Artificial ruins or imitation ruins are edifice fragments built to resemble real remnants of ancient ruins in European landscape parks and estates of the nobility of the 18th and 19th centuries. Ruins were built to aestheticize the destruction of time; man-made ruins were designed to evoke a melancholic and romantic mood in the observer.
Decorative artificial ruins appeared in the second half of the 18th century in landscape parks in England [1] and France as architectural follies (French: fabriques) and did not go out of fashion throughout the 19th century; sometimes romantic ruins eventually turned into significant artifacts themselves. [2] In addition to England and France, romantic ruins were common in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Russian Empire and Netherlands. [3] Romantic ruins were placed in such a way as to attract the attention of visitors during walks. They differed greatly in style, shape and choice of material, most often they were built in the form of ruins of roman buildings and temples, medieval castles, towers, Triumphal Arches, Gothic abbeys, pavilions and even mills, forges and other utilitarian buildings.
The fashion for ruins began with the discovery of Herculaneum and in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748, after which excavations and studies of ancient sites began to be carried out throughout Europe. Well-preserved antique buildings in Italy with cleaned frescoes have become part of the European cultural code: Pompeii has become a mandatory point in the Grand Tour of Europe. The Baroque and neoclassicism gave the Greco-Roman antiquities the status of an aesthetic canon, and therefore the ruins, especially the well-preserved ones, joined the list of role models. The engravings Piranesi emphasized the difference between the majestic ancient buildings and the utilitarian architecture of modernity; thus, the artist symbolically judged the culture of the present. [4]
The ruins became an object of nature for many artists of that time. The landscapes depicting vedutas of Roman Campagna inspired Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, who placed mythological subjects in the Roman pastoral landscape. The artists conveyed the picturesque kinship of ruins and landscape, idealized nature and endowed it with essential meanings. [2]
Ruins in manors and parks were designed to encourage contemplators to reflect on the influence of time and the frailty of human life, to contribute to the melancholic and romantic mood of the observer. [5]
As the English writer of the 18th century Thomas Whately wrote in his popular handbook on the poetics of English gardens, "at the sight of ruins, thoughts of variability, destruction and devastation naturally come to mind, and behind them stretches a long string of other images, slightly tinged with melancholy, which the ruins inspire". [6]
In Western Europe, ruins are beginning to be perceived as ruins and preserved in this capacity during the Renaissance. During the Enlightenment, the ruins acquired a special value, and began to be endowed with a variety of properties and functions – historical, psychological, political and philosophical. There was a desire to preserve the ruins to maintain a sense of integrity and coherence of history, as signs of the great past. In Western societies, ruins have played an important role in consolidating national identity. Philosophers, from Denis Diderot to Jean Baudrillard, began to pay attention to the significance of the ruins and tried to uncover the secret of the attractiveness of the ruins. [2]
Diderot believed that the usefulness of ruins is that they stimulate desire and create subjectivity, which constrains society. The ruins speak of the great equality of all things before death, but at the same time allow a person to "feel more alone", balancing on the very edge of the "stream" that "drags nations one after another into the abyss common to all." Diderot argued that ruins bring us back to our inclinations, as time and death challenge the meaning of communities and peoples. [2]
The German philosopher Georg Simmel also participated in the glorification of the ruins. In his famous 1907 essay "Ruin: an Aesthetic Experience," Simmel wrote about the essentially reconciling effect of ruins on a person and that a ruin is paradoxically a window into the future, showing that an object that has turned into a ruin continues to exist and develop even after it has been subjected to "violence that the spirit he performed on him, shaping him in his own image." [7] Simmel believed that ruins are not synonymous with decomposition, because they create a "new form" and a "new meaning". [7]
Giovanni BattistaPiranesi was an Italian classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons". He was the father of Francesco Piranesi, Laura Piranesi and Pietro Piranesi.
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.
The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as their first priority, as is still often the case.
