standing,
the term ‘Grand Tour’ is applicable to both types of traveller, because their shared
purpose was to acquire knowledge and status that would prove invaluable on
their return home, one as a patron and the other as a practitioner.

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 r uin and r o t unda

In Rome, Adam formulated both an architectural style and a cultured per-

sona, so that they would appear synonymous and inseparable. His dilemma was
to further his architectural studies in private while appearing as a fashionable and
enlightened gentleman in public. Adam resided at Casa Guarnieri, a reputable
address near Piazza d’Spagna. In October 1756, while planning a trip to Frascati,
he mentioned that he would take ‘my Clerisseau, my Chariot, my Cook, and my
Valet de Chambre alongst with me.’15 Concerned that his evident skill would
reveal his professional status, Adam remarked soon after arriving in the city:

If I am known in Rome to be an architect, if I am seen drawing or with a pencil in

my hand, I cannot enter into genteel company who will not then admit an artist
or, if they do admit him, will very probably rub affronts on him in order to prevent
his appearing at their card-playing, balls and concerts.16

Warning his family and friends to ‘avoid putting the word Architect on the back of
letters’, he asked instead that they address their correspondence to ‘Robert Adam
Esquire’ or ‘Robert Adam Gentilhomme Anglois.’17
Adam began to compile a collection as soon as he arrived in Rome, em-
phasising his status as a gentleman to Grand Tourists and Italian residents. The
collection was profitable, in that many pieces were acquired and later sold. But its
principal purpose was to underpin his architectural credentials when he returned
to Britain, establishing a catalogue to inspire and furnish future designs:

I must write Johnnie and Jamie after and tell them how I am getting models
made of all the Antique ornaments of freezes, cornishes, vases etc. in plaster,
which I am to send to Scotland. How I am employing painters, drawers etc. to do
the fountains, the buildings, the statues and the other things that are of use for
drawing after and for giving hints to the imagination of us modern devils. How I
am buying up all the books of architecture, of altars, chapels, churches, views of
Piranesi, and all the gates, windows, doors and ornaments that can be of service
to us. In short how I intend myself to send home a collection of drawings of Cléris-
seau’s, my own, and our myrmidons which never was seen or heard of either in
England or Scotland before.18

Instructed in landscape drawing by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, Adam remarked

that Laurent Pécheux’s lessons in figure drawing were ‘absolutely requisite …
without which an Architect cannot ornament a building. Draw a Basrelievo
or a Statue.’19 For two years, he studied with Clérisseau, his principal tutor,

117
 r uin an d r o t un da

sketching ancient buildings and Renaissance ones, too. Of Casa Guarnieri, he

remarked: ‘I have got my friend Clérisseau lodged in the next room to mine
where we are very convenient as we sit and draw in one and others’ rooms or
amuse ourselves as is most agreeable to us.’20 Maybe reflecting on his enjoyable
experiences there, he later contrasted the British to the French: ‘Accustomed by
habit, or induced by the nature of our climate, we indulge more largely in the
enjoyment of the bottle.’21

Clérisseau’s ruin rooms

Referring to Clérisseau’s obsession and principal source of income, Adam re-

marked that ‘to draw his ruins by which he lives.’22 Clérisseau depicted known
ruins and settings, known ruins in imaginary settings and imaginary ruins in
imaginary settings drawn from his extensive knowledge of actual places. His
most distinctive commission was to transform a room at the Monastery of Santis-
sima Trinità dei Monti, the church high above Piazza di Spagna where Claude is
buried. Drawn in black ink, brown wash, gouache and watercolour, Clérisseau’s
design sketches for the walls and ceiling of the trompe l’œil ‘Ruin Room’ were
executed with little adjustment and much admired by Piranesi. Entered off a
long, wide internal corridor, Clérisseau’s design depicts an antique temple that
has settled into a state of gentle ruination and partial reconstruction, fit for the

Charles-Louis Clérisseau,
Design for the Ruin Room of
the monastery (now
­convent) of ­Santissima
Trinità dei Monti, Rome,
c. 1766. Courtesy of
­Fitzwilliam Museum,
University of Cambridge/
Bridgeman Images.

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 r uin and r o t unda

inhabitation of a hermit in a benign climate, with warm shadows cast by a pale

blue sky. The physical window in the west wall provides the only natural light
and an actual majestic view across rooftops towards the dome of St Peter’s,
which was of architectural and religious significance to the friars who occupied
the room. Everything else is a painted illusion. In the afternoon sun, the con-
trasting glare of the window fuses with the soft, painted light of the interior. The
entrance door and window shutters appear as though they are made of rough
timber boards and crude iron hinges. The ceiling is a crumbling coffered vault
with gaping holes and exposed timbers. On the south wall, a parrot perches on a
timber beam beneath which a broken wall provides a view onto nearby trees. An
arched opening on the east wall frames a high building on a distant hill. As the
west wall permits an actual urban vista and is otherwise painted to appear solid,
the room’s hilltop setting seems to be at the edge of the city and the country. A
bunch of lemons on the north wall and a vase of flowers on the east wall imply
that someone is still in residence. On the south wall, the bookcase includes a
volume by Isaac Newton, alluding to the inhabitants’ occupation. According to
Thomas J. McCormick:

It is not surprising that mathematicians of the caliber of Le Sueur and Jacquier

should have commissioned Clérisseau to paint such a room for them. Their inter-
est in mathematics and in architecture led Jacquier to measure the Colosseum,
and both to collaborate on a study of the dome of St. Peter’s. So Clérisseau’s
plausible re-creation of the architecture of an ancient temple would appeal to
them as it did to Winckelmann.23

Clérisseau first met Cardinal Alessandro Albani, the leading patron and collec-
tor, in February 1755, enabling Adam to see him soon afterwards. Albani most
likely introduced Clérisseau to Winckelmann that year, two years after the German
art historian’s arrival in Rome and another two before he became the Cardinal’s
­librarian. In a letter dated 29 January 1757, Winckelmann remarks that ‘a French
architect is my good friend but he has disassociated himself from his nation in
order not to feel ridiculous.’24 Winckelmann described Clérisseau as ‘the best ar-
chitect’ in 1763 and appreciated his assessment of History of Ancient Art, 1764,
offering to adjust the next edition accordingly.25 Winckelmann helped Clérisseau
to acquire the commission for the Ruin Room, as well as an unexecuted design
for the noted antiquarian Abbé Filippo Farsetti at Santa Maria di Sala near Venice,
which Clérisseau conceived as a landscape of ruins reminiscent of his sketches
of Hadrian’s Villa. Writing to Clérisseau in 1767 after he had returned to Paris,

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Wincklemann praised the design’s authenticity and appreciated its dialogue be-
tween entire and ruined elements, remarking that it:

seemed to me the portrait of an antique monument rather than a composition in

the same manner. I very much hope for you and for him that the noxious modern
air that you are going to breathe does not invade your new productions … I see
again always with new pleasure and even with illusion the large model of the ruin
which will be at the end of the vista from the house.26

Winckelmann’s support and Albani’s friendship with Clérisseau led to the con-
struction of a ruined temple at the Villa Albani, Rome, to Carlo Marchionni’s
design in c.1760. Situated in an isolated section of the garden and housing
an aviary, the ruined temple had a roughly hewn rusticated base from which a
spring emerged. The square fluted columns on the side porticoes recalled the
Ceremonial Precinct at Hadrian’s Villa. But Marchionni’s principal model was the
fourth-century Temple of Clitumnus near Spoleto in central Italy, which Adam
had drawn in 1755.27 Its pediment severely broken, the replica was even more
ruinous than the ancient Roman original.

To breath the antient air

Soon after he entered Rome, Adam met Clérisseau’s friend Piranesi, whose stu-
dio was then opposite the French Academy’s base in Palazzo Mancini. According
to John Wilton-Ely, French support for the primacy of ancient Greece encouraged
Piranesi to ‘swiftly abandon his former contacts with the French Academy in
Rome … in favour of visiting architects from Britain … with their more pragmatic
viewpoint.’28 In the summer of 1755, Adam recounted a journey with ‘Signor
Piranesi and Monsieur Clerisseau to see the ancient thermae or baths of Cara-
calla, the ruins of which are most magnificent,’ and they also visited Hadrian’s
Villa together.29 Adam characterised Clérisseau, Piranesi and Pécheux as his
‘three friends cronys and Instructors’ but identified contrasting temperaments30:

Without Clerisseau I should have spent several years without making the progress
I have done in one fourth of the time. The reason is evident, the Italians have at
present no manner of taste, all they do being more French than anything else.
­Piranesi who may be said, alone to breath the Antient Air, is of such dispositions as
barrs all Instruction; His Ideas in locution so ill ranged, His expressions so furious &
fantastick. That a Venetian hint is all can be got from him, never anything fixt, or
well digested. So that a quarter of an hour makes you Sick of his Company.31

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 r uin and r o t unda

Giovanni Battitsta P
­ iranesi,
Blackfriars Bridge, ­London,
under construction,
1766. Courtesy of RIBA
Collections.

