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The article examines the elements of curiosity and wonders of nature in 17th-century Dutch landscape paintings. Topics discussed include portrayal of pastoral structures and rustic ruins in Abraham Bloemaert's paintings of biblical and mythological subjects, depiction of nature combined with allegorical representations or personifications in paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder, and zoomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes in Roelant Savery's paintings.

Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi's (Galleria degli Uffizi) belongs to an iconographic and semantic tradition, which beneficed of an extraordinary evolution during the second half of the fifteenth century. In such representations the poor wooden construction described by the Bible is combined with the ruins of splendid classical buildings and mean the beginning of Christianity on one hand and the submitted pagan era on the other. A comparison of the two drawings of Leonardo, held in the Louvre and the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi, and the unfinished painting reveals the various steps of the development of the architectural background. Recent ultraviolet studies identified different solutions, conceived and then abandoned by Leonardo, which allow to reconstruct the ruins and architectural fragments in a more detailed manner. In the first version, the Holy family is placed before a heterogeneous structure of wood and stone, while an antique ruin with two flights of stairs raises on the right side. The drawing of the Uffizi focuses its attention on this ruin now shifted to the left side, while the stairs advance strongly toward the centre. On the right side a fragment of a classical order completes the feature, which evokes an antique forum. In the painting the Holy family is situated is the foreground, without any wooden construction to protect them, and the ruin, whose structure and position is slightly changed, is linked to it by the moving of figures and animals. Like in the drawing of the Uffizi many busy craftsmen reveal that the ruin is intended as a building site. The parallel flights remind us of the church of San Sebastiano in Mantua, built according to Leon Battista Alberti's project, and seems to have been inspired by the Roman temple of Claudius. In Lorenzo de' Medici's villa of Poggio a Caiano, begun in 1485, such a pattern had been adopted for the first time in a private building, introducing a complete metamorphosis of this type. Vasari records that several architects proposed drawings for this villa and if such a competition had taken place before Leonardo left Florence in 1482, the latter could have seen sketches or models, like those of Giuliano da Sangallo, and perhaps even proposed his own project. This could explain his interest for architectural features in his Adoration, a concern less present in his other paintings. No document confirms the hypothesis of a direct link between Lorenzo's villa and the ruin of the Adoration, but it is sure that the latter one is nearly connected to the entourage of Lorenzo de' Medici who promoted in this years a renewal of architectural typologies and idioms, founded on the principles of Leon Battista Alberti, the spiritus rector of Lorenzo's youth. When Perugino finished in 1496 another Adoration for the Augustans of San Scopeto he privileged the poor stable conformingly to the biblical tradition, perhaps as required by the monks. Leonardo's ruin as building-site, as an original metaphor of the new Christian religion, had only little Nachleben. A significant testimony is however an Adoration about 1522/1523 attributed to Sebastiano Serlio, who could have known Leonardo's bold architectural background through his master Baldassarre Peruzzi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between ruins and the monumental, the sublime and overwhelming can be traced back to the eighteenth century and the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This contribution is less interested in the monumental ruin and instead looks at the ruin as memorial and at the function ruins perform in commemorative cultures. This encompasses memorials in which poignant remains have been preserved and turned into reminders of violent acts as well as memorials in which the iconographic traditions of the ruin are consciously reproduced for remembrance purposes. While there are numerous examples of the former, from Berlin's ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche’ to the French village Oradour-sur-Glane, there are far fewer cases in which the language of the ruin is deployed to reconfigure our relationship with the past to allow not only for melancholic reflection but for actual mourning to take place. They range from eccentric projects such as the Neptune Memorial Reef off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida – an alternative cemetery in which people can have their ashes combined with forms for a reef that is growing over the faux ruins of what looks like a lost city – to Argentinian clandestine detention camps which are left to go to ruin because any kind of intervention is seen to interfere with the forensic and traumatic real. The ruin allows for a visualization of different forms of mourning: we mourn loss, death, decay and destruction; man-made and natural catastrophes; humanity's futile and successful attempts to master nature; and nature's indifference to humans and their cruelty against one another. But do we need to conceive memorial ruins differently, depending on whether they commemorate gradual decay and mortality, a natural catastrophe, or various types of governmental, military or economic violence? Could the aesthetic of the ruin dangerously confuse very different forms of terror, violence and violation, directed against other nations, political opponents or ethnic minorities, perhaps even rendering invisible human agency and erasing the specificities of the historical context? Or may the ruin help us to discern where these structures and practices of violence converge? These and related questions will be explored in this contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper charts a changing relationship to ruins over fifteen years of making site-specific performance. It looks at three sets of ruins (a nineteenth-century water tower and a chapel and almshouses, both of medieval origins) and records how they each acted as the beginning of three separate post-dramatic performance projects. By re-visiting and walking between the three sets of ruins, the author tests his own changing understanding of their materiality: from inert properties waiting for invasive or re-compositional acts to unfinished and vibrant materials actively recomposing themselves as allies in resistance and ‘slow revolution’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at photography of ruins in the U.S. Particular focus is given to photographs by artists Walker Evans, Robert Smithson, and Camilo José Vergara. According to the author, these artists' images captured the process of entropy as theorized by philosopher Georg Simmel. It is suggested that their photographs presented a darker and less romantic image of ruins than was seen in 19th-century European pastoral art. Details on the relationship between nature, American industry, and waste in the photographs also are presented.

