While the extraordinary popularity of ruin imagery in
eighteenth century France is well known to art historians, it
has remained a largely unstudied, and thus misunderstood,
cultural phenomenon. The profusion of ruin pictures and
ruinous garden pavilions during the Enlightenment is generally
interpreted as symptomatic of the emotional febrility and
escapist perversity of a society bogged down in decadence.
The popularity of ruins as motifs of interior decoration is
taken as proof of the reign of rococo frivolity.
The present study seeks to bring into focus how eighteenth
century artists, connoisseurs and writers themselves
felt about their ruin imagery. This examination is called
for because the evidence of documents, literary sources and
the art itself overwhelmingly suggests that ruins were considered
to be symbolic of nature's regenerative vitality and
wholesomeness. To the contemporary viewer, therefore, the
experience of a ruin was an antidote to, not a symptom of,
social and personal lethargy.
Early signs of the new iconographical trends appear in
the art of students at the French Academy in Rome and were
probably influenced by the commitments to ecclesiastical and
cultural reform expressed by Italian ruinists associated with
the academy. Ruins had a longstanding association in visual
imagery and literature with the contemplative life, intellectual
insights and poetic inspiration; in the eighteenth century,
to frequent ruin settings implied a rejection of hypocrisy,
pomposity and spiritual complacency.
In France, catastrophes, urban renewal projects and the
Revolution created "fresh" ruins which, even more poignantly
than ancient ruins, illustrated the transience of life.
Images of these modern ruins clearly embodied the unstable
blend of anxiety, excitement, hope and resignation with which
French society watched the shirlwind of change sweeping their
country toward the year 1800
