In RuinsChatto & Windus, 2001 - 280 pages Why are we so fascinated by ruins? Do we see them as jig-saws and riddles or romantic evocations of the damage of Time, complete with crumbling stone and ivy? Do they stir us to remember past glory or warn against future arrogance? In this elegant, provocative book, the brilliant young art-historian Christopher Woodward looks back to the start of the cult in the eighteenth century, when follies were built in English landscape gardens, artists and writers thrilled to Rome's poetry of decay, and in Paris the great chef Careme even served blancmanges shaped like classical ruins. He takes us from Troy and Pompei to Sicilian palaces and Nazi fantasies, and whirls us forward to modem times - to the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, to Florida's Museum of Natural Phenomena, designed as a court-house dumped upside-down by a hurricane and to Chelsea Flower Show's brand-new 'Millennium Ruin'. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple - with its fascinating stories and characters, and its telling illustrations, In Ruins is full of strange delights and startling surprises, exploring the mysterious, melancholy charnl of eternal fragments. Thematically organised, not a guide book, it is full of wonderful stories, anecdotes and illustrations. |
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 Appian aqueducts archaeologists arches architect architecture artist Baths of Caracalla beauty bomb brick bridge Britain building built buried Byron castle Charles-Louis Clérisseau Chateaubriand church civilisation classical Clérisseau Colosseum columns country house crumbling dark dead decay demolished deserted desolation destruction discovered dome eighteenth century Empire England English erected Europe façade fall flowers folly Forum fragments garden Giorgio Bassani Gothic grass hermitage Hubert Robert imagined inside John Dyer John Piper John Vanbrugh Lampedusa landscape later Leptis Magna London manor marble medieval melancholy memory modern monuments Museum never Newstead Ninfa novel Orford Ness painted painter palace photograph Picturesque poem poet realised River Roman Rome rubble scene shadow Shelley Sicily Soane Soane's stone temple tomb tourist tower travelled trees valley village W. G. Sebald walk walls wilderness William William Stukeley wrote young