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the relationship between photography and history, photographs of ruins, and color photography.

Steve McQueen’s Giardini(2009) was a film installation made specifically for the British pavilion at the 53rd Biennale. It pondered the architectural and ideological grounds of Venice’s ageing institution of art. Filmed in the winter, the Giardini della Biennale were made to appear derelict, abandoned by the summer exposition crowds and left to the effects of nature. Viewers were positioned within a heritage of ruin-gazing that extends back through the picturesque tradition, and which had been familiar to the Venice of Englishmen such as Byron, Turner and Ruskin. In this film, the national pavilions took on the character of so many follies, in a proleptic fantasy or ‘fairytale’ that challenged a line of imperial imaginaries handed down from Scipio, Gibbon and Speer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamin's writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroque's two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aesthetics of ruins in relation to Romantic aesthetics. Topics include art historian Alois Riegl's thought on the historicity of ruins from an aesthetic perspective, the fragmentary nature of ruins as artistic objects, and art critic Linda Nochlin's interpretation of the drawing "The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins" by Henry Fuseli. Also addressed the poem "An Elegy on a Pile of Ruins" by John Cunningham, the relation of the passage of time to aesthetic valuation, and the aesthetic thought of philosopher Immanuel Kant.

The article discusses an aesthetic perspective on ruins in relation to the issue articles "On Things That Are Not There Anymore" by Jennifer Judkins, "Architectural Ghosts" by Jeanette Bicknell, and "The Triumph of Time: Romanticism Redux" by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Other topics include the relation of archaeology to architectural aesthetics, the phenomenon of visits to historic sites such as battlefields, and the building Bannerman Castle on the Hudson River. The book "Pleasure of Ruins," by Rose Macaulay, is noted.

Why have ruins been so fascinating for artists? And is there an inherent melodramatic quality to states of ruin? What is the link between architectural ruins, financial ruin and ruinous lives? And what kinds of ways out do artists offer to counteract ruined affairs? The paper looks at a prominent case of a ruined city - Detroit - and offers readings of how artists (photographers, filmmakers, musicians, and cityscapists) have taken up the challenge to view and experience a city that has been prone to destruction, desolation, and doom. The range of productively working with and against notions of decay includes the highly melodramatic as well as the ludicrously comic (both prominent in the TV series Hung), and for new ways of achieving success there are not only technological, athletic and horticultural incentives at stake, but one may even have to rely on the age-old means of commodity: one's own body. The 'melodramatic penis' will therefore be discussed as a tangible sign of economic and spiritual crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on artist Hubert Robert's painting "Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie en ruines," which represents the Louvre palace located in Paris, France. It is stated that in the painting, the Louvre is represented not as a national museum resulting from a revolution, but as the remains of a dying world. Robert's ruin paintings depicted different ideas and stages for the re-modeling of the palace during the period 1795-1805.

Sociologist Jonathan Jan Benjamin Mijs explores Detroit, the symbol of destructive global forces, and finds agency in a wealth of ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews an exhibition displaying sculpture work of sculptor Richard Deacon held at Tate Britain, London, England from February 5-April 27, 2014 and the art exhibition "Ruin Lust" related to the use of ruins in art at Tate Britain, London, England from March 4-May 18, 2014.

