The Pleasures of the Past and its Portents
“The Pleasure of Ruins,” essayist Rose Macaulay’s 1953 appreciation of tumbled down antiquity – the “stupendous past” she called it – casts, in modern terms, the central romantic appeals of the ancient world. On the other hand, “The Necessity for Ruins”, written a quarter century later, by American cultural geographer J. B. Jackson, is all skepticism of the craze for preserving the architectural vestiges of the United States’ “very much more recent and insubstantial past.”
Pleasure and necessity – an apparently opposed pair of words nonetheless capturing much of the attraction of the past and its presence; describing, as well, collectors’ interests in the architectural pictures, models, and artifacts offered by Piraneseum.
And how do we describe the passions stirred by them; write in reasonable ways about those unreasonable, unruly, evanescent urges and interests which reliably guide us to places unforeseen or barely expected, yet wholly compelling?
What is it about old these old objects that is, for all of us, so very fascinating? We undertake this knowing that not everyone can fully understand and follow along. A more than usually interesting interview, of a dealer trading in fancy, 19th century artifacts of Neoclassicism, asked about the temperaments of his shop’s customers. Nearly all of these, the dealer judged, are collectors. Of these, he guessed a third to be fully in the grips of their respective passions; reason overtaken, to various extents, by heedless interests. This group, this devoted third of collectors, will understand what follows here. We also hope to engage some others – those whose compulsions are, as yet, better managed.
Among our favorite places in the world is the house of an architect who, marrying well, felt freed at last to follow his very abiding interest in architecture’s glorious possibilities, especially those of its Classical past and Romantic present. A description of this place is beyond our scope here, perhaps beyond that of anything written, so we’ll simply say something of one small piece of it.
Alongside ‘The Corridor’, beneath ‘The Dome’, not far from ‘The Crypt’, in architect John Soane’s c. 1800 London townhouse, fixed to a tall plaster wall and glancingly washed in a nearly eerie refracted, reflected daylight – an effect named by Soane ‘la lumiere mysterieuse’ – is a small, carved marble plaster capital, pried loose, a long time ago, from the interior of Rome’s ancient Pantheon.
Just how this trifling memento, and several others just like it, found its way from that hoary temple to the architect’s ‘Museum’ is a slight scandal; and it’s likely easier on our erratically delicate 21st century sensibilities to be ignorant of the full particulars.