Frozen time

BUILDINGS are the most tangible monuments of a civilisation.

Bellotto's Ruins of the Forum

BUILDINGS are the most tangible monuments of a civilisation: the pyramids speak of the other-worldly obsession of the Egyptians, Greek theatres of a civilisation based on the shared and public life of a citizenry, medieval cathedrals of aspirations to holiness.

Today, our corporate towers embody a certain idea of economic efficiency and social stratification, offering those who work in their higher levels a sense of sublime mastery and dwarfing the rest who walk in their shadows; while the overtly anti-functional design of art and entertainment precincts such as Federation Square in Melbourne is meant to mark these off as places of temporary escape from economic determinism.

In building, we transform matter into idea: stone is cut into regular forms, shaped into expressive ornament; clay is baked into bricks, timber cut and carved. Nature is reshaped into the order of culture, and nowhere more impressively than in stone buildings. Yet nature is never forgotten. The stone, for example, from which a building is made contributes to its character in the same way that a violin or a woodwind endows the same musical note with an entirely different material form and quality.

Stone has texture and colour, and responds to the fