ABSTRACT
This closing section considers a later modern attitude not just to nature but to Rome itself. It looks at the aesthetic that became a lens for looking at Rome and nature in the Grand Tour, that is, that of the picturesque ruin. In premodern times, when the idea of a natural cosmos was still relevant, ruins were of little interest. The section explores the connection between ruins and nature in the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ultimately ruins are not a way of interacting with a past culture, but of aestheticizing the past. The section explores this picturesque mode that blurred the line between art and reality in the ruins. It then turns to Georg Simmel’s account of Rome as an eclectic heap or ruin, which he compares to nature itself.
