In Ruins
Condition: SECONDHAND
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Christopher Woodward
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
The brilliant young art historian Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the mouldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the colosseum and Freud at Pompeii. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple- we see our own mortality, as Dickens Pip, in Great expectations, sees in Miss Havisham's house the wreck of his hopes. We see doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. But has the artist's joy in ruins found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth century landscape gardens been banished by the forensic archaeologists of today? This elegant, provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination. With
Author: Christopher Woodward
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
The brilliant young art historian Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the mouldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the colosseum and Freud at Pompeii. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple- we see our own mortality, as Dickens Pip, in Great expectations, sees in Miss Havisham's house the wreck of his hopes. We see doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. But has the artist's joy in ruins found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth century landscape gardens been banished by the forensic archaeologists of today? This elegant, provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination. With
Description
NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Christopher Woodward
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
The brilliant young art historian Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the mouldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the colosseum and Freud at Pompeii. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple- we see our own mortality, as Dickens Pip, in Great expectations, sees in Miss Havisham's house the wreck of his hopes. We see doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. But has the artist's joy in ruins found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth century landscape gardens been banished by the forensic archaeologists of today? This elegant, provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination. With
Author: Christopher Woodward
Format: Hardback
Number of Pages: 288
The brilliant young art historian Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey with artists and writers who have delighted in ruins. We travel from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. We meet the teenage Byron in the mouldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the colosseum and Freud at Pompeii. Even the decay of an ordinary house can be as moving as the collapse of a temple- we see our own mortality, as Dickens Pip, in Great expectations, sees in Miss Havisham's house the wreck of his hopes. We see doomed visions of the future, whether in grandiose Nazi fantasies or in the battered Statue of Liberty prophesying the end of the American Empire in Planet of the Apes. But has the artist's joy in ruins found at its most charming in the follies of eighteenth century landscape gardens been banished by the forensic archaeologists of today? This elegant, provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination. With
In Ruins