In her minor classic, Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay coined the phrase “ruin-mindedness” to describe an aesthetic sensibility familiar to travelers——and readers and writers of travel-literature—for some centuries now: a sentimental attraction to ruins as poignant, elegiac things redolent of both past grandeur and time’s inevitable ravaging of the loftiest human achievements. This perspective on ruins was not always a feature of western discourse, however, nor does it seem to have been much present elsewhere in the world until quite recently, as Roland Mayer stresses in the first chapter of his “cultural history” of Rome’s ruins, by way of introducing his project as a whole. Mayer proposes to demonstrate that “ruin-mindedness” first developed —specifically and quite exclusively——in relation to the city of Rome before diffusing outward from there, and to explore when, how and why the surviving traces of the ancient imperial capital came to be viewed as edifying and eventually even pleasing features in their own right. This is no small undertaking.
The result is a capacious, engagingly written work that plaits together aperçus on a vertiginous array of topics, from ancient perspectives on ruins (unsightly and depressing, rarely worth mentioning) and “how Rome became ruinous” in the early Middle Ages in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively, to 18th-century cork models of Roman monuments and other Grand Tour-era souvenirs, faux ruins in European and American gardens, ruin-painted tableware, cinema from Fellini to Ridley Scott, postcards, CGI and digital modeling (Chapters 8-10), and the list goes on.
But the primary thrust of Mayer’s study, which he frames as “an extended essay in reception, centred on the remains of Rome itself” (xv), is literary, in two distinct but closely related ways. For Mayer, an essential part of what allowed ancient Rome’s remains to be ‘received’ differently from the monuments of other vanished civilizations is the sheer quantity and perduring cultural centrality of ancient Roman texts. From the Middle Ages to modern times, countless readers of the Classics (which Mayer taught at King’s College) have set out to walk in the footsteps of familiar authors who say more about Rome than any other ancient place, and inevitably to compare the tales of a peerless imperial metropolis with the crumbling relicts they encountered. These literate visitors—nearly all those most memorably struck by Roman decay have not been locals, as Mayer notes—in turn produced reams of musings on Rome’s ruins that now run several orders of magnitude larger than the ancient canon: “The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the literary heritage, and it is that which enables writers to respond to them in a way that one cannot respond to a ruin without a secure historical context, such as Stonehenge or Machu Picchu” (307; echoed at xviii). The ancient “literary heritage” is thus the premise for Mayer’s focus on later writers: Roman ruins became “prototypical” not only because, as Susan Stewart—the recent scholar whose work most closely anticipates Mayer’s—says, they are grander and have been more consistently frequented over time than others,[1] but also because ancient writers suffuse them to an unparalleled extent, which prompted posterity gradually to develop a novel appreciation of ruins and ruination. “This aesthetic response was a unique development, and came to be extended to ruins elsewhere in the world. It is an entirely modern sensibility, unknown to antiquity and to many other cultures. It is thanks to the ruins of Rome that this sensibility exists at all” (309).
Chapter 3 sets the stage for this conceptual revolution by surveying the impressions of medieval writers, who already encountered a sparsely populated and largely ruinous carcass of the ancient metropolis. Mayer singles out Hildebert of Lavardin for the precociously close attention he paid in the early 12th century to Rome’s ruins (perceived as valuable not in themselves but rather as testimonials to the supreme achievements of the ancients); subsequent accounts such as the various iterations of the Mirabilia tradition and the descriptions of “Master Gregory” reveal a growing appreciation of Rome’s peerless collection of dilapidated hulks and a new antiquarian interest in using ancient authors to identify—albeit usually erroneously—the monuments themselves. They thus presage the “watershed” (Chapter 4) that Mayer associates above all with Petrarch, whose “stupefied reaction when he first saw Rome’s ancient buildings is the crucial initial step in the development of a sense of the value of ruins, or ruin-mindedness” (56). The new sensibility that inspired Petrarch was rooted in his intimate familiarity with ancient authors, which prompted him to repopulate the ruins he saw with the shades of his literary heroes and thus to supply Roman rubble with the compelling narrative context it had previously lacked. Petrarch and then others (Cola di Rienzo, Manuel Chrysoloras, Ambrogio Traversari, etc.) created a new symbiosis between text and object that enhanced the appeal of both as repositories of historical knowledge, and of ruins as objects of sustained attention in their own right.
Ch. 5 thus turns to the 15th-century humanists who viewed Rome’s ruins as worthy of study and consequently also of preservation. Mayer divides them broadly into practicing artists and especially architects, who wanted to use the remains of antiquity as inspiration in the present (e.g., Brunelleschi, Alberti, Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo), and scholars who treated them as primary sources for the study of the past (Poggio Bracciolini, Cyriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, the “father of modern antiquarianism and scientific topography” [78], and so on). But the preservation-minded were a small minority during the Renaissance, when Roman monuments were systematically mined for building-materials used in the grand new projects of the day. Only the advent of mass tourism in the 17th and especially the 18th centuries would finally convince the papal authorities to make more consistent efforts to preserve what remained, which leads to Chapter 6, “From Topographical Treatise to Guidebook,” a whirlwind tour stretching from (inter alia) Ligorio, Panvinio, Dupérac, Donati and Nardini in the 16th and 17th centuries all the way, via the likes of Venuti, Vasi, Nibby and Jordan, to Claridge, Coarelli and Carandini in the 21st.
