What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

Abstract

The cult of ruins that arose in the eighteenth century set all Europe on fire. Italywas its first laboratory, but it did not take long for it to invade France, Great Britain, the German principalities, and even Russia. Travelers and the “Grand Tour” were the vectors of this enthusiasm, enriched by the art of painters and poets no less than by antiquarian scholarship and the development of techniques of observation, survey, and excavation. Each of these contributed to a sensibility that grewandbranched out. TheRenaissance taste for ruinswas originally almost entirely focused on Rome and its antiquities, Roman history being the history that mattered. In the course of the eighteenth century, such men as Jacon Spon and Lord Arundel turned to Greece while at the same time British, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Scandinavian antiquarians took on the task ofmaking a precise inventory of their local antiquities. The first systematic inventories appeared in the seventeenth century with Peiresc and Rubens, soon followed by Cassiano dal Pozzo. Antiquaries like Pietro della Valle set sail for the Orient and reached Persia and India. Theodor de Bry had already pre-