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Hieronymus Cock's view of the Capitoline Hill, published in his 1562 series on Roman ruins, has long been considered a useful document by historians of art and architecture for the key historical and topographical information it contains on one of Rome's most celebrated sites during the Renaissance. Beyond its documentary nature, which, as will appear was essentially rhetorical, the view also offers much information as to how a mid-sixteenth-century Flemish artist might perceive Rome's illustrious topography and celebrated ancient statuary. In other words, Cock's engraving enables us to put into practice what may be called an "archaeology of the gaze." Through previously unnoticed details, Cock invents a comical—verging on the satirical—vision of the antique sculptures proudly displayed on the famous piazza. Such an ironical reversal of Italian classical dignity is typical of the attitude of some contemporary Flemish artists, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was then close to Cock, and exposes the ambivalent position of some Northern European artists towards the classical tradition and Italian art theory. Finally, the analysis of other engravings of ruins by Hieronymus Cock where two emblematic characters—the draftsman and the kakker (the one who defecates)—appear side by side, sheds light on the origin and possible significance of these comical and subversive details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The intent of this paper is to explain the excavation, the renovation and the valorization intervention of the forum complex in the archeological area of Tiermes, located in the south east of Soria province (Spain). This intervention has been made by a multidisciplinary expert group as part of the project “Tiermes: Cultural Lab”, whose activity, after the problems diagnosis, has consisted in an intervention of consolidation and protection of the ruins, as well as an architectonic project to improving the accessibility and the integration of the archeological remains with the uniqueness of Tiermes landscape. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The artistic representation of the estancias of Cordoba was a work begun in the early twentieth century that featured numerous works in all techniques and by several authors, especially architects. This paper intends to present the author of a series of sketches depicting the ruins of the Jesuit Mission of San Ignacio de Córdoba Exercises and artistic reconstruction achieved from a detailed, documental and archaeological study. So far this work was known, but believed an anonymous drawing. We present the background on similar representations of buildings declared an UNESCO World Heritage Site, which did not include San Ignacio, some biographical data of the author and the importance of his work to establish itself as the first archaeological survey, and hypothetical reconstruction of this important Jesuit stay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits a turning point in the history of Western Europe's engagement with ancient ruins, the sixteenth-century Renaissance. The author puts pressure on the notion that modernity's fascination with ruins rests on an interest in the historical past exclusively. A close look at the oeuvre of the Haarlem-based artist Maerten van Heemskerck and his Self-Portrait with the Colosseum of 1553 reveals ruins’ appeal as multivalent. For Heemskerck and other sixteenth-century artists, ruins engendered encounters and confrontations between the material and the immaterial, the self and history, life and death. What is more, the temporality of ruins is more polymorphous than now classic essays on the ruin by Georg Simmel and others have us imagine. In Heemskerck's Renaissance, the depiction of ancient ruins also resonated with the violence-induced ruination of recent events such as the Sack of Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In A View of the Writers' Building from the Monument at the West End (1824–1826), James Baillie Fraser depicted the memorial to the Black Hole of Calcutta in ruins before the pristine Georgian façades of the Writers' Building and Saint Andrew's Church. Erected in 1760, the monument commemorated the British citizens who suffocated in a cell after they were captured by the Nawab of Bengal in 1756. Significantly, while earlier British representations present the monument as a marker of the origins of Britain's dominion over Calcutta, Fraser's image of the memorial is far more ambiguous. In Fraser's aquatint, its representation as a picturesque ruin appears to impinge on the very status of Holwell's monument as a memorial. Situated before the buildings that symbolise Britain's power and progress in Calcutta, the decaying monument troubles the scene by recalling the fraught nature of British hegemony in a city poised to become the capital of British India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have already examined how the avant-garde used, understood and satirised techniques of the mass media. This article examines how Schwitters engaged in a more ambitious project: an exploration of fundamentally new systems of information technology, and of the ways information was communicated, controlled, preserved and discarded. The ruin of Schwitters' lifework, the Merzbau, has been thoroughly examined; this article explores instead how Schwitters literally used the ruin and the ruined, fragments of the immediate past, trash, as his material of choice. I will argue that Schwitters' work, neither straightforwardly politically engaged nor arguably formally innovative, represents a sustained exploration of this first media age and its completely new forms of mediation: the before and after of the ephemera of our society, producing adverts, branding and packaging as a graphic designer and reasserting the same objects as trash, rubbish and the ruined in his collages and assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Of the various types of ruins, some are precipitated by nature and time, but others, more violently, in conflict and war. Such ruins act as signs of wasteful and destructive human acts, and often carry hortatory overtones for the viewer. The ruin, far from being a ‘mark of peace’ (as Simmel, in his classic article suggests), is a sign that warns of man's violent nature. This idea is explored in this paper, in part, through the work of modern artists Anselm Kiefer and Anne and Patrick Poirier. Author then looks to the ancient world, to Greece and Rome and to such examples as Rome and Athens, as well as to iconic modern sites such as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin and the Königsplatz in Munich. The author offers a summary typology of the ruin and suggests that we can construct a model of restless yet significant sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on a series of drawings of skeletons of blank billboards along the margins of the journal's pages. The author notes the association of the drawings to the architecture of the journal and to "Space Available," the public installation for the High Line. The author states that the project has similar attributes as the work of Hudson River School painters Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole which highlights the tension between architectural ruins and landscape.

