Ruins & Reverie

The ruin is architecture surrendered to time, and from the Renaissance onward painters found in it an irresistible mood. A broken arch, a fallen column, ivy climbing a roofless temple — these are the props of reverie, the visible proof that empires fall and that we are small against history. In the eighteenth century the taste hardened into a genre. Piranesi's etchings made Roman ruins vast and oppressive; Hubert Robert painted imaginary ruins so devotedly he was nicknamed Robert des Ruines; the capriccio invented ruins that never existed, recombining them for effect. The mood is melancholic and contemplative, sometimes touched with the mysterious. Watch the scale of the human figures who wander these wrecks: shepherds and travellers dwarfed by what other people built and lost. The ruin painting offers a strange consolation — that decay is beautiful, that time is the greatest of all the forces a landscape can contain, and that our own moment will one day be ruins too.

Curatorial note by Alexander Knigge, Editor, Artifact World Gallery