![]() ![]() All the artists here took delight in ruins. Jones's Colosseum, overgrown and green, is a corpse in which a new world has blossomed. ![]() Yet in an age abandoning its religion, they were also reassuring images of what survives, what remains of us. They were an opportunity to reflect on the passing of empires and the vanity of human effort. In the 18th century, ruins were objects of contemplation, reverie and sober enjoyment. In Ruins, an exhibition of artists' depictions of devastated buildings from the baroque to the second world war, does not need the inclusion of Cornelius Gijsbrechts's still life with a skull to make us see that architecture's destruction is a memento mori. There's ruin after ruin: churches bombed in the blitz, depicted by John Piper as they still smouldered the charred wreckage of an 18th-century pleasure palace, the Pantheon, the day after its destruction by fire the Roman Colosseum, a vast inverted skull in whose mouldy cup the Welsh landscapist Thomas Jones lingered melancholically one day in about 1776, painting from life in oils, allowing the very silence to take on visible form. T he deceptively genteel Holburne Museum of Art in Bath feels like a catacomb stacked with mummies. ![]()
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