Self-Portrait with Ruins: Maerten van Heemskerck, 1553

Abstract

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.