But Adam and Piranesi continued to be friends and colleagues, sharing many
interests. For example, their appreciation of scenographic effects was indebted to
baroque theatre, including Bibiena’s innovations, which influenced the develop-
ment of the picturesque notably due to Kent’s studies in Rome. British admiration
led Piranesi to be recognised as ‘a most ingenious architect’ and elected an hon-
orary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1757, to his considerable pleasure.32
Acknowledging the support and appreciation he had received from British archi-
tects and patrons, Piranesi remarked in 1778 that if he had lived outside Italy he
would have chosen London.33 According to Salmon, the ruin studies:

of British architects visiting Italy for a few years and seeking a vocabulary of
form for their working careers at home were not the same as for those long-term
Roman residents, such as Piranesi, and few seem to have entered fully into the
intellectual antiquarianism of eighteenth-century Rome.34

But in June 1755, Adam wrote to his sister Peggy that Piranesi:

is become immensely intimate with me & as he imagined at first that I was like
the other Englishes who had love for Antiques without knowledge, upon seeing
some of my Sketches, & Drawings, was So highly delighted that he almost ran
quite distracted, & says I have more genius for the true noble Architecture than
any other Englishman ever was in Italy.35

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Emphasising Piranesi’s genuine respect, an inscription to Adam appears among

the monuments along the Via Appia in the frontispiece to the second volume of
Antichità romane, 1756. In June 1755, Piranesi mentioned that he would ded-
icate his next plan of ancient Rome to Adam. Visiting his friend in April 1757,
Adam saw the Ichnographia in preparation, and in a letter to his sister Helen
described the various dedications to him:

To Robert Adam Britain, Patron of Architecture, This plate of Campus Martius

is dedicated by John Batista Piranesi. Then on a frieze above is a medal, where
Fame points to a piece of architecture and leans on my shoulder in the attitude of
going off to proclaim my praises. Round the medal is this inscription: Robert Adam
Architect, Member of the Academy of St Luke at Rome and of Florence and of
the Institute of Bologna—all in Latin. In another medal Piranesi has put my head
and his own joined, forming a Janus or double-faced head, with both the names
of the dedicator and the dedicated on it, but this was not finished when I saw it.36

With only minor revisions to this account, the dedications appear in Campo
Marzio, which Adam supported with a generous advance payment towards its
publication.37 Further dedications in the title page and Scenographia also refer to
Adam, who asked to be mentioned in the preface too. In a subsequent visit just
before leaving the city, he was happy to read ‘many very handsome compliments
as to the extraordinariness of my genius and the unblemished probity of my
character that envy durst not dare attack.’38 Adam corresponded with Piranesi
after he left Rome and appreciated their continuing association. According to
Damie Stillman:

Before his arrival in Rome and his encounter with Piranesi, Adam was already
excited by antiquity and grandeur; Piranesi heightened this excitement, but he
did not create it. Similarly, a number of the ideas propounded by Piranesi in the
mid-1760s were anticipated by Adam or were developed concurrently … Yet
if Adam was the beneficiary of Piranesi’s influence, he was also important to
­Piranesi. For Adam was a practicing—and highly successful—architect whose
work demonstrated the merit of a good part of Piranesi’s theory.39

Piranesi subscribed to Adam’s major publications Ruins of the Palace of the Em-
peror Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, 1764, and The Works in Architecture
of Robert & James Adam, which was published in five sequential parts between
1773 and 1778 when it appeared as a single volume, with a further volume pub-
lished in 1779. Piranesi contributed four engravings of Syon House to The Works.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Mostly written by James Adam but overseen by his elder brother, the preface
to the 1773 edition was indebted to James’ unfinished and unpublished 1762
essay on architectural theory, which was prepared while he was in Rome and
influenced by Piranesi.40 Acknowledging their respective status, James remarked:
‘You may assure Bob, I shall pardon him for superior merit. I am much less
ambitious than Caesar, I am contented to hold second place.’41 The Works em-
phasises Jones’ role in stimulating a classical revival in English architecture, but
concludes that the Palladian model is too literal and restrictive, stifling architects’
invention.42 Instead, the brothers state that reverence for ancient Rome should
inspire a comparable spirit of invention in contemporary architecture:

The great masters of antiquity were not so rigidly scrupulous, they varied the
proportions as the general spirit of their composition required, clearly perceiving,
that however necessary these rules may be to form the taste and to correct the
licentiousness of the scholar, they often cramp the genius and circumscribe the
ideas of the master.43

In contrast to the assumed lack of creativity of Jones and Wren, they write that:

Vanbrugh understood better than either the art of living among the great … But
his lively imagination scorned the restraint of any rule in composition; and his
passion for what was fancifully magnificent, prevented him from discerning what
was truly simple, elegant, and sublime.44

For all the brothers’ criticism of formulaic designs, there were limits to their taste.
They appreciated creative invention within the formal vocabulary of ancient
Rome, and Vanbrugh was chastised for diverging too far from this model.
Once again indebted to Piranesi, the brothers appreciated the monumental
vaults, domes and apses of Roman architecture in the second to fourth centuries
AD. The Works promoted a massive, windowless architecture more appropriate to
public buildings than private houses:

The frequent, but necessary, repetition of windows in private houses, cuts the
façade into minute parts, which render it difficult, if not impossible, to preserve
that greatness and simplicity of composition, which by imposing on the imagina-
tion, strikes the mind.45

Designs that feature such massive, monumental expression in plan, section and
elevation include the Assembly Rooms, Bath, c. 1765, but the idea was original in
mid-eighteenth-century Britain and no such public buildings were constructed.46

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The Works depicts designs for major public and private buildings as entire struc-
tures. But Adam’s appreciation of ancient sites stimulated a concern for the ruin as
well as the reconstruction. Fabricated ruins were admired in early eighteenth-­century
Britain and known to Adam before he arrived in Rome, as in Kent’s ­Richmond
­Hermitage. But Piranesi undoubtedly deepened his fascination for the ruin as a model
for design. Many of Adam’s Italian design sketches depict ruined buildings, and a
significant number combine intact and ruined forms within a single structure.47
Stimulated by the Enlightenment’s concern for origins, major excavations
began at Herculaneum in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748. Founded in 1732, the
Society of Dilettanti resolved ‘That a Roman dress is thought necessary for the
President of the Society’ in 1741, and financed Robert Wood’s visit to the ancient
Roman city in modern-day Syria that led to The Ruins of Palmyra, 1753.48 Mir-
roring the need for precision in the natural and biological sciences, archaeological
investigations stimulated demand for accurate, measured drawings as a means
to compile detailed records and aid comparative analysis within and between
ancient sites. Wood lived on the floor below Adam at the Casa Guarneri. But in
1757, influenced by Piranesi, Adam described Wood’s ‘taste’ as ‘hard as Iron
and false as Hell,’ implying that he lacked any feeling for the creative expression
of ancient Roman architecture and its relevance to contemporary architecture.49
As the Society of Dilettanti turned its attention to ancient Greece, two of its mem-
bers, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, published The Antiquities of Athens,
vol. 1, 1762, in which Stuart argues that ‘all the most admired Buildings which
adorned the Imperial City, were but imitations of Greek Originals.’50 In the 1775
frontispiece to The Works, Greece appears below Italy to emphasise its status as
the root of classical architecture.51 But Adam had little interest in the post and
the lintel construction of ancient Greece and did not visit Athens, which remained
under Ottoman control. Ancient Rome was by far the greater influence on his
architecture. Again following Piranesi’s example, he acknowledged the Romans’
debt to the Etruscans, further undermining the influence of ancient Greece.52
Beginning with Jones and continuing with Burlington, British architects and
patrons had identified Palladio as the heir to ancient Rome and the faithful inter-
preter of its architecture. But surveying ruins studied by Palladio such as the Baths
of Caracalla and Diocletian, Adam questioned the accuracy of his drawn reconstruc-
tions. In a letter to James Adam in September 1756, he remarked that Palladio was
‘most faulty in many things and very unjust over his measurements, not so much in
the plans as in the sections and elevations’. Damningly, he concluded that Palladio
had ‘done many things by fancy where there were remains enough to point out the
truth’.53 In April 1757, just before he left Rome, Adam remarked of one survey:

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my Baths are now all completed and to be sure it has cost me a deal of trouble
and plague. Now I must begin to write the description of it, being determined, in
imitation of Scotch heroes, to become author, to attack Vitruvius, Palladio and
those blackguards of ancient and modern architecture, sword in hand.54

His dismissive criticism of Palladio was tinged with self-promotion. Questioning

Palladio’s invention as an architect and accuracy as an archaeologist, Adam im-
plied that he instead was the rightful heir to ancient Rome. Despite such criticism,
Adam’s mostly open-minded approach allowed him to not only prioritise ancient
Rome, but also learn from the Renaissance and Baroque as well as Palladio and
Palladianism.
An early and influential publication, Antoine Desgodtez’ Les Edifices antiques
de Rome, 1682, had helped to disprove the assumption that ancient Roman
architects adhered to a system of precise and consistent architectural proportions.
But contrary to its subtitle—dessinés et mesurés trés exactement—Desgodtez’
study was criticised for inaccurate measurements and misleading reconstruc-
tions. Employing Clérisseau and four assistants, Adam proposed a new edition to
­surpass Desgodtez. Work began in 1755, but was curtailed after a year due to
the vast scale of the endeavour.55 In early 1757, Adam wrote elegiacally of his
time at the Casa Guarnieri:

I am sorry to think of leaving this place where I have lived so happily with many
agreeable and good friends, unmolested by kirk or state, esteemed and respected
by all good people and hated and envied by the wicked and villainous only; mas-
ter of myself, with a proper mixture of application and amusement and constant
improvement in my own business in the most elegant and lordly way.56

Leaving Rome in May 1757, Adam was still determined to undertake a substan-
tial archaeological project before he returned to Britain, selecting the Emperor
Diocletian’s Palace on the Dalmatian coast because it was in good condition, little
known and easily accessible in the Venetian territories of the eastern Adriatic.
Arriving there on 22 July 1757, he was pleased to see ‘how little justice former
descriptions and unskillful drawings had done to it.’57 Proclaiming the profession-
alism of his survey, Adam remarked:

we were just five weeks at Spalatro and (during that time) four people were
constantly at work, which is equal to twenty weeks of one person. Mr Wood was
but 15 days at Palmyra and had but one man to work for him—judge then the
accuracy of such a work!58

