![]() Piranesi's engravings were such a potent framing device for the cultural imagination of the 18th century that the actual ruins had to compete with them. His "sublime dreams", Horace Walpole said, had conjured "visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour". As Marguerite Yourcenar put it, Piranesi was not only the interpreter but "virtually the inventor of Rome's tragic beauty". It's not that Piranesi, an architect, couldn't do the maths: he wasn't trying to document the remains so much as translate them into a grand melancholic view. When ruin-meister Giovanni Piranesi introduced human figures into his "Views of Rome", they were always disproportionately small in relation to his colossal (and colossally inaccurate) wrecks of empire. This hypertrophied response to decay and dilapidation is what drives the "ruin gaze", a kind of steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past because we cannot enlarge the present. After Rose Macaulay's London home is bombed during the second world war, leaving her "sans everything but my eyes to weep with", she goes on to write The Pleasure of Ruins, which confesses to her "intoxication" with "the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs". In The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroine Miriam slips unnoticed into the Colosseum, and there, under its "dusky arches", its "picturesque and gloomy wrong", she throws off her self-control and becomes "a mad woman concentrating the elements of a long insanity into that moment". Henry Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins, painted in 1779, depicts an aesthete sitting among history's scattered fragments with his hand clamped to his brow in a state of neuralgic meltdown. The downward drag of ruins can be a dizzying or terrifying experience. ![]() We do not simply stumble across ruins, we search them out in order to linger amid their tottering, mouldering forms – the great broken rhythm of collapsing vaults, truncated columns, crumbling plinths – and savour the frisson of decline and fall, of wholeness destabilised. The exhibition's title – taken from the 18th-century German compound Ruinenlust – describes the curious psychopathology of being drawn to that which we most fear. How we turn this melancholic experience of loss into a form of satisfaction is the subject of Tate Britain's exhibition Ruin Lust, curated by Brian Dillon (editor of Ruins, a 2011 collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery).
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