ABSTRACT
While on his Grand Tour to Rome, Addison comments upon both “Buildings the most magnifi cent in the world, and Ruins more magnifi - cent than they.”1 His comment suggests the interesting possibility that ruins can exceed monuments in magnifi cence. For later eighteenth-century audiences, old symbols of authority and power, whether classic or Gothic, have a particular appeal when they are weak and crumbling. The intertwining of ruin and monument can demonstrate the late eighteenth-century’s characteristically ambivalent attitude towards authority and order. The “ideal” ruin must be grand enough in stature to suggest what it once was, and, at the same time, decayed enough to show that it no longer is; grand enough to suggest a worthwhile conquest, yet decayed enough to quell any doubts about who conquers. Ruins can emphasize either permanence-that is, the enduring presence of the past and its still-unextinguished glory-or the impermanence of the present and, indeed, of all earthly glories. For this reason, they are capable of evoking emotions as varied as national pride, melancholy, nostalgia, or even utopian ambitions. Contradictory impulses undergird the fascination with ruins, which Rose Macaulay dubs the “ruin drama”: “Half of [the] desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth.”2 Just like the famous glass of water which can appear either halffull or half-empty, a given ruin can also be seen as either half-remaining
or half-vanished-as either “comforting” or “horrifying,” or more likely both at the same time.3