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Adam’s team included Clérisseau, Agostino Brunias and Laurent-Benoît Dewez. Not-
ing that they were British, French, Italian and Belgian, respectively, Pinto ­concludes:
‘Such an international cast of characters provides an indication of how Rome
­functioned as an entropôt for the exchange of ideas about art and architecture.’59
Clérisseau’s contribution was substantial. He helped to measure and draw
Diocletian’s Palace, sketch perspectives, supervise engravers and prepare the
subsequent publication. In the introduction to Ruins of the Palace of the ­Emperor
Diocletian, Adam writes that he ‘prevailed on’ Clérisseau, ‘whose taste and knowl-
edge of antiquities I was certain of receiving great assistance in the ­execution
of my scheme, to accompany me in this expedition.’ But the ‘French artist’ is
acknowledged as an agreeable, educated companion and not a significant
­contributor.60 Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian is credited to one
author: Robert Adam. After Adam aborted his early written draft, his first cousin
William ­Robertson, the eminent historian and principal of the Edinburgh Univer-
sity from 1762, completed the introduction without credit, while Adam supplied
the commentary on the plates. The text is written in the first person as though
Adam is the author, and he undoubtedly retained overall control of the publication
that carries his name. Its premise is clearly stated:

The buildings of the Ancients are in Architecture, what the works of Nature are
with respect to the other Arts; they serve as models which we should imitate, and
as standards by which we ought to judge: for this reason, they who aim at emi-
nence, either in the knowledge or in the practice of Architecture, find it necessary
to view with their own eyes the works of the Ancients which remain, that they may
catch from them those ideas of grandeur and beauty, which nothing, perhaps,
but such an observation can suggest.61

The publication’s purpose was to establish Adam’s reputation as an expert in an-

cient Roman architecture and an architect capable of convincingly furthering its
legacy. Earlier, eighteenth-century architects had focused on the civic and religious
architecture of classical antiquity and Adam was the first to prepare a detailed
study of an ancient Roman house for a British readership. As a grand, imperial res-
idence, the Palace offered an enticing model for aristocratic patrons who wished to
draw analogies between ancient Rome and modern Britain. That Adam was known
to be preparing such a book was already advantageous, and he was busy with
commissions by the time it was published with an impressive list of subscribers.
In comparative engravings, the same elevation is depicted in reconstructed
and ruined states, one above the other on a single plate, as in the South Wall of

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the Palace.62 The ruins are shown without all the later structures then on the site, Robert Adam, Ruins of
and the reconstructions are also creative interpretations. Adam implies that these the Palace of the Emperor
drawings—the reconstruction and the ruin, in both instances presented without a Diocletian at Spalatro in
setting—can be understood as designs ready to be translated to a British context. Dalmatia, 1764, plate 8.
Elevation of the South Wall
of the Palace depicted as
To breath the antient air in Britain reconstructed and ruined.

Early in his career, Adam identified a potential rival in William Chambers, who
was a less innovative designer but became the principal threat to his pre-­
eminence among British architects. Half a decade Adam’s senior, Chambers
arrived in Rome five years earlier and was also tutored by Clérisseau, although
they did not become close. In 1751, a year into his studies in Rome, Chambers
prepared a design for a mausoleum in Kew Gardens in response to the premature
death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who he had met before leaving Britain. A wa-
tercolour perspective shows the mausoleum as an intact rotunda surrounded by
four obelisks with no hint of decay.63 It is unclear if a watercolour section, dated
1752, depicts the mausoleum as a future ruin or a fabricated one, because the
rotunda’s interior is unaffected by age while the exterior is broken and over-
grown with vegetation. In 1759, soon after his return to Britain, Chambers built
a ruin indebted to ancient Rome in the gardens at Kew belonging to Augusta,
Frederick’s widow. The Ruined Arch has a practical function in that it facilitates
two paths, one under the arch and the other above it. Also at Kew, Chambers
designed an approximation of a ten-storey Great Pagoda, 1762, adorned with
dragons. The dialogue between Europe and China began in the early seventeenth
century when Jesuit priests encountered Confucian scholars at the imperial court

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in Beijing, which led to the introduction of linear perspective to Chinese drawings

and paintings. Trade with China ensured that ideas and artefacts spread from
one continent to another and Chinese gardens were cited as an inspiration for
picturesque landscapes.64 As an employee of the Swedish East India Company,
Chambers twice visited Canton in the 1740s before he became an architect, and
he later authored Designs of Chinese Buildings etc., 1757, and A Dissertation on
Oriental Gardening, 1772, falsely assuming that Chinese gardens included ruins.
A linear conception of time predominates in Western philosophy, although there is
some awareness of a cyclical conception of time, as in the seasonality of farming
guides. Familiarly conceived in terms of dualisms and the new replacing the old,
Western philosophy comprehends a temporal and physical distinction between a
monument and a ruin. But this is meaningless in traditional Chinese philosophy,
which understands contraries as interrelated and mutually supportive and time as
cyclical in terms of birth, life and death.65 Wu Hung notes: ‘There was indeed an
unspoken taboo against preserving and portraying architectural ruins: although
abandoned cities or fallen palaces were lamented in words, their images, if actu-
ally painted, would imply inauspiciousness and danger.’66 Accordingly, ‘the an-
cient Chinese perception of ruins’ did not rely on the conception ‘of ruins in the
European Picturesque tradition, but instead depended on the notion of erasure:
frequently it was the “void” left by a destroyed timber structure that stimulated a
lament for the past’.67 Plants and rocks rather than ruined buildings appeared in
Chinese paintings and gardens; appreciation of a withered tree represented decay
not in terms of ‘finality’ but as ‘a chain of perpetual transformation.’68 Chambers’
error may have been genuine, probably because he misinterpreted rundown struc-
tures as deliberate creations, but his appreciation of Chinese gardens furthered
the cult of ruins, which he extended to wasteland, suggesting that quarries and
excavations ‘could easily be framed into vast amphitheatres, rustic arcades, and
peristyles’ or ‘might be converted into the most romantic scenery imaginable, by
the addition of some planting, intermix’d with ruins.’69 Paradoxically, cultural and
commercial exchange between Europe and China introduced the Western concep-
tion of ruins to Chinese art and architecture, ‘which ceased to be a self-contained
cultural system and was brought into a global circulation of images.’70
Writing to James Adam in July 1756, Adam was already concerned that his
significant debt to Clérisseau would undermine his reputation in Britain, and sug-
gested that they should pay his tutor a retainer to keep him preoccupied:

The travelling scheme you see keeps him distant some years so that he can
neither interfere nor eclipse the first flash of character and after that is over he
comes secretly like a thief in the night and no one regards him.71

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In August 1756, Adam repeated his concern that Clérisseau’s arrival in ­Britain
‘would be the worst of politicks for my character, as Chambers and etc would not
be idle in saying he can do nothing by himself it is Clerisseau that does all.’72
Having accepted an annual retainer of £100, Clérisseau agreed to wait in Italy
until his tutorship was required again, which occurred when James Adam ar-
rived in 1760 for a three-year study.73 On his return to Britain in January 1758,
Adam’s collection included artworks, books, drawings and ‘all the antique orna-
ments that I am to use in my architecture’, while he also brought along his two
principal draughtsmen in Rome, Brunias and Dewez.74 Adam chose to settle in
London not Edinburgh because England’s wealthy, aspirational and appreciative
patrons offered greater scope for his ambitions.
Descended from a Norman family, the Curzons had lived at Kedleston since
the twelfth century and were the grandest Tory family in eighteenth-century
­Derbyshire. In 1749, aged 23, Nathaniel Curzon made a month-long trip to
France, Belgium and the Netherlands, but there is no indication that he visited It-
aly despite his fascination for classical antiquity.75 He succeeded his father as MP
for Derbyshire in 1754 and inherited Kedleston on his father’s death in November
1758, becoming the fifth Baronet. Curzon admired Holkham Hall, which was only
then nearing completion to Kent’s design, although construction had commenced
in 1734. Kent had died in 1748, and Curzon commissioned Holkham’s supervis-
ing architect Matthew Brettingham Sr to design a new house at Kedleston, replac-
ing a Queen Anne design. Palladio’s unbuilt drawing for the Villa Mocenigo, which
concludes the second of The Four Books, inspired Brettingham’s design for a
central block with four pavilions at its corners as at Holkham.76 Just two of Kedle-
ston’s pavilions were built. In 1759, Brettingham supervised the construction of
the family pavilion, while James Paine was responsible for the subsequent kitchen
pavilion. Recounting their first meeting in December 1758, Adam remarked that
Curzon had been ‘struck all of a heap with wonder and amaze’ by his drawings:

Everything he converted to his house and every new drawing he saw made him
grieve at his previous engagement with Brettingham. He carried me home in his
chariot about three o’clock and kept me to four o’clock seeing all said Brettingham’s
designs and asked my opinion. I proposed alterations and desired he might call them
his fancies. I went back on Saturday evening at six o’clock and sat two hours with
him … I revised all his plans and got the entire management of his grounds put into
my hands, with full powers as to temples, bridges, seats and cascades, so that as it
is seven miles round you may guess the play of genius and scope for ­invention—a
noble piece of water, a man resolved to spare no expense, with £10,000 a year,
good-tempered and having taste himself for the arts and little for game.77

