Bringing the ancient city back to life
ANCIENT ROME IN FIFTY MONUMENTS PAUL ROBERTS 256pp. Thames and Hudson. £30.
EIGHTY YEARS AGO, when Allied troops liberated the Eternal City on June 4, 1944, General Mark Clark noted that one of his American soldiers, on first seeing the Colosseum, softly whistled, then remarked: “Geez, I didn’t know our bombers had done that much damage in Rome!” One can sympathize with the reaction. With the city’s ancient remains, it’s often hard to know what exactly we are seeing. Even the grandest monuments can perplex, on the first view or on the 100th.
Imagining Rome’s ruins whole again was a preoccupation of Renaissance humanists, starting in the mid-fifteenth century, and it’s an exercise that has continued unabated in every conceivable medium down to our own digital age. This includes “anastylosis” – the process of piecing back together elements of a monument to give a sense of its original scale and structure. Just the last two years have seen such an intervention in Rome – not without controversy – on parts of the Forum of Trajan. Yet the most seductive recreations are not actual physical efforts or computer-generated images, but rather the wellresearched romanticizing illustrations associated especially with the Beaux-Arts tradition, and seen more recently in the work of the British artist Alan Sorrell (1904–74) and the American Gilbert Gorski (born 1955).
Sorrell and Gorski’s paintings have a large presence in Paul Roberts’s Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments, alongside other expert attempts at visualizing elements of the ancient city, from the wistful engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the 1740s to the startling digital work of Italy’s Altair4 Multimedia in the 2020s. But the dreamier renditions of Rome are punctuated by superior images of its monumental remains as they look today, including more than a dozen by Carole Raddato (born 1976), now the preeminent photographer of the Roman world. For the price the reader gets a surprisingly lavish publication, where the huge colour images, many spreading over two pages, cumulatively have a mesmerizing effect.
Roberts is keeper of antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His long experience in communicating to a broad public the story behind ancient artefacts clearly informs his book. Indeed, it has the feel of strolling through a blockbuster exhibition. Key points are communicated at multiple levels: through large-font quotations, historical mini essays, topical sidebars and the fifty central articles, all brief and impressively well informed, with their images and captions. There is too much to take in at one time, notwithstanding the brisk pace of the prose.
The material is arranged chronologically rather than topographically, offering a sweeping but systematic narrative of building in Rome across more than a m
