New book explores how Rome’s ruins have resonated in art and literature over centuries

The ruins of Rome have served as a Rorschach test for centuries, with spectators projecting onto them their hopes, fears, or even disappointments. As early as 1411 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras wrote of Medieval Rome that its ruins “seem beautiful even in their dismembered state”. Four hundred years later, the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand detected instead “a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the brevity of our existence”, while the American scholar Henry Adams (1838-1918) gave a political twist to his reading of the runes: “Rome was actual; it was England; it was going to be America”. “What did I find in the Forum?” wrote Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, to a friend in 1849: “An archway and two or three pillars.”

Now Roland Mayer, the emeritus professor of classics at King’s College London, has produced a survey of this rich field of speculation, tracing Rome’s greatest ornaments from antiquity to the present day. The book originated as a series of lectures to undergraduates, and it bears traces of its origins: the approach is methodical, with illustrations employed like PowerPoint slides. Along the way, key signposts highlight the narrative, which encompasses how Rome became “ruinous” and how tourism and archaeology changed the perception of the city. While the subject is vast, the ruins sometimes seem to be lost in the background, which, of course, was often their fate in landscape paintings of the Roman campagna. That said, the author demonstrates an easy command of the prodigious bibliography associated with the Eternal City and is a cicerone who knows his history.

Our fascination with ruins owes much to Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins (1953), often reprinted and perpetually cited by later writers on the subject. More recently, the literary scholar Susan Stewart observed that it was non-Roman visitors who were inspired by the ruins, when the locals tended to take them for granted, and, indeed, most of the passages quoted by Mayer are from foreigners.

The French poet Joachim du Bellay (1552-60) saw the ruins of Rome as symbolic of life and fate, popularising this concept across Europe with his poetic cycle Les Antiquités de Rome (1558). A note of melancholy became a leitmotif of later writers such as the Englishman Joseph Addison (1672-1719) or the Welsh clergyman John Dyer, whose poem The Ruins of Rome (1740) sought to convey a warning to the British about the fall of empires.

The age of the Grand Tour

The 18th century was, of course, the age of the Grand Tour when visitors stood before monuments while declaiming passages from Virgil or Horace. It was a time when, as the writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson put it, “a man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see”. Engravings by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) transformed the way the ruins were seen and stimulated the beginnings of archaeological excavations, a fashion that the German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) complained was “a gain for learning at the expense of the imagination”.

The tension between archaeological inquiry and aesthetic pleasure informed the work of 18th-century architects such as Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Robert Adam, and the challenge of interpreting the ruins bridged the gap between the rich literary culture of antiquity and the ambiguity of its physical remains. Piranesi spoke for many of his contemporaries when he wrote that “these speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those by the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying”. A demand for more knowledge was stimulated by the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the first half of the 18th century, but tourism also generated the “Rome experience” with moonlight visits to the Colosseum becoming de rigueur, eventually reappearing in the 19th century as a literary trope in the works of Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Before the unification of Italy in 1870, the irregularity and deformity of the monuments inspired landscape settings with confected ruins across Europe from Potsdam to Painshill. Such artificial structures preserved something of the double nature of their originals or “la poétique des ruines” in Denis Diderot’s phrase. Decay cultivated a taste for the picturesque, and 18th-century British travellers, who could not afford foreign journeys, still experienced a comparable sense of nostalgia by moonlight visits to Tintern Abbey on the banks of the River Wye in Wales, or to relics of other monastic buildings. Ruins did not have to be Italian to “speak”.

Mayer makes a very interesting point when he observes that artists such as the 17th-century Frenchman Claude Lorrain or Piranesi could translate their feelings for the ruins of Rome into their art more easily than most writers could put them into words, and the illustrations in this book prove the point. The emotional validation of ruins was, however, neatly expressed by the 18th-century artist and writer William Gilpin who wrote that to endow a Palladian mansion with beauty one had to “use the mallet instead of the chisel… in short from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin”.

• Roland Mayer, The Ruins of Rome:A Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, 394pp, 200 colour illustrations, £30/$39.99 (hb), published 23 January

• Bruce Boucher’s Sir John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Yale) was published in 2024