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Robert and James Adam,

Section of the New Design
for Sir Nathaniel Curson
Baronet at Kedleston/From
North to South, 1760.
Drawn by a member of
the Adams’ office, possibly
by Agostino Brunias, with
the ‘now Lord Scarsdale’
inscription added by William
Adam. Courtesy of Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.
In 1760, Adam was given responsibility for the design of the house as well as
the park.78 Construction was mostly complete by 1765. Entering Kedleston Hall from
the north, the columned Marble Hall—top-lit and over 12 metres high—leads to the
Saloon, where the view to the south is secondary to the view up towards the coffered
dome, which is nearly 13 metres in diameter and culminates in a circular oculus
about 19 metres from the floor. This sequence is clearly expressed in Adam’s North
to South Section through the Marble Hall and Saloon, which was drawn in 1760 and
dedicated to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, who was ennobled as the first Baron Scarsdale
on 9 April 1761. Listing Scarsdale as a subscriber, Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of
the Emperor Diocletian distinguishes between two important rooms, the atrium and
vestibulum, which were models for the Marble Hall and Saloon, respectively:

From the Porticus we enter the Vestibulum which was commonly of a circular
form; and in the Palace it seems to have been lighted from the roof. It was a sa-
cred place, consecrated to the Gods, particularly to Vesta (from which it derived
its name) to the Penates and Lares, and was adorned with niches and statues.
Next to the Vestibulum is the Atrium, a spacious apartment, which the Ancients
considered as essential to every great house. As the Vestibulum was sacred to
the Gods, the Atrium was consecrated to their Ancestors, and adorned with
their images, their arms, their trophies, and other ensigns of their military and
civil honours. By this manner of distributing apartments, the Ancients seem to
have had it in view to express, first of all reverence for the Gods, who had the
inspection of domestic life, and in the next place, to testify their respect for
those Ancestors to whose virtues they were indebted for their grandeur.79

Keen to encourage visitors, Curzon built an inn on his estate and prepared a
1769 guidebook, in which he acknowledges the Saloon’s principal influences,

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describing it as the ‘Dome of the Ancients, proportioned chiefly from the Pantheon
at Rome and from Spalatra,’ meaning the vestibulum there.80
Commissioned by Hadrian in the second century AD on the site of an earlier
circular building from Agrippa’s reign, the Pantheon was first a temple to all the
Roman gods and then converted into a Christian church in 608 AD.81 The di-
ameter of the dome and height of its apex are both around 43 metres, while the
central oculus is approximately 10 metres in diameter and open to the elements.
When Raphael chose to be buried there in 1520, no other famous person was en-
tombed in the Pantheon and it was still subject to flooding from the Tiber. Raphael
stimulated other eminent architects, painters and sculptors to be commemorated
there, and niches were introduced throughout the circumference of the church in
1731, appearing in Panini’s many depictions of the interior.82 The Pantheon that
Adam observed in 1755 soon after arriving in Rome was, therefore, a monument
to ancient Rome, the Roman Catholic Church and individual achievement:

The greatness and simplicity of parts fills the mind with extensive thoughts,
stamps upon you the solemn, the grave and the majestic and seems to prevent
all those ideas of gaiety or frolic which our modern buildings admit and inspire.83

Robert Adam, Kedleston

Hall, 1765. The Saloon,
looking north. Courtesy of
National Trust Images/Paul
Barker.

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Robert Adam,
­Kedleston Hall, 1765.
The apse and dome in the
Saloon. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Chris Lacey.

In the Saloon—Kedleston’s Pantheon—the four doorways facing north, south,

east and west are each surmounted by a pediment. Between the doorways, tall
alcoves recall Curzon’s precedents, the Pantheon and Diocletian’s vestibulum.
Each alcove terminates in a hemispherical vault with a curved diamond-shaped
pattern that diminishes in size vertically, accentuating the alcove’s height and
directing the viewer’s attention upwards. More elaborate than the one proposed in
Adam’s North to South Section, the decorative pattern is derived from the Temple
of Venus and Rome in the Roman Forum, which Palladio depicts as the ‘Temples
of the Sun and the Moon’ in The Four Books.84
Holkham’s Statue Gallery displays ancient Roman sculptures from the first
and third centuries AD, including Ceres, goddess of the harvest; Diana, goddess
of the hunt; Faunus, god of the forest; and Neptune, god of the sea. Adam’s
North to South Section indicates that a comparable display was intended for
the Saloon. Rather than ancient Roman originals, the inserted statues were
mostly contemporary copies or plaster casts of well-known antique sculptures,
depicting Urania, Venus and Antinous, among others.85 As ancient statues
were usually copies, modern ‘secondary copies’ were also valued for their direct
association with classical antiquity.86 A large statue was located in each of the
four alcoves and smaller figures were placed in the eight niches between the al-
coves and the doorways. When the Saloon was altered in 1788–1789, the stat-
ues were transferred to the Marble Hall and the Great Staircase and supplanted

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by bronzed altars, two of them stoves. The niches were blocked in and replaced
by elaborate wall sconces, and the doorcases remade.87 Introduced at around
the same time, the chairs and benches were appropriate to the grand balls
that played an important part in prosperous eighteenth-century society, which
the Saloon’s wooden sprung floor further emphasises. Combining the festive
and the funereal, Adam’s design for the benches was based on the monumen-
tal sarcophagus of Agrippa and may have been a tribute to Piranesi, as the
­sarcophagus also appears alongside a dedication to Adam in Campo Marzio.88
Adam’s North to South Section focuses on one of the four large paintings of
ancient Roman ruins, which are located above each of the doors and beneath the
cornice and dome. The paintings recall the earlier practice of depicting ancient
­Roman ruins, as in Veronese’s frescoes at Palladio’s Villa Barbaro, emphasising that
Kedleston Hall, ‘as the idealised villa d’antica, represents Rome reborn.’89 Images
of ancient ruins acknowledge the demise of an ancient civilisation, offer a model to
emulate and surpass and prophesy the inevitable ruin and future adoration of the
present civilisation. But the ruins depicted at Kedleston and the Villa Barbaro are
not equivalent because the ruin meant more in the eighteenth century than before,
alluding to time in varied and complex ways in an era when ruins were fabricated as
often as found. Depicting figures casually strolling among the ruins, the painter was
William Hamilton, who Adam had sponsored to visit Rome and study with ­Antonio
Zucchi, one of his regular collaborators. As they were painted a decade or so after
the construction of the Saloon and the statues departed soon afterwards, ­Adam’s
original arrangement shown in the North to South Section was short-lived.90
­Another frequent collaborator, Biagio Rebecca, completed the smaller, horizontal
grisaille panels, which are placed between the large paintings and depict scenes
from English, mostly medieval, history.91 Rather than changeable, the paintings
and panels are integrated into the architecture and follow the curve of the wall.
The paintings’ lavish frames are part of the interior decoration while the panels are
indented into the wall surface. References to medieval ­England and ancient Rome
indicate a desire to draw inspiration from the two cultures and combine them, too.
But in comparison to the smaller monochrome panels, the paintings’ substantial
size and vibrant colours establish a clear hierarchy in which the classical is pre-­
eminent. Kedleston represents the ambition to forge a new classical civilisation in
which the former Roman colony would become the new Rome.
The dome has octagonal coffers with central rosettes inspired by the Basilica
of Maxentius, Rome.92 Diminishing in size as they near the oculus, the coffers
give the dome surface depth and accentuate its height so that the viewer is drawn
upwards, as in the alcoves. The dome, oculus and single external door recall the

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Pantheon. But Salmon suggests that the Saloon recalls a Roman ruin as much as
an entire ancient structure:

With its central oculus, external glazed door to the south and north door to the
top-lit Entrance Hall, the forms of the Saloon at Kedleston are enlivened and given
variety by the way in which the light falls across them. It is arguable that one of
the most important lessons architects like Adam learned from drawing great frag-
ments of Roman opus caementicum structures was how to manipulate building
mass and to handle spatial composition under changing conditions of light.93

The Saloon can be understood as a designed ruin comparable to Clérisseau’s Ruin

Room but in painted and physical form, recreating the light patterns of actual ruins.
Accentuating the play of light and shadow, the Saloon’s modelled surfaces are dec-
orated in gilt and scagliola, a highly polished composite of plaster and marble, and
float in off-white plaster that evokes an overcast English sky, across which the oculus
casts a rotating circle of light on sunny days. The alcoves, dome and oculus draw the
eye upwards, while the dialogue between the distinct elements and pale plaster ‘sky’
keeps the eye on the move from foreground to background and side to side, e­ liciting
a fragmented and questioning experience comparable to the e­ ighteenth-century ap-
preciation of the ruins’ allegorical potential. Referring to this oscillation between
‘the gaze and the glance,’ Peter de Bolla identifies a mode of viewing that com-
bines ‘two regimes—of the picture and of the eye,’ which he respectively charac-
terises as ‘the appreciation of high cultural artifacts’ and ‘the phenomenology of
seeing.’94 Noting the increasing type and number of spaces for public display in
mid-eighteenth-­century Britain, which included assembly rooms, theatres, galleries
and estates, de Bolla conceives the Saloon in terms of a viewer who perceives him
or herself ­simultaneously viewing and being viewed. In conclusion, he locates the
self-­reflective viewer within ‘a culture of visuality in which seeing and being seen
were crucial indices to one’s social standing, to one’s self definition’.95
The resulting experience is picturesque. Even when the viewer is static, phys-
ical and perceptual movement is implicit, because any past or future journey is
understood in relation to other potential journeys and is but one part of a complex
and changeable whole. In 1756, Adam described Italy as:

the most intoxicating Country in the world, for a pictoresque Hero, would you
have agreeable smiling prospects, they are here in abundance. Would you dip
into wild caverns, where glimmering light aggravate the horrid view of Rocks &
Cavitys & pools of water. Here there are many of them, such indeed as my wildest
imagination had never pictured to me.96

