In RuinsPantheon Books, 2001 - 280 pages A brilliant young historian, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. Woodward illuminates doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. He uncovers intimations of mortality in the decay of an ordinary house. He revels in the charm of the follies of eighteenth-century landscapes. Elegant, thought provoking, and beautifully illustrated, In Ruins is a revelation of the expression of the human imagination where we might otherwise have seen only a pile of stones. |
Table des matières
Who Killed Daisy Miller? | 1 |
A Perverse Pleasure | 32 |
Haunted Houses | 45 |
Droits d'auteur | |
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Abbey amphitheatre ancient ancient Rome antiquity aqueducts archaeologists arches architect architecture artificial ruin artist Baths of Caracalla beauty bomb brick Britain building built Byron castle Charles-Louis Clérisseau church civilisation classical Clérisseau cloister Colosseum columns country house crumbling dark decay demolished deserted desolation destruction discovered dome eighteenth century Empire England English erected Europe façade fall flowers folly Forum fragments garden Ghibellina Giorgio Bassani Gothic grass hermitage Hubert Robert imagined inside John Dyer John Piper John Vanbrugh Lampedusa landscape later Leptis Magna London Lord Manor marble medieval melancholy memories modern monuments Museum never Newstead Ninfa novel Orford Ness painted painter palace photograph Picturesque poem poet Prince published realised Robert Roman Rome rubble scene shadow Shelley Sicily Soane Soane's stone temple tomb tourist tower travelled trees valley Vanbrugh Virginia Water visited W. G. Sebald walls wilderness William William Stukeley wrote young