In this paper, we look at buildings from the 'disturbing' perspective of ruin and ruination. The relationship between buildings and ruins appears to be an antithesis, one between organisation and disorganisation: a dyad of mutually exclusive opposites. However, we try to show how the relationship between buildings and ruins is more complex and multifaceted so that rather than being the play of opposites, it is one which is mutually enacting and inextricably entwined. We explore three aspects of the relationship of mutuality between building and ruin. The first is a consideration of ruins and their relationship to structuring and de-structuring. Second, we look into the multiplicity of meanings that ruins engender, their inherent ambivalence. Finally, we argue that ruin and ruination are as related to construction and re-ordering as they are to destruction, since they are not the absolute annihilation of building and organisation, but are themselves different forms of organisation and organising. Thus, the paper is not so much about ruins themselves, where ruins are seen as obliteration or the absence of form. Rather, it is about what ruins and ruination tell us about buildings, structure and the processes of organising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on architecture and representation of ruins in post-catastrophic Warsaw. The large empty spaces left over from socialist planning reflect the dullness that renders the cityscape monotone. Reinhard Zimmermann proposed three basic concepts to define the artificial ruin including the contrastive ruin, ruine that facilitate historical continuity and contrastive ruin. The contrastive ruin describes, structures including grottoes or hermitages, which that serve aesthetic purpose.

When Thomas Stamford Raffles published his seminal text The History of Java in 1817, ruins were a favourite leitmotif in British art, forming an important element within the visual vocabulary of the picturesque. Given the fascination in this period for the ruin, fuelled by a tradition of antiquarian enquiry, the newly developing science of archaeology, and the increased possibilities for travel in the wake of imperial expansion, it is not surprising that Raffles chose to devote a whole a chapter of his publication to Java's ruined candis. The plates and vignettes which illustrate the chapter, created according to pictorial conventions that were ordinarily applied to the crumbling remains of Europe's classical past, are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of South-East Asia's architectural remains. This paper examines how these images elicited set emotional responses associated with the idea of ruins and ruination and confirmed key stereotypes associated with the region, linking the candis, and by implication the Javanese themselves, with a vanished past rather than with a dynamic and forward-looking present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a series of 36 prints titled "Ruinas de Zaragoza" by Fernando Brambila and Juan Gálvez which depict the destruction wrought in the Spanish War of Independence in the conflict with French General Napoleon Bonaparte. Though less well known than the pictures of that war by compatriot artist Francisco de Goya, the prints are said to embody a Romantic tradition of ruins' depictions, the cultural patrimony of Zaragoza, Spain's citizens, and a protest statement against war.

All ruins bespeak both persistence and decay. Yet the specificity of Roman ruins, for the Antwerp publisher Hieronymus Cock (c.1510-1570), lay less in a charged sublimnity than in a lingering power to model, to furnish templates in his Netherlandish here-and-now. Cock's astonishing series of etchings, the Praecipua Aliquot Romanae Monimenta was published in 1551. One of the earliest products of Cock's revolutionary Aux Quatre Vents firm, the Praecipua has long proven problematic to art historians, since it seems less to document ancient Rome than to present the city as landscape, a sprawl of disabled structures. Writing in 1907, for example, the archaeologist Hülsen complained that Cock's views 'teach us nearly nothing' of antiquity, and 'depict only how grave the monuments' "en-rubblement" (Verschüttung) has become'. Yet the sixteenth-century appeal of Cock's prints lay precisely with this enactment of decay. For his audiences Cock fragmented views of the Colosseum, blurred distances between buildings like the Septizodium and the Baths of Diocletian, and dotted the ruins with tiny animals and human figures. Ultimately, the etchings mattered not as antiquarian documents but as pattern prints, templates re-used and excerpted by German intarsists, Dutch metalsmiths, and Italian painters. It was the print medium that enabled such copia to reconstruct a Rome that was no longer there, less by showing it than re-staging via a kind of antiquarian virtuality, its aesthetic of bricolage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the masterpieces cited at the Art in Ruins in Great Britain. It features that most of the artworks at the Art in Ruins are characterized with provocative artworks and cites that several artists who are involved with the art have used the fragments of the country's culture. In addition, the artworks are considered as the condensation of "Game with Vestiges" by Jean Baudrillard. It notes that these artworks are the artistry amalgamation of architects as well as the artists. Moreover, the postmodernism designs are also highlighted.