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Adam acknowledged ‘Kent’s genius for the picturesque.’97 But he believed

that he:

could carry that affair to a greater length than Kent and his disciples have yet
brought it, as I have greater ease in drawing and disposing of trees and buildings
and ruins picturesquely which Kent was not quite master of, as all his trees are
perpendicular and stiff and his ruins good for nothing.98

As this acerbic criticism acknowledges, Kent’s garden ruins were small and not for
daily use, unlike those that Adam proposed.
Kent’s interiors, gardens and garden buildings are all picturesque. The juxta-
position of rooms and routes that he designed for the piano nobile at Houghton
Hall, Norfolk, c. 1725, includes the austere, monumental and monochrome
Stone Hall, the vibrant, crimson and gold Saloon and the Great Staircase covered
in trompe l’œil depictions of mythological hunting scenes, which has a Doric
temple at its centre that is seemingly a garden monument transferred to an in-
terior. But Kent’s publications do not explain his theory of design.99 One of The
Works’ significant achievements is to articulate a theory of the picturesque in
which the design and experience of a building is equated to that of a landscape:

Movement is meant to express, the rise and fall, the advance and recess, with
other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building, so as to add greatly to
the picturesque of the composition. For the rising and falling, advancing and re-
ceding, with the convexity and concavity, and other forms of the great parts, have
the same effect in architecture, that hill and dale, fore-ground and distance, swell-
ing and sinking have in landscape: That is they serve to produce an agreeable and
diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture, and creates a variety
of light and shade, which gives spirit, beauty and effect to the composition.100

Adam applied the landscape analogy to the design of a building’s setting, façades
and interior surfaces. A free interpretation of the Arch of Constantine, Kedleston’s
South Front expresses the picturesque movement described in The Works as do the
undulating interior surfaces of the Saloon, from which the South Front’s symmetrical,
curved stairs lead down to the park. Adam combined axial and oblique approaches
to aid anticipation and stimulate surprise: ‘the more you keep the people from seeing
the more their imaginations have occasion to work’.101 To the west of the Saloon, the
State Apartment includes a number of family portraits, including Nathaniel Hone’s
The First Lord and Lady Scarsdale walking in the grounds of Kedleston, 1761, fur-
ther emphasising the connection between the house and park.102

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Robert Adam, Kedleston

Hall, 1765. The South
Front. Courtesy of National
Trust Images/Rupert Truman.

In Rome, Adam sketched numerous designs for picturesque ruins in land-

scape settings, combining and reworking ones observed on his travels. He no
doubt enjoyed the appreciation of sublime ruins in Kames’ Elements of Criticism.
But given that Adam depicted and designed gothic and classical ruins, he must
have disagreed with his friend’s conclusion that a gothic ruin ‘exhibits the triumph
of time over strength; a melancholy, but not unpleasant thought: a Grecian ruin
suggests rather the triumph of barbarity over taste; a gloomy and discouraging
thought.’103 The ruins that Adam designed in Britain were sometimes intended
to establish an imaginary medieval prehistory of an estate. Remains of the Old
­Castle of Osterly in Middlesex, one of the seats of Robert Child Esq, 1774,
is a proposal for a ruin intended to appear as though it preceded Adam’s new
house.104 Adam designed ruins to use as well as admire. Intended to house
the estate’s domestic offices, the design for a partially ruined castle at Brampton
Bryan, 1777, for Edward Harley, fourth Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, was the larg-
est inhabited ruin that he proposed.105 On a smaller scale, Design of a ruinous
bridge for the Garden at Sion, 1768, is illustrated in The Works.106
Reflecting the further division of labour into specialisms since Kent’s era, Adam
designed garden buildings but left landscape design to others. One of his design
sketches from Rome, dated 1757, imagines a dilapidated Pantheon on a hill, with
a substantial building surmounted by a dome in a distant vale to the right.107

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In 1759, Adam prepared designs for garden buildings in the park at Kedleston. His Robert Adam, Sketch for
panoramic proposal in watercolour and pen and ink has a Pantheon at its centre Landscaping the Park at
108
as also on the crest of a hill. The details of the sketch are small and unclear. Kedleston, 1759. Courtesy
The Pantheon has a portico and seems to be intact, but the dome has a flat top, of National Trust.
which may suggest that it terminates with an oculus open to the sky. Two smaller
eye-catchers are on the hills to the left and right, and there is a substantial building
with a spire, possibly a stable block, in low ground to the extreme right. According
to Leslie Harris:

The view seems to be taken from a point just beyond the ha-ha to the south west
of the house, looking west-north-west. On the far right can be seen the palatial
stables … with Harepit Hill above, crowned with a clump of trees.109

In Rome, Adam prepared two small design sketches of vaulted chambers and a
large coloured sketch design of a ruined rotunda, which have sometimes been
associated with Kedleston. The first small sketch, in pen and ink, has Adam’s
French inscription in ink: ‘Une Cote du Temple Ruiné, et restoré avec les/ ­fragmens
antiques.’ Charles James Richardson, an assistant to Sir John Soane when he
acquired Robert and James Adam’s extensive drawing collection in 1833, added
the inscription ‘Adams’ in pencil. The second small sketch, in pencil and pen and
ink, has Adam’s inscription ‘Un Autre temple frequenté par un Hermit / et par oui
il et converté a Chappelle.’ Correcting Adam’s French, Clérisseau crossed out part
of the inscription—‘oui il et converté a’—so that it concludes ‘par lui Changé en
Chappelle’. Richardson added the name ‘Adams’ in pencil.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Robert Adam, Ru-

ined Antique Shrine,
c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy
of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

Robert Adam, Ruined

­Temple, c. ­1755–1757.
Courtesy of the
­Trustees of the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.

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 r uin and r o t unda

Robert Adam, Design

for a Roman Ruin,
c. ­1755–1757. Courtesy
of the Trustees of the
Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

Redrawn with more finesse and design detail, the two vaulted chambers re-
appear at each side of a ruined rotunda in the large coloured sketch design, which
is drawn in pencil, pen and ink and watercolour. Pencil inscriptions similar to
those in the small sketches—‘Temple Ruiné et restoré avec les fragmens antiques’
and ‘Une Cote du Temple Ruiné frequenté par un Hermit,’ respectively —are seen
beneath the left and right chambers. Richardson added the pencil inscription
‘Original Sketch by Robert Adam Architect.’
A doorway connects the rotunda to the left chamber, while none is evident
between the rotunda and the right chamber. The room to the left is domestic in char-
acter with a fireplace and high glazed window, while the one to the right has an altar-
piece covered by a cloth, which is surmounted by a painting and flanked by niches.
According to A. A. Tait: ‘The Janus-like pavilion presented, as it were, the options
open to the architect concerned with the past. He could remodel in the antiquarian
style … or simply fling past and present together … to create a modern space.’110
The scale at its base emphasises the coloured sketch design’s creatively am-
biguous status between architecture and archaeology. Recalling Piranesi’s layered
dissections of ancient Roman constructions in ruin, the sketch can be understood
as an elevation or a section, and it is likely that Adam intended this ambiguity. The
sketch’s upper parts seem to be in elevation, as the outer edges of the brickwork
dome and vaults are drawn and coloured in a similar manner to the arched open-
ings in the walls of the Rotunda. As an elevation, the sketch can be understood
as a sequence of indented alcoves, which frequently appear in Adam’s designs
for external and internal walls, offering picturesque movement, ‘the rise and fall,

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the advance and recess.’111 But the layered roof construction and the continuous
dark shadow between the sloping roofs and vaulted chambers suggest a section,
as do the foundations. Reinforcing the assumption that the sketch is a section, the
inscriptions indicate that the two vaulted chambers were once ruined and later en-
closed and made habitable; both are in good condition and have stone floors. Only
the largest of the three spaces, the rotunda, remains a ruin with rough, cracked
walls and an uneven, earth floor. The arched openings in the rotunda and the left
chamber frame views onto trees, which also appear at the edges of the composi-
tion, emphasising the design’s natural setting. The varied tree types include tall,
angular cypresses of Mediterranean origin. No one is seen in the side chambers,
but three brightly clothed figures, possibly in Roman dress, one seated and two
standing, occupy the ruined rotunda, which is partially covered in vegetation and
dramatically lit, casting strong shadows even though the pale sky has soft, billowing
clouds. Stephen Astley speculates that the seated figure is ‘an architect, drawing
an antique fragment uncovered by his assistants.’112 A comparable seated figure
appears in the frontispiece to Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian.113 But
an alternative interpretation is that the figures reside here, and that Adam proposed
a combination of ruined and internal rooms within one structure. The figures’ loca-
tion and the respective size of the three rooms imply that the ruined rotunda is the
most important of the three chambers and possibly the most conducive to inhab-
itation, notably when offering shade and ventilation in a hot Roman summer and
also because it has no defined purpose and thus more space for the imagination.
In 2002, the coloured sketch was associated with the design of The Ruin at
Mowbray Point in Hackfall Park, Yorkshire. John Aislabie created the gardens at
nearby Studley Royal between 1722 and 1742. His son William incorporated the
medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey into Studley Royal for picturesque effect and
then developed Hackfall as a further counterpoint to the formality of his father’s
garden in the 1760s and 1770s. Conceived as an eye-catcher and a banqueting
hall, The Ruin stands on a ridge that affords long easterly views across the Yorkshire
countryside. Below, on the steeply wooded hillside leading down to the River Ure,
William Aislabie inserted winding paths, follies, waterfalls, pools and a stone seat
dedicated to Kent. According to The Landmark Trust, which commissioned The
Ruin’s restoration: ‘Weight of circumstantial evidence—which includes Adam work-
ing at nearby Newby Hall from 1766 points overwhelmingly to this watercolour
having directly inspired The Ruin, which building accounts suggest was completed
by 1767.’114 Alastair Rowan also associates the sketch with Mowbray Point and
suggests that Diocletian’s Palace influenced its central rotunda.115 It is possible that
the coloured sketch inspired The Ruin, which when seen from the Vale of Mowbray