The Leasowes is a 57-hectare estate in Halesowen, historically in the county of Shropshire, later Worcestershire, England, comprising house and gardens. The parkland is now listed Grade I on English Heritage's Register of Parks and Gardens and the home of the Halesowen Golf Club. The name means "rough pasture land".
Ruins are the remains of a civilization's architecture. The term refers to formerly intact structures that have fallen into a state of partial or total disrepair over time due to a variety of factors, such as lack of maintenance, deliberate destruction by humans, or uncontrollable destruction by natural phenomena. The most common root causes that yield ruins in their wake are natural disasters, armed conflict, and population decline, with many structures becoming progressively derelict over time due to long-term weathering and scavenging.
Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, in Coolidge, Arizona, located northeast of Casa Grande, Arizona, preserves a group of Hohokam structures dating to the Classic Period (1150–1450 CE).
The Adam style is an 18th-century neoclassical style of interior design and architecture, as practised by Scottish architect William Adam and his sons, of whom Robert (1728–1792) and James (1732–1794) were the most widely known.
Ruin value is the concept that a building be designed in such a way that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as "The Theory of Ruin Value", although he was not its original inventor. The intention did not stretch only to the eventual collapse of the buildings, but rather assumed such buildings were inherently better designed and more imposing during their period of use.
18th-century French art was dominated by the Baroque, Rococo and neoclassical movements.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin.
Painshill, near Cobham, Surrey, England, is one of the finest remaining examples of an 18th-century English landscape park. It was designed and created between 1738 and 1773 by Charles Hamilton. The original house built in the park by Hamilton has since been demolished.
The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, is a cultural landscape and World Heritage Site in Germany, located between the city of Dessau and the town of Wörlitz in Central Germany. One of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe, it was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau. Today, the cultural landscape of Dessau-Wörlitz encompasses an area of 142 km2 (55 sq mi) within the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Because of its exceptional landscape design and testimony to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm was designated as a world heritage site in 2000.
Sanssouci Park is a large park surrounding Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam, Germany, built under Frederick the Great in the mid-18th centurys. Following the terracing of the vineyard and the completion of the palace, the surroundings were included in the structure. A Baroque flower garden with lawns, flower beds, hedges and trees was created. In the hedge quarter 3,000 fruit trees were planted. The greenhouses of the numerous nurseries contained oranges, melons, peaches and bananas. The goddesses Flora and Pomona, who decorate the entrance obelisk at the eastern park exit, were placed there to highlight the connection of a flower, fruit and vegetable garden. Along with the Sanssouci Palace and other nearby palaces and parks, Sanssouci Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1990 for its unique architectural unity and testimony to 18th and 19th century landscaping in Europe.
Pompeii was an ancient city in what is now the comune of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Along with Herculaneum, Stabiae, and many surrounding villas, the city was buried under 4 to 6 m of volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The French landscape garden is a style of garden inspired by idealized romantic landscapes and the paintings of Hubert Robert, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, European ideas about Chinese gardens, and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The style originated in England as the English landscape garden in the early 18th century, and spread to France where, in the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century, it gradually replaced the rigidly clipped and geometrical French formal garden.
Attre Castle is a former castle, now a country house or château, in Attre in the municipality of Brugelette, province of Hainaut, Wallonia, Belgium.
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
The Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte is an eight-volume book of engravings of the findings from excavating the ruins of Herculaneum in the Kingdom of Naples. It was published between 1757 and 1792, and copies were given to selected recipients across Europe. Despite the title, the Antichità di Ercolano shows objects from all the excavations the Bourbons undertook around the Gulf of Naples. These include Pompeii, Stabiae, and two sites in Herculaneum: Resina and Portici.
Sanspareil rock garden is an English landscape garden created between 1744 and 1748 in the village also now called Sanspareil, pronounced locally in German, or the Ostfränkisch dialect as "Samberell". It is in the municipality of Wonsees in the district of Kulmbach, Bavaria.