In praise of the old and crumbline structures that have nourished painters and poets for ages

BY SUDIP BOSE

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In Ruins
By Christopher Woodward, Pantheon, 288 pages, $24

In the spring of 1819, just three years before his death, Percy Shelley moved with his family to Rome, after spending much of the previous year traveling elsewhere in Italy. The 27-year-old poet developed a routine: Every morning, with pens and black-leather notebook in hand, he made the 20-minute walk to what remained of the Baths of Caracalla, that monumental center of Roman leisure built in the third century A.D. The baths, where 1,500 Romans could have once gathered together, fed Shelley?s feverish imagination. Among the flowery glades and the clumps of trees in full blossom, he gazed upon the arches and platforms of the ruinous structure, and composed a good bit of Prometheus Unbound. Indeed, the remains, framed by "the bright blue sky of Rome," as Shelley writes in his preface to the work, "were the inspiration of this drama."

Edward Gibbon had also spent time among the ruins of Rome, in 1764, and what he saw inspired him to write his own masterpiece, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But if Shelley?s Prometheus is optimistic and forward-looking, Gibbon?s massive work is full of regret, dark-hued in tone. In the fallen stones and marble, he saw only collapse and despair. As the classicist Gilbert Highet puts it, "Gibbon sits among the ruins and looks backward towards the past. Shelley finds in the ruins an inspiration for the future; his poetry is a rebirth of beauty from the magnificent fragments of that immortal yesterday which is eternally reborn."

It should come as no surprise that these two writers, their temperamental differences notwithstanding, should respond to ruins in opposite ways. A ruined structure, after all, is a fragment, something whole made incomplete by decay. And, as Christopher Woodward writes in this small, beautifully written, and at times maddening book on the subject, "Each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her own imagination."

Woodward, an Englishman who is the director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, takes the reader on a modern-day Grand Tour, reveling in the decaying structures of Rome and Sicily and Istanbul, in an old manor house in his native Hertfordshire, in the crumbling abbeys of the English countryside, and in the abandoned Italian city of Ninfa, among other places. He also considers the many ways in which ruins have nurtured the imaginations of western artists. We see Byron thrilled by the Roman Coliseum ("A noble wreck in ruinous perfection"), and Nataniel Hawthorne disgusted by it, wishing that "the very sight had been obliterated" before he had happened upon it. And we encounter John Clare and Walter Scott, their melancholy intensified by the English ruins they looked upon, "as if the architecture [were] a sounding-board to amplify the emotions." In ruins, countless artists have seen the transient, the ephemeral, contemplating not only "past greatness," Woodward writes, but also "the future of their own societies." If Rome, Carthage, and Athens could fall, their glorious architecture proving as vulnerable as their civilizations, couldn?t the same fate befall London, Paris, or New York?

A wistful quality lingers throughout much of Woodward?s book, a longing for an earlier century when tourists from abroad, their eyes filled with wonder, could take in the delight of a ruin and become so transformed by the sublimity of the experience that they could not help writing verse or painting pictures that evoked the awe, melancholy, fear, or optimism they felt. Traveling among ruins today, Woodward is often disappointed. The Roman Coliseum he sees, for example, is not the place that enchanted Goethe, Chateaubriand, and Henry James, but is instead suffused with "the most monumental bathos in Europe: a bald, dead and bare circle of stones." At the Baths of Caracalla, Woodward is similarly disillusioned: "Passing through a steel perimeter fence tourists walk on tarmac paths between metal barriers ? and desultory labourers in hard hats give the ruins the air of a modern construction site."

The villains responsible for the sorry state of much of today?s ruins? Archaeologists, according to Woodward. The writer?s denunciation of archaeologists (among them, the "cold-hearted" excavators who uprooted all the trees and plucked "every flower and blade of grass" from the ruins of the Coliseum) is not only naive but reactionary as well?and it sounds the only false note in an otherwise learned and erudite book. "The artist is inevitably at odds with the archaeologist," Woodward writes. "In the latter discipline the scattered fragments of stone are parts of a jigsaw, or clues to a puzzle to which there is only one answer, as in a science laboratory; to the artist, by contrast, any answer which is imaginative is correct."

He goes on in a more impassioned manner: "A ruin has two values. It has an objective value as an assemblage of brick and stone, and it has a subjective value as an inspiration to artists. You can uproot that alder tree, ? erect more fences, spray more weed-killer, excavate and polish. You will preserve every single brick for posterity, and analyse the very occasional discovery of a more ornamental fragment in a learned publication. You will have a great many bricks, but nothing more. If the archaeologists had arrived before Shelley there would be no Prometheus Unbound."

Maybe not, but excavation hardly yields "a great many bricks, but nothing more." Though the West?s romance with ruins has led to some of our greatest art, how can we claim that the immense knowledge we have gained about the ancient world by tireless excavation is of secondary importance to art? Is it enough to be enchanted by a ruined centuries-old building, or should we like to know what kind of people lived there once, how they lived, what they ate, what languages they spoke, how they entertained themselves, and how they made their living? Among my favorite of all travel narratives is D.H. Lawrence?s beautiful Sea and Sardinia. If all we had on our bookshelves was that book, we would think that the Sardinia Lawrence encounters, a primitive island of innocent and simple peasants, indeed had "no history, no date, no race, no offering." Only because of recent excavations do we now know that a prominent and complicated civilization actually flourished on the island in the Bronze Age.

It may be true that?as the English artist and farmer John Dyer put it, articulating the English Picturesque sensibility?a building can appear more beautiful in a state of ruin than when it was originally erected. But don?t we want to know what that beautiful ruin must have been like when it was built? The brush of the modern-day painter cannot tell us that, but the archaeologist?s shovel can.

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