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The article focuses on the views of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Giambattista Vico shown in the monumental vestiges of ancient Rome. It notes that Piranesi and Vico's discussion focuses on the regurgitation through the Lodolian rationalism or a widespread war of words that left an indelible mark the antiquanerism in the 18th century. Moreover, their works show the influence of Vichian on the image-making or the kind of image-making that brings ruins, histories and formal ingenuity together. Meanwhile, it mentions that Vico's thought about the art of memory and recovery seems to be the same on Piranesi's art which combines archeological reconstruction and composite invention.

The article explores the landscaping interests of former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, with reference to the artificial ruins that he had over many years arranged on his property at Kingsmere, Ottawa, Ontario. It is stated that more than a hobby, the Kingsmere property blossomed into the outward sign of King's inward and spiritual grace. According to the author, Kingsmere's ruins come burdened with a load of cultural and historical baggage. The author thinks that Mackenzie King's ties with Kingsmere originated in an act of love for his friend Bert Harper.

The meaning of music crosses the historically conceived concept of time. This article focuses on the the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as cases ponting out the resistence of musical signs (semiotically speaking) to functionalist readings, which would transform them into ruins (to be precise, rubble of the past acquiring their real beauty in the present, as Marc Augé try to display, in his recent essay, with regard to heritage of some culture). Mendelssohn's role was central, in the debates of his time, about the new perspectives of lutheran sacred song, because he suffered the resistence opposed by some contemporary composers and critics to his Paulus, the oratorio addressed to the concert halls and not to the sacred service. Bach's thought endured several misinterpretations during the romantic era. The case of Two and three part Inventions shows that the sense of arising musical culture of the past has to be corrected (translated) to prove the linear historical development of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article picturises the studio ruins of the artist, Francis Bacon. After his death the studio was dismantled and transported to Dublin and reassembled in Hugh Lane Gallery. All the things are preserved in their own places appearing as if the artist has taken a break from his work. The article provides an interior view of the art room as well as the living room.

We consider a Markov-modulated risk model in which the claim inter-arrivals, amounts and premiums are influenced by an external Markovian environment process. A system of Laplace transforms of the probabilities of the severity of ruin, given the initial environment state, is established from a system of integro-differential equations derived by Snoussi [The severity of ruin in Markov-modulated risk models Schweiz Aktuarver. Mitt., 2002, 1, 31–43]. In the two-state model, explicit formulas for probabilities of the severity of ruin are derived, when the initial reserve is zero or when both claim amount distributions are from the rational family. Numerical illustrations are also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consideration of some Italian writings on the Lisbon earthquake allows us to single out three different kinds of reaction to the catastrophe. The very first contemporary reports reflect the process of the construction of an event that, according to Gilles Deleuze, is characterized by extension, intensity and formation of something new. Then, some years after 1755, a new interest in the theme of ruins emerges in the work of Giuseppe Baretti, for whom ruins represent the reference to a past that has to be contemplated in its loss of functionality (following a pattern of perception recently described by Marc Augé). Finally, a third aspect is linked to the materialistic reflection about nature put forward by the nineteenth-century poet Giacomo Leopardi who elaborates his pessimistic conception of nature in a strict dependence on Voltaire's SLème sur le désastre de Lisbonne pointing out the antinomy between collective happiness and individual sorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an article about a series of black-and-white landscape photographs taken in the ruins of Spanish colonial and the U.S. imperial architecture in Panama in 2002. Geographical comparison between the ruins of Spanish colonial and the U.S. imperial architecture; Purpose of taking the image of the landscape; Significance of a rocking chair on the photographs

The article focuses on the contract for the painting "The Grand Attack on Valenciennes," by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in France. The author stated that the contract was written in French and covers four pages, written in a scribal copperplate. It is implied that the painting was acquired at the Stargardt auction in Berlin, Germany on March 16 to 17, 1995. The author averred that the objectives of the contracts were to engrave a set of views of the ruins of the town. Furthermore, it is inferred that the entrepreneurs of the project include Valentine Green, Rupert Green, and Christian Mechel.

