(light jazz music)
- [Steven] While there are
plenty of representations
of ruins and of antiquity
in the Renaissance,
interest in ruins, interest in antiquity
is accelerated exponentially
because of the discovery
in the 18th century
of the ancient city of Pompei,
a city that had been covered by ash
that had been extinguished,
but also preserved.
- [Beth] And for the first time,
Europeans had a sense of the daily life
of an ancient Roman city.
But this is also the time of
the beginnings of art history.
With all of the discoveries
that were being made
of classical fragments, There
were those like Winkelmann,
who attempted to date them to
correlate what was being found
with ancient Greek and
Roman literary sources.
Art history in a way was born.
- [Steven] This was a
period of the Enlightenment,
when philosophers and political thinkers
began to question absolute faith in God
and the monarchies of Europe,
thinking instead logic and the rational
might be more important.
And in the context of the Forum,
we could use scientific analysis
to understand the way
that history had unfolded.
- [Beth] There was the
beginning of the understanding
of layers of history, of stratigraphy,
of digging down in order
to dig through time.
- [Steven] The law of superposition,
that is when something is
layered over something else,
it's newer than the thing below it.
These ideas are being expressed
in the work of artists
who begin to include a kind of melancholy
in their representations of ruins,
a melancholy that speaks
to the grandeur of time,
that acknowledges the transience
of human accomplishment.
- [Beth] And the ruin is beautiful
and a reminder of the
transience of human life.
But it also for artists like Fuseli
became a symbol of a past era
that couldn't be surpassed,
of how could those in the late
18th and early 19th century
possibly equal the
incredible grandeur of Rome?
- [Steven] Those kinds of
thoughts are very much the product
of a moment when England and France
and other increasingly
industrializing countries
are gaining more and more
mastery over the environment,
are building enormous cities
and are beginning to ask themselves,
Will our cities also become ruins?
- [Beth] We also see
artists like Hubert Robert,
who painted an image
of the Louvre in ruins,
So he's imagining a future
when this important palace,
this expression of the
monarchy, of Napoleon's empire
is one day in the future itself a ruin.
We also see an image
where the bank of England
is represented as a ruin.
And we know also that artists
are intentionally fabricating ruins.
- [Steven] The late 18th
and early 19th century
used the ruin as a vehicle to
come to terms with modernity.
Science had really come to the fore.
Traditional religion was receding,
and artists and poets,
people that we associate with
the movement of Romanticism,
were looking for the awe, the grandeur,
the power that we once
associated with God,
but that was more difficult
to locate in the modern world.
The fragment reminded us
of the futility of empire.
It reminded us of the awesomeness of time,
something that man could
never triumph over.
- [Beth] And we see this
expressed in paintings
by Casper David Friedrich,
where instead of classical ruins,
we see the ruins of a Gothic church.
There's also a sense
that not only has time
eroded human achievement
and human glory, but also
that human beings themselves
are responsible that
we've let things decline,
we've allowed civilizations
and their traces
to vanish before our eyes.
- [Steven] And so we
have a responsibility,
and it's at this moment that
modern archeology develops.
That is an effort to understand the past
through physical remains,
through excavations
using scientific methods.
- [Beth] Just as there was
an awareness of history,
of the way that empires rise and fall.
There was also a sense
that you could build
monumental architecture
so that when it became a ruin,
it still spoke of your culture's grandeur.
And perhaps the most
disturbing example of that
is the Theory of Ruins put
forward by Albert Speer,
Hitler's favorite architect.
- [Steven] This is the height of uberous
that the Nazis would outlive
even their projected Thousand-Year Reich
and that their constructions
would equal the Romans,
not only when they were intact,
but even projected far into the future.
- [Beth] They wanted
to rival ancient Rome.
Ancient Rome had left majestic ruins
that spoke to the greatest
achievements of humankind.
- [Steven] And one of the
allies of the Nazis, Mussolini,
had at his disposal the
actual ruins of Rome
and undertook enormous
excavation projects,
demolishing the medieval,
demolishing the Baroque,
in order to highlight
the great ancient traditions of the city.
- [Beth] He had Hitler come and visit,
and Mussolini put on a show
highlighting ancient Rome's grandeur.
- [Steven] Some would argue
that modern archeology,
and not just the archeology
of Mussolini, did damage,
that archeology in search of knowledge
has served also to destroy
the beauty of the accumulation of time.
- [Beth] They're no longer overgrown.
They're no longer so topsy-turvy,
there are no cows grazing here.
You have to pay to enter.
- [Steven] The Forum has always
been a place of pilgrimage
and is now a place of modern mass tourism.
And with vendors just
outside the historical park,
selling souvenirs, the
experience might seem
to be trivialized, but for me,
and I think for many visitors,
even when it's crowded,
it is still possible to
experience the grandeur of time,
the sense of the sublime
that was so important to
artists in the late 18th
and early 19th century.
Those things are still true.
And so when we walk through the Forum,
when we look at its monuments,
when we look at its
fragments, at these ruins,
what we're seeing is not simply
a fragment of ancient Rome.
What we're seeing is the
testament to the changing meanings
of the ruin through time.
(light jazz music)
