The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart Jeanne M. Britton Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019). Pp. 368; 11 color illus., 80 halftones. $35.00 cloth. Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture is an ambitious journey through the visual and literary culture of architectural ruins. Along the way, ancient and early modern poetry mingles with archaeological detail, “ruined” women confront architectural decay, and Romanticism seems to find its truest origins in Rome. The primary destination, though, is what Stewart refers to as the “ruins print,” a vital and vibrant combination of medium and genre in which archaeology, tourism, pilgrimage, and visual thinking coalesce. The master of this genre—and the star of this expansive book—is Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Stewart approaches Western artworks “as paradigmatic of conflicts between beliefs and practices involving materialism and value” (xiii). Her chapters offer an insightful, surprising retelling of the historical narrative in which architectural remains, especially Roman, are plundered or neglected for centuries, then objects of pilgrimage and sources of knowledge, later the foundation for artistic inspiration, and eventually representations not of the past or its aesthetics but a new value of interiority. Throughout, the material of artistic production plays a central role, whether it is the tufa of the ancient Roman builder or the copper of the eighteenth-century printmaker. The material aspects of printmaking—itself “an art of inscribing stone and other mineral surfaces” that “involves the erosion and [End Page 253] eventual destruction of the work’s own material” (38)—make it, more than painting, the appropriate medium for the representation of ruins. As each pressing of a copper plate wears down the malleable metal, “[p]rintmaking is indeed,” Stewart notes, itself “a process of ruination” (122). Matter and form take equal weight and perform equal conceptual work throughout her chapters, and while the ruin as a subject supports such an approach, it does not guarantee its success or clarity, which must be attributed to Stewart’s masterful readings that move seamlessly across languages, genres, and eras. The book is organized thematically and chronologically across eight chapters. The introduction establishes the connections between ruins and language that guide the volume’s approach to visual and literary works of art, noting that ruins “call for the supplement of further reading, further syntax” (2). The following chapter, “Matter: This Ruined Earth,” considers the material foundations of ruins alongside their abstract significance and touches on Goethe’s Faust, Vergil’s Aeneid, Hebrew scriptures, and the Tower of Babel. While ruins expose the construction methods of the ancient Romans, they also generate new perspectival views and disturb boundaries between interior and exterior, between transparency and opacity. “Marks: Inscription and Spolia” expands on the syntax that ruins summon by considering pagan and Christian uses of ancient remains in a wide range of classical and early modern texts before a section on the frequency of ruins in nativity scenes. In the following chapter, “Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores—On the Ruin of Women,” a striking effect of Stewart’s thematic structure is the connection between “Matter” and “Mater,” between building materials and maternity, and above all between the ruined building and the ruined woman. This connection initially seems somewhat strained but is strengthened in her discussions of a number of themes. Virginity and prostitution feature prominently in ruins narratives; the downfall of many a city is linked to promiscuity; architectural ruins are often the background for figures of human ruination. Most provocatively, she considers connections between the significance of the feminine and the reproducibility of the print, and in particular the etymological link between the Latin “matrix” [womb, source, origin] and “mater” [mother], in the following chapter (“Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print”). In the context of copper-plate engraving, the “matrix”—the metal sheet from which a print is made—is a source of prolific aesthetic and imaginative reproduction. The second half of the book proceeds from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. “Model: The Architectural Imaginary” takes up the ruin as neoclassical model and (proto-) Romantic...