The Fragment in Ruins

In March of 1818, an extensive array of architectural fragments arrived on English shores, aboard H.M.S. Weymouth, from Leptis Magna on the Libyan coast of North Africa. The shipment contained twenty-two granite columns, fifteen marble columns, ten capitals, twenty-five pedestals, seven loose slabs, ten pieces of cornice, five inscribed slabs, and various fragments of sculptured figures (for example, “Statue in halves Head and Feet deficient”). ¹ Such large-scale plundering of ruins abroad was not an unusual activity at the time—this is, after all, only a few years after Lord Elgin acquired a number of marbles from the Parthenon—but these, it seemed, had no obvious destination. They languished in the courtyard of the British Museum until 1826 when King George IV's architect, then Jeffry Wyatt, came up with a plan to erect them in the King's gardens, on the southern shores of Virginia Water, an artificial lake in Windsor Great Park. Wyatt refashioned them into what he referred to as his “Temple of Augustus,” a loose arrangement of columns intended to convey the impression of a temple in ruins, though bearing no direct relation to their original disposition at Leptis. These were grouped in two sections, separated by a road that was elevated upon a bridge, under which the King could pass on his private ride from the lake to Fort Belvedere. The group on the south side formed a semicircular apse, and on the north, a parallel colonnade. In places, pieces of entablature were hoisted on top of groups of two or three complete columns, but in general the shape, which suggested a submerged structure, was indicated by broken column shafts, and by fallen columns, or simply their remaining bases (Figure 3.1).