Review: Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory, by Sigrid de Jong

Abstract

Sigrid de Jong Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 352 pp., 100 color and 185 b/w illus. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780300195750 Sigrid de Jong's Rediscovering Architecture is about several things at once. Most evidently, it is a book about a group of three famous, if not iconic, archaic Greek-Doric temples: Paestum's Temple of Hera I, built around 530 BCE, the oldest and most idiosyncratic of the three, commonly referred to in the eighteenth century as the Basilica because visitors could not believe such a peculiar building had been a temple; the Temple of Athena, constructed ca. 520 BCE, the smallest of the three; and the Temple of Hera II, built ca. 460 BCE, the largest and the most conventional. At the time of their rediscovery around the middle of the eighteenth century, these structures were met with a variety of reactions, including vivid and often dismissive descriptions expressing everything from astonishment to distaste. These temples did not resemble any buildings with which eighteenth-century visitors were familiar; Paestum turned accepted ideas of classical architecture upside down. De Jong notes, for instance, that it is known that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, upon arriving on the site of these porous limestone temples with their rough columns, was at first uncertain whether he was seeing rocks or ruins. And Antoine Vaudoyer, visiting Paestum in the summer of 1787, found the temples “of heavy and clumsy character,” with “the form, the grace and subtlety of Hercules” (47). The temples were the subject of captivating drawings and paintings, as in Thomas Hardwick's sketchbooks and William Turner's dramatic watercolors (many of which provide beautiful illustrations for this book), and of lavish publications. Between Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont's Suitte [Suite] de plans (ca. 1750) and Paolo Antonio Paoli's Paesti (1784), mid-eighteenth-century authors produced no less than seven monographs on the temples of Paestum. De Jong's book is also about the life of the temples in eighteenth-century architectural thought. Rather than starting …