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to the east appears to have a broken rotunda and two smaller open side vaults that
each lead to a separate room. But it is unlikely that Adam was directly involved in
the commission, as the Ruin has three rooms of nearly equal size and a diminutive
central rotunda and is much smaller than the design in the coloured sketch.
When Adam acquired the commission to design Kedleston Hall, his attention
was diverted from the garden buildings, which receded further from realisation as
construction costs led Curzon to delay completion of the interior of the house. In
The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Arthur T. Bolton describes
the coloured sketch as ‘a design of a great Roman ruin to be erected at Kedleston,
possibly in connection with the bridge’. Identifying an ancient Roman inspiration
for the design, he remarks that its ‘central feature is a brick hemi-cycle of the
­Minerva Medici type’, a building dedicated to nymphs and associated with the
water supply. Identifying the coloured sketch design as an elevation and not a
section, Bolton assumes that it was drawn in 1761 because he associates its
chronology with one of Adam’s designs that year, a watercolour of the bridge at
Kedleston.116 In Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, 1962,
John Fleming confirms Bolton’s attribution of the coloured sketch design to Cur-
zon’s estate but not the date and exact location, describing it as a Design for an
ornamental ruin in a park, adapted for Kedleston, 1758, by Robert Adam.117

With all his designs for garden temples ready to hand he was able to ‘tickle up’
an amusing ruin in no time and produced an imposing cavernous structure,
­reminiscent of the Serapaeum at Hadrian’s Villa, though incorporating his ‘temple
ruiné et fréquenté par un hermit’ and his ‘temple ruiné et restoré avec les frag-
ments antiques’.118

Thomas J. McCormick associates Adam’s two small sketches of vaulted chambers

with Clérisseau’s Ruin Room, and repeats the assumption that they were later adapted
for the design of a ruin at Kedleston.119 But there is no documentation to irrefutably
associate the coloured sketch with the estate, and Leslie Harris, for many years the
archivist there, does not mention it in his guides to the Hall and park. Indicating that
the association is now uncertain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, first listed
the coloured sketch as Design for a Roman Ruin, Capriccio, pen, ink on pencil with
watercolour. Formerly identified as a design related to Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire,
and later removed any mention of Curzon’s estate.120 The association with Kedleston
cannot be proved due to lack of direct evidence. But it still may be true. I believe that
there is enough circumstantial evidence to once again assert the connection between
Kedleston and Adam’s drawings in Rome, notably the coloured sketch design.

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In Italy, Adam sketched many perspectives and numerous plans, sections

and elevations. But very few drawings he made there are equivalent in ambition,
as carefully crafted and so obviously a design proposition as his coloured sketch,
which is a similar size to his North to South Section of Kedleston. Approximately
10 metres in diameter and 14 metres high from the floor to the oculus, its rotunda
is of comparable dimensions to Kedleston’s Saloon and also has recessed niches
on each side of a central doorway.
Although they are similar in spirit, none of Hamilton’s four paintings of ruins
inserted in the Saloon are the same as the one that Adam depicted. In the North to
South Section, the large capriccio of ancient ruins above the Saloon’s east doorway
shows to the right a grand, ruined colonnade with a straight and a curved row of
columns, a broken cornice and overgrown vegetation and a circular urn decorated
with carved figures in the foreground. A small colonnaded building is to the left and
further in the distance. Between them, there is a pyramid very similar to that of Gaius
Cestius in Rome, in front of which two figures gesture. The capriccio is clearly based
on a sketch that Adam prepared in Italy, c. 1756–1757,121 which he extended
horizontally to insert the pyramid from another of his sketches.122 The capriccio
and two sketches are very similar to another capriccio, c. 1756–1757, attributed to
­Clérisseau, which includes the ruined colonnade to the right and the pyramid to the
left. Clérisseau depicts the ruined colonnade as circular, suggesting that the inspira-
tion may have been the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli that he and Adam often sketched.123

Robert Adam, Capriccio

showing parts of a ruined
colonnade with a trium-
phal arch on the left,
c. ­1756–1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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r uin and r o t unda

Robert Adam, Capriccio

showing parts of a ruined cir-
cular temple with Corinthian
capitals beside a pyramid
with architectural fragments
at its base, c. 1756–1757.
Courtesy of Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London.

Charles-Louis Clérisseau,
Capriccio showing a ruined
circular colonnade of the
Corinthian order with a
broken and overgrown cor-
nice. Beside it is a pyramid
and in front of that is a
circular altar-sacrophagus,
c. 1756–1757. Courtesy of
Sir John Soane’s Museum,
London.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

In the early 1760s, Adam prepared various versions of an unexecuted design

for a Grotto or Rock Room at Kedleston, in which a small circular temple sits
above a rocky hill with a cave-like or arched opening at its base.124 A sketch sec-
tion suggests that the diminutive temple is actually a cupola to an underground
room, which is modelled on the left-hand chamber in the coloured sketch design.
A related interior wall elevation with a chimney piece incorporates cinerary urns
and a dado based on Roman sarcophagi, which Scarsdale annotates: ‘This may
do very well for the inside finishing of the Rock room.’ In a related plan of a
circular pavilion, not drawn by Adam or his office and more likely prepared at
Kedleston, Scarsdale comments: ‘This Room will finish much the better in ye
Manner of the left hand room in Mr Adam’s design for a ruin. With the addition
of the Sarcophagus in the Dado.’ In a further annotation on the same drawing, he
remarks: ‘The Lower room may be a kind of Grotto.’

Plan of a circular pavilion,

Kedleston, early 1760s.
Courtesy of National Trust /
Andrew Pattison.

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Section of a domed pavilion, Kedleston, early 1760s. Courtesy of National Trust.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

Interior wall elevation with

chimney piece, Kedleston,
early 1760s. Courtesy of
National Trust.

Sketch of a circular pavilion

on a rock with a grotto un-
derneath, Kedleston, early
1760s. Courtesy of National
Trust.

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These words suggest that Curzon was shown the coloured sketch design.
Given that actual and imagined ruins appear more often than entire structures
in Adam’s Italian drawings, and ruined rotundas are especially common, it is
quite likely that one of his finest designs for a habitable ruin—the coloured sketch
design—was considered for Curzon’s estate.125 Adam’s 1759 panoramic sketch
of the park at Kedleston focuses on a Pantheon, and James Adam confirmed that
ruins were proposed there. In Florence in 1761, he acquired antique marbles that
would be ‘excessively saleable in London, particularly should Bob have any ru-
ined temples to adjust such as he proposed for Sir Nathaniel’s garden’.126 If they
had both been constructed at Kedleston, the Saloon in the Hall and the Pantheon
in the Park would have stimulated an evocative dialogue on the character, condi-
tion and potential of a habitable ruin, so that one would have been the mirror of
the other and either its past or future.

Notes

1 Altering this relationship, the water level of Loch Leven was lowered in the 1830s.
Astley, p. 5.
2 This is the earliest dated drawing in the multiple-volume Drawing Collection of Robert
and James Adam at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, which includes 8,000 office
drawings and 1,000 drawings from the brothers’ Grand Tours. Soane acquired the
majority of the drawings for £200 in 1833 and purchased others at various times in
his life. Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/14; Sir John Soane’s
Museum, London. For details of Soane’s purchase of the Adams’ drawings, refer to
Sands, Robert Adam’s London, pp. 4–5.
3 Tait suggests that the artist Paul Sandby, who moved to Scotland in the mid-1740s,
may have encouraged this appreciation. Tait, ‘Reading the Ruins,’ p. 527.
4 Tait, Robert Adam, p. 7. Refer to Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 6.
5 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 108–112; Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’
p. 58.
6 Adam, letter to James Adam, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 16.
7 Adam, letter to William Adam, 31 January 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 23.
8 Adam, diary entry, January 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 23.
9 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 5 March 1755, quoted in Eileen Harris, The Country
Houses of Robert Adam, p. 7.
10 Adam, summer 1756, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 4.
11 Graham, pp. 84–85.
12 Shaftesbury, Chacteristicks, vol. 3, p. 207. Refer to Li, pp. 110–112.
13 Pope, The Dunciad, p. 41.
14 Salmon, p. 29, refer to p. 27.
15 Adam, letter to Nelly Adam, 23 October 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 52.