Many of these treatises and guidebooks, aided by developing technologies of mass-reproduction, featured pioneering maps and illustrations, which lead to an extended departure from the written record starting with Chapter 7, devoted to images (paintings, drawings, woodcuts and engravings/etchings, photographs) of Rome and its ruins produced between the 14th century, when Roman ruins first featured in the frescoes of Maso di Banco, and the later 19th. We get a few pages on the paintings of Claude Lorrain and G.P. Panini, a couple on drawings from van Heemskerck in the 16th century to Clérisseau in the 18th, somewhat more on engravings, especially those of Piranesi, and a final three pages (including one of illustrations) for the pioneers of photography.
The narrative reverts to Rome and the stewardship of its ruins in Chapter 11, devoted to the efforts made to excavate, frame, and preserve both fragmentary and more or less intact structures since the late 18th century, since which time tourism has been widely recognized as the main driver of the local economy, and Rome consequently fashioned into a museum-city. Chapter 12, finally, takes up the literary thread again to explore the ways in which some of these legions of grand tourists and other sensitive souls responded to the preserved vestiges of antiquity. We encounter Gibbon, Goethe, Lord Byron, Alexandre Dumas, Henry Adams and Henry James, Hawthorne, the Shelleys, Dickens and a host of others, including lesser lights such as the Lady Knight who in 1778 left us with perhaps the first of many romanticized (and capital-‘R’ Romanticist) accounts of a moonlit visit to the Colosseum. The broader point to emerge from this serried cluster of vignettes is that the now-prevalent notion of ruins as sentimentally evocative things, more compelling even in their fragmentary state than whole, only really began to coalesce over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, notably in the figure of Byron: “His phrase ‘ruinous perfection’ serves as a sort of definition of ruin-mindedness: the ruin is paradoxically perfect, in a way that the undamaged structure never was” (292).
I have quoted Mayer verbatim a number of times, and have been tempted to do so still more, in part because he has the refreshing habit of saying clearly what he means. His straightforward way of framing often sweeping claims and conclusions on complex topics conduces to narrative cohesion, which eases the reader’s path through what might otherwise seem impenetrably jumbled thickets of names and material. It therefore also risks claims of oversimplification (or worse) by specialists in the many different periods and disciplines he touches on. But this is perhaps beside the point, for Mayer explains at the outset that much of his material derives from a course for second-year undergraduates called “Views of Rome” (“make it entertaining, Roland,” he quotes his Department Head as advising him), and notes that his “sifting” of the textual sources included in the book was done “keeping in mind that my target audience then and now will not read the original works in Latin or perhaps even in Italian” (xv-xvi). Evidently, Mayer’s “target audience” does not include specialists.
So who, then, is he writing for? He does not elaborate, which leaves us to speculate. We have a substantial volume (well over 300 pages of text, plus another 60-odd of notes, bibliography and index), copiously illustrated and reasonably priced withal. A distillation of heaps of primary materials and modern studies, it contains hardly a paragraph that has not been treated in various book-length studies, and is appropriately furnished with an apparatus of citations and bibliography that reflects ample engagement with the work of past scholars, whom Mayer is generous in acknowledging by name in the text. As a sort of picturesque, anecdotal vade mecum, it might be said to have something in common with some of the better early modern guides to Rome and its ruins, but it also offers a sustained and coherent argument for the city’s seminal role in the birth and subsequent diffusion of “ruin-mindedness.” Fans of Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins will doubtless want to have a look, as might other “educated general readers,” whoever they might be. But so, too, might reception-specialists (which this reviewer is not), in order to judge for themselves whether Mayer’s bolder contentions about the peculiar appeal of Rome’s ruins generally hold, notwithstanding the cavils that will almost inevitably present themselves in a work of this scope.[2] In any case, at a time when scholars too often leave the important work of big-picture synthesizing to popularizers, such an enterprising foray by a trained guide surely comes as welcome food for thought.
Notes
[1] The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago, 2019).
[2] One such cavil related to the reviewer’s field: readers familiar with the bustling landscape of the later medieval agro romano presented by Chris Wickham, Marco Vendittelli and Sandro Carocci, and for that matter long ago by Jean Coste and Giuseppe Tomassetti will raise an eyebrow upon reading that in c. 1300, the extent of intramural cultivation meant that “there was little need to cultivate the ground outside” the Aurelian Wall (53). A broader question regarding which more clarity would have been welcome is that of what, exactly, a ruin is understood to be. When does a standing monument (always appreciated in one way or another at Rome) become a ruin? Many of the monuments, and depictions/descriptions thereof, that Mayer discusses do not in fact show conspicuous signs of dilapidation, sometimes in avowedly alternative contexts such as proposed reconstructions of ancient buildings, but sometimes not. At 299, for example, Mayer calls the Pantheon a ruin; but if the Pantheon can be defined as such at any point between antiquity and the present, then so too can every other extant remnant of the ancient city. This conceptual slippage would seem to risk swelling the concept of ‘ruin’ to an unwieldy extent.