Discusses the caprice, a genre of ruin painting, as a fictional structure. Development of the ruin as a subject of invention in painting; Analysis of how Diderot first defined the poetics of this genre in the 'Salon de 1767'; Fantastic genre's variations on the theme of Piranesi's 'Prisons.'

Discusses sensibilities towards ruins in literature, arts, archaeology and architecture. Presentation of a vision opposite to the Beaux-Arts perspective; Transformations of the perception westerners have of ruins during the second half of the 20th century; Realization that ruins can be more than some enchanting reminder of distant cultures.

This article reflects upon a few pages of Albert Speeds memoirs on the Third Reich, in which the man who was Hitler's first architect from 1934 to 1942, after a twenty-year term of imprisonment, offers his theory on the value of ruins. The architect himself considered this an active factor in establishing his privileged relation to the Führer, a theory that conceived the Reich's official buildings in view of the beautiful ruins they would produce after centuries of neglect. This projective (instead of retrospective) treatment of the ruins, of which the modern period offers many an example, becomes a pressing issue with such a cumbersome and fundamentally anti-modern heritage as Third Reich constructions. Speer's anticipation of the Antique-cum-Romantic inspired ruins was to impose stylistic, economic and pragmatic constraints on his projects for which the functional necessities of the present became less important than the programmed revelation of Nazi imperial glory. The counterpart (both real and symbolic) of ruins was to be found in the architectural debris of modern European cities produced under the competent care of Hitler's first architect made armaments minister in 1942: Albert Speer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the restoration of the ancient sculpture "The Belvedere Venus." The restoration of the sculpture was performed by famous seventeenth-century sculptors that include Bartolomeo Ammannati, Ercole Ferrata with his pupil Giovanni Battista Foggini, Baccio Bandinelli, among others. The process starts with the thought of preserving the decapitated parts as well as the part wherein it was no longer presentable. In like manner, the sculptors painstakingly took into account to preserve the originality of the masterpiece and at the same time enforcing their own personal ideas.

The article discusses works by Publius Annius Florus of Viterbo, Italy. Annius, as cited, was a trained theologian and a Biblical exegete who stands in the tradition of Dominican learning. Historical landscape to Annius is one of ruins, including remains of buildings, buried inscriptions and fragments of texts. He believes that the best type of historical evidence are names and inscriptions. The author defined history in terms of substance and the modes of its individuation. History to him consists of three parts, namely narratio, which is the substance, chorographia and chronographia. In his work "Etrusca et Italica Chronographia," the author invokes the methodological guidelines demonstrated in his "Methasthenes" to create a chronological framework for Etruscan history.

Six ruins in the region east of the Dead Sea are called locally by the same name, Khirbet el-Medeineh, which means "ruin of the little city. " Since those ruins are in the same general area and have the same name, they are often confused with one another. The purpose of this brief communication is to clarify the confusion and provide some basic bibliography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The only Nabataean settlement of any consequence between Petra and Meda⊃ in Şāliḥ, Ḥumayma (ancient Auara) became a major station on the Via Nova Traiana after the Roman annexation of Arabia and remained an important garrison-town into the Byzantine period. Although Ḥumayma was the most promising site for settlement in the northern Ḥsmā, skillful mobilization of the scarce water resources in this arid zone was required if the inhabitants of the town were to survive and prosper. Previous descriptions of the extensive water system (reservoirs, cisterns, aqueduct) the Nabataeans developed have concentrated on the visible ruins and have had little to say about the relative capacities of the water sources or the pattern of consumption over time. The regional survey we conducted in 1983, on which this article is based, not only produced a more reliable measurement of capacities but also provided an assessment of the strategy of mobilization the inhabitants devised in response to the harsh desert conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the 'Hadleigh Castle Mouth of the Thames--Morning After a Story Night,' a painting done by John Constable in the 19th century. Profile of Constable; Historical analysis of the theme; His interest in ruin scene as his landscape theme; Relationship between painting and the on-the-spot drawing and large oil sketches of late 1828 to early 1829.

The article discusses contemporary Latin American photographers. The Mayan ruins in the Yucatan were rediscovered in 1941 by British Archeologist George Catherwood who published drawings of the ruins. In the 1980s, Argentinian Leandro Katz duplicated these drawings in photographs. Ruins are the past. The article analyses the work of several Latin American photographers who bridge the gap between the past and the present, including Gerardo Suter, Mario Cravo Neto, and Oscar Muñoz.