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16 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 140, refer to
pp. 158–159.
17 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 2.
18 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 1755, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 20. Refer
to Yarker, unpaginated.
19 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 18 June 1755 (misdated 1754), quoted in Stillman,
‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 197.
20 Adam, letter, quoted in Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 16.
21 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, plate 5, p. 48.
22 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 September 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 117,
refer to pp. 117–120.
23 McCormick, p. 110.
24 Winckelmann, quoted in McCormick, p. 99.
25 Winckelmann, letter to Caspar Füssli, 26 November 1763, quoted in McCormick,
p. 100, refer to pp. 103, 114–116.
26 Winkelmann, letter to Clérisseau, 1767, quoted in McCormick, pp. 112–114.
27 Stephen Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 25.
28 Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, Paestum and Soane, p. 21.
29 Adam, quoted in Tait, The Adam Brothers in Rome, p. 64.
30 Adam, letter to Jenny Adam, 5 July 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 28.
31 Adam, letter to James Adam, 19 October 1755, quoted in McCormick, p. 34. Refer
to Stillman, ‘Robert Adam and Piranesi’, p. 198.
32 Hugh Thompson, assistant secretary of the Society, 7 April 1757, quoted in Murray,
p. 46.
33 Piranesi, in Wilton-Ely, Piranesi, p. 7, refer to p. 55.
34 Salmon, p. 45.
35 Adam, letter to Peggy Adam, 18 June 1755 (misdated 1754), quoted in Stillman,
‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 198. Refer to John Fleming, Robert Adam and his
Circle, p. 207; Wilton-Ely, ‘Amazing and Ingenious Fancies,’ pp. 221–222.
36 Adam was elected accademico di merito of the Accademia di San Luca in 1757, as
was Piranesi in 1761. Adam, letter to Helen Adam, 9 April 1757, quoted in John
Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 231. Refer to Salmon, p. 32; Stillman, ‘Rob-
ert Adam and Piranesi,’ p. 198.
37 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 20.
38 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 231.
39 Stillman, ‘Robert Adam and Piranesi,’ pp. 202, 206.
40 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 315–319; Tait, Robert Adam,
pp. 112, 114.
41 James Adam, quoted in Oresko, p. 33.
42 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 5, p. 56.
43 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46.
44 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 5, p. 56. Refer to Adam and
Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, pp. 46–47.
45 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 4, p. 54.

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46 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ pp. 26–27.

47 For example, Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 55/98, 99,105,
107, 116; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
48 Quoted in Lionel Cust and Sidney Colvin, History of the Society of Dilettanti, 1898,
and repeated in Ayres, Classical Culture, p. 61.
49 Adam, 1757, quoted in Salmon, p. 43.
50 James Stuart, The Antiquities of Athens, 1762, quoted in Tait, Robert Adam, p. 108.
51 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 44.
52 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 2, preface, p. 58.
53 Adam, letter to James Adam, September 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 218.
54 Adam, 9 April 1757, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 218.
55 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 170–171; Salmon, p. 38.
56 Adam, Spring 1757, quoted in Tait, The Adam Brothers in Rome, p. 107.
57 Adam, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 238. Refer to Iain
Gordon Brown, Monumental Reputation, p. 24.
58 Then named Spalato and now Split, Adam called the city Spalatro. Adam, quoted in
John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 240.
59 Pinto, Speaking Ruins, p. 260.
60 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2.
61 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, ‘Introduction,’ p. 2. Refer to
John Fleming, ‘An Adam Miscellany’, pp. 103–107; Tait, Robert Adam, p. 104.
62 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, plate 8. Refer to Iain Gordon
Brown, Monumental Reputation, pp. 38–39; Salmon, p. 41.
63 McCormick, pp. 19–21; Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 22.
64 Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque, p. 181; Wu, pp. 13–19.
65 Denison and Ren, pp. 15–20; Zhu, pp. 11–40, 217.
66 Wu, p. 94.
67 Wu, p. 23.
68 Wu, p. 41.
69 Chambers, pp. 130–132. Refer to Harris, Sir William Chambers, pp. 36–37;
Di Palma, pp. 230–234.
70 Wu, p. 95.
71 Adam, letter to James Adam, 24 July 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 51.
72 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 September 1756, quoted in McCormick, p. 52.
73 Clérisseau came to London in 1771 and worked with Robert Adam for a few years.
McCormick, pp. 147–161.
74 Adam, letter to James Adam, 4 September 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 362, n. 227.
75 Leslie Harris, ‘Kedleston and the Curzons,’ pp. 9–10; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall,
p. 7.
76 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 2, ch. 17, p. 78.
77 Adam, letter to James Adam, 11 December 1758, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, pp. 257–258.

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78 Adam, letter to James Adam, 24 July 1760, referred to in Stillman, The Decorative
Work of Robert Adam, p. 66.
79 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, p. 8.
80 Scarsdale, Catalogue of His Pictures, Statues etc. at Kedleston, 1769, p. 2, quoted
in De Bolla, p. 201.
81 In the eighteenth century, the Pantheon was incorrectly attributed to the first century AD
rather than the reign of Hadrian. As a church, it was known as Santa Maria della R­ otonda
as well as Santa Maria ad Martyres. Dixon, ‘Piranesi’s Pantheon,’ pp. 60, 67–68.
82 Panini sometimes omitted other elements, including Raphael’s tomb. Pasquali,
pp. 38–43; Thomas, pp. 26–27; Wixom and Linsey, pp. 265–266; Wrigley and
Craske, ‘Introduction,’ p. 3.
83 Adam, letter to Mary Adam, 1 March 1755, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam
and his Circle, p. 145.
84 Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, bk. 4, ch. 10, pp. 36–37. Refer to Eileen
Harris, The Country Houses of Robert Adam, p. 44; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall,
p. 7; Salmon, p. 47; Stillman, The Decorative Work of Robert Adam, p. 68.
85 The sculptors were Richard Hayward and Joseph Wilton. Curzon acquired the plaster
casts from Matthew Brettingham Jr. Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ pp. 58–59; Leslie
Harris, ‘Kedleston and the Curzons,’ p. 12.
86 Nagel and Wood, p. 279.
87 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 34; Stillman, The Decorative Work of Robert Adam,
p. 110.
88 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 36; Wilton-Ely, ‘“Amazing and Ingenious Fancies,”’
pp. 228–229.
89 Watkin, ‘Built Ruins.’ p. 6.
90 According to Leslie Harris, Hamilton’s ruin paintings were painted in 1787 and ‘re-
placed an earlier series of paintings by Morland, after Rubens’. But the National Trust,
which now owns Kedleston, dates them as 1775–1778, and records their location in
the Saloon in 1778. Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ p. 62; www.nationaltrustcollec-
tions.org.uk/object/108799/108800/108801/108802 (retrieved 6 June 2017).
91 Leslie Harris writes that they depict ‘the Dukes of Northumberland and Suffolk entreating
Lady Jane Grey to accept the crown; Edward the Black Prince serving the French king
(then his prisoner) at supper; Elizabeth, widow of Sir John Grey, imploring Edward IV to
restore her husband’s lands; Eleanor sucking the poison from her husband Edward I’s
wound.’ A Curzon notebook dated 1768 and a Hamilton watercolour of the same year
refer to an alternative, probably unexecuted proposal for Persian, Turkish and ­Venetian
scenes. Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 35; Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue’, p. 62.
92 Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ pp. 58–59; Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 7.
93 Opus caementicum is Roman concrete. Salmon, p. 47.
94 De Bolla, p. 212, 9; refer to pp. 10–11, 119, 182–183, 213–214.
95 De Bolla, p. 69.
96 Adam, 1756, quoted in Tait, Robert Adam, p. 136.
97 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 47.
98 Adam, quoted in Eileen Harris, The Country Houses of Robert Adam, p. 179; and in
John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 229.

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99 William Kent, The Designs of Inigo Jones, Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Pub-
lick and Private Buildings, 1727, and William Kent, Some Designs of Mr. Inigo Jones
and Mr. William Kent, 1744.
100 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46. Refer to John Fleming,
Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 315–319; Hausberg, unpaginated prepublication
manuscript; Tait, Robert Adam, p. 136.
101 Adam, letter to his mother, 13 November 1756, quoted in John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 363. Refer to Eileen Harris, ‘Discord and Dissonance in
­Robert Adam’s Interiors,’ p. 94; Middleton, ‘Soane’s Spaces’, p. 32.
102 Leslie Harris, Kedleston Hall, p. 39.
103 Kames, vol. 1, p. 448.
104 Held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; refer to Rowan, Robert Adam,
pp. 82–83, plate 54, cat. 108. Related drawings of Osterley are in the Drawing Col-
lection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 21/1–2; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
105 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 37/59; Sir John Soane’s M
­ useum,
London. Refer to Sands, ‘Adam’s Ruined Megastructure.’
106 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 2, no. 4, plate 7.
107 Held in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York; refer to John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, plate 73.
108 Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue,’ p. 75.
109 Referring to the extensive, meandering Long Walk to the west and south of the house,
Leslie Harris states that the three ‘eye-catchers’ in the sketch are ‘all of them indicated
on the circuit walk shown in Adam’s rough plan of the pleasure grounds, and on the
(George) Ingham survey of 1764’. But Adam did not draw landscape plans as he left
landscape design to others. Jonathan Hill in conversation with Dr Frances Sands, Cu-
rator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21–22 June 2017;
Leslie Harris, ‘The Catalogue’, p. 75.
110 Tait, Robert Adam, pp. 33–34. Refer to Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 25; Rowan,
Robert Adam, p. 33.
111 Adam and Adam, The Works, vol. 1, preface to part 1, p. 46.
112 Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue,’ p. 23.
113 Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian, plate 1.
114 Colin Briden, an archaeologist working for The Landmark Trust made the association.
The Landmark Trust, ‘The Ruin, Hackfall, Grewelthorpe.’
115 Rowan, ‘Bob The Roman,’ p. 25.
116 Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, vol. 1, p. 244; refer to p. 74,
n. 63a, p. 243. Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 40/41; Sir John
Soane’s Museum, London.
117 John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, pp. 266, 278, plate 80.
118 Adam’s coloured sketch is also reminiscent of a number of his other sketches at
Hadrian’s Villa, including the rotunda of the larger baths. John Fleming, Robert
Adam and his Circle, p. 258. Refer to MacDonald and Pinto, pp. 236–239; Pinto,
Speaking Ruins, pp. 146–149; Wilton-Ely, ‘Amazing and Ingenious Fancies’,
p. 225.
119 McCormick, pp. 110–112.

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 r uin an d r o t un da

120 http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69102/design-adam-robert (retrieved 20 April 2015);

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69102/design-for-a-ruin-design-adam-­r obert
­(retrieved 8 May 2017).
121 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/90; Sir John Soane’s M ­ useum,
London. A similar but simpler view appears in vol. 56/85.
122 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/78; Sir John Soane’s M ­ useum,
London.
123 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 56/120; Sir John Soane’s
­Museum, London. Refer also to another Clérisseau sketch, vol. 56/69.
124 The location may have been at Little Ireton, which was incorporated into the Kedleston
estate in 1721. Astley, in Woodward, ‘Catalogue’, p. 23; Leslie Harris, ‘The Cata-
logue’, pp. 69, 84–85.
125 Drawing Collection of Robert and James Adam, vol. 55/76–119, vol. 56/59–145
vol. 57/1–162; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
126 James Adam, 1761, quoted in John Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle, p. 278.

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 6
life in ruins
 li f e in r uins

Forget not Piranesi

The child of a bricklayer and a poor and uneducated family that he never men-
tioned, Soan invented Soane. Reflecting his ambition, he continued the renaming
tradition of Palladio and Kent, even correcting all his earlier signatures to match his
chosen surname.1 In 1768, aged 15, he entered the office of George Dance the
Younger who was that year one of only four architect founder members of the Royal
Academy of Arts, which acquired a prestigious royal charter at its inception while
even the Royal Society had to wait two years. The Royal Academy’s first President
was the painter Joshua Reynolds and its first Treasurer was Chambers. The two
female founder members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, were rare examples
of women achieving such status in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.2
The Royal Academy chose to present annual exhibitions, appoint 40 eminent
Academicians for life and provide a free artistic education for a period of up to ten
years with admittance judged on the submission of a portfolio of drawings.3 Soane
entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1771 while he continued to work for Dance,
and then moved to Henry Holland’s office the following year. In 1776, at his second
attempt, he won the Royal Academy gold medal for students of architecture with a
design for a Triumphal Bridge. While working on the design, he had declined the
offer of a Greenwich boating trip with friends, which led to the accidental drowning
of James King. A non-swimmer too, Soane acknowledged his good fortune and sad
loss. At the Royal Academy in 1777, he exhibited a tribute to his friend, a grand
mausoleum with space for 84 coffins and 24 urns, the first of many such designs.
In an era increasingly preoccupied by origins and memorials, Soane’s concern for
funerary monuments even surpassed that of his contemporaries.4
In 1774, with the financial support of the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal
Academy established a three-year travel scholarship, which included £60 annual
subsistence and £30 travelling expenses to and from Italy. Award of the scholar-
ship rotated between students of painting, sculpture and architecture. In 1777,
it was the architectural students’ turn to compete, open only to former gold med-
allists, and Soane was successful. Before setting out, he prepared his first book
Designs in Architecture, 1778, beginning a lifelong fascination with publishing.5
Offering guidance on his journey, Chambers gave Soane a copy of a letter he had
prepared for another pupil in 1774:

Seek for those who have most reputation, young or old, amongst which forget not
Piranesi, whom you may see in my name; he is full of matter, extravagant it is
true, often absurd, but from his overflowings you may gather much information.6

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While Chambers was ambivalent, Soane’s Triumphal Bridge was indebted to

­Piranesi’s Ponte Magnifico in Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, 1743.
Dance encouraged Soane’s interest in Piranesi, having studied in Rome at the
same time as James Adam. Soane met Piranesi in the summer of 1778 shortly
before the Venetian’s death in November that year, and no doubt admired the com-
pelling fusion of home, studio and museum at Palazzo Tomati. The ‘tutor’ indicated
his respect for the ‘pupil,’ offering four engraved views of the ancient Roman mon-
uments and ruins: The Pantheon, The Arch of Constantine, The Arch of Septimus
Severus and The Tomb of Cecilia Metella.7 Piranesi’s appreciation of the diversity
and invention of ancient Roman architecture and its debt to differing eras and
regions in pluralist combination was invaluable to Soane as it had been to Adam.
Visiting many of the sites that Adam had seen 20 years earlier, Soane trav-
elled throughout Italy, viewing Renaissance, Palladian, mannerist and baroque
buildings as well as ancient Roman ruins, including the imperial baths and
­Hadrian’s Villa, and the ancient Greek ruins at Paestum.8 Soane’s close friend and
travelling companion John Patterson, whose family were wool traders, noted with
frustration that while Britain had a prosperous and respected mercantile class,
‘business is despised by the nobility in Italy.’ Another of Soane’s contemporaries
Thomas Jones noticed that contemporary Romans divided Grand Tourists into
three classes. At the top were the ‘Cavalieri or Milordi Inglesi,’ who travelled with
servants and tutors; next were the ‘Mezzi Cavalieri’ or half gentlemen; and then,
at the base, were the artists.9 While Adam had aspired to the first category, Soane
was closer to the third, even with the status of his Royal Academy scholarship.
But among the Grand Tourists, social boundaries were less defined, allowing
Soane to later remark: ‘This was the most fortunate event of my life, for it was the
means by which I formed those connexions to which I owe all the advantages I
have since enjoyed.’10 Soane’s most eminent potential patron was Frederick
­Hervey, Bishop of Derry. On becoming fourth Earl of Bristol in December 1779,
Hervey offered the young architect commissions to transform The Downhill, his
house in County Down, Ireland, and design a new mansion at Ickworth, ­Suffolk.11
After just two years in Italy, Soane returned home earlier than intended, missing
the last year of his scholarship. But the projects came to nothing.

The climate of London

In 1806, Soane, by then an eminent practitioner, was elected Professor of Archi-

tecture at the Royal Academy, replacing his friend and former employer Dance.
Appointed from among the Academicians, the Professors were expected to present

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lectures, which were principally intended for students but also open to the public,
receiving wide attention and press reviews. Dance avoided giving any lectures in
the seven years of his professorship. But Soane relished the challenge, presenting
two series of six lectures, the first beginning in 1809, the second in 1815 and
also gave some lectures more than once.12 He illustrated his talks with large,
elaborate drawings prepared by his pupils at his expense, which offered the audi-
ence a virtual Grand Tour as the Napoleonic Wars restricted travel to Italy.
The Enlightenment concern for specialised knowledge allowed art, sci-
ence and morality/ethics to emerge as three independent value systems within
­European society, each with its own specific concerns so that they did not inter-
fere with each other.13 The foundation of the Royal Academy was part of this pro-
cess. But in practice, the transition was neither immediate nor universal. During
Soane’s studies, the Royal Academy was housed in temporary accommodation
in old Somerset House, but in 1780, it moved to a purpose-design accommoda-
tion in Chambers’ new Somerset House, remaining there until 1837. On leaving
the Strand, the visitor passed into the high entrance portico, which framed the
expansive central courtyard beyond. To the left was the entrance to the Royal
Society, which promoted the sciences. To the right was the entrance to the Royal
Academy, which promoted the arts. Their proximity encouraged the members of
one institution to attend the meetings and lectures of the other so that scientific
theories informed artistic practices and vice versa.
Common attitudes and allegiances united artists and scientists. The term
‘romanticism’ is sometimes applied pejoratively, suggesting disengagement from
contemporary concerns and retreat to the natural world. Claiming to heal the
rupture of culture from nature, the romantic imagination may instead conflate
the inner journey into the mind with the outer journey into the world, and thus
misrepresent nature, further its commodification and prevent critical engage-
ment with the natural world. But this was rarely the case in early nineteenth-­
century London, when collaborations and conversations between painters, poets,
­scientists and architects indicated their mutual respect and overlapping concerns.
Rather than discard reason, the search for understanding led the romantic mind
to cultivate a dialogue between the rational and irrational. Valuing intellect as well
as emotion, invention as well as history, time as well as place and industry as
well as nature, romanticism was promoted in science as well as art, which were
not then opposed in the way they have sometimes subsequently been. Acknowl-
edging the union of nature and culture, romanticism recognised a responsibility to
them both. Rather than the myth of objective expertise, the romantic scientist was
not external to nature and neither were the romantic painter, poet and architect.

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Humphry Davy climbed the Lake District with William Wordsworth in 1805,
while three years later, as Professor of Chemistry, he invited Samuel Taylor
­Coleridge to lecture on ‘Poetry and the Imagination’ at the Royal Institution, which
was founded in 1799 to complement the more theoretical concerns of the Royal
Society. Identifying the seeds of romanticism within Georgic England, Davy ad-
mired Thomson’s The Seasons, which inspired his own poems on natural energy,
drawing parallels between the scientific and artistic minds:

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty;

and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michel Angelo, and of Handel, are
not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is
necessary to perfection in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a
power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative
source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in
physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same pas-
sion, as is the love of the magnificent, the sublime and the beautiful.14

In his preface to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads, which he and Coleridge first
published in 1798, Wordsworth considers the convergence of poetry and science
with Davy as the likely model:

If the labours of Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct
or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive,
the Poet will sleep no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the
steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will
be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of Science itself.
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as
proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed…15

It was not unusual for a Royal Academician to also be a Fellow of the Royal
Society, as in the case of Soane and the sculptor Francis Chantrey. A member of
the Royal Institution since at least 1807, Soane presented two lectures there in
1817 and three more in 1820, which were very popular and included many of
the illustrations from his Royal Academy lectures. In 1825, he became a member
of the Athenaeum, one year after it was founded with Michael Faraday as the first
Secretary. Two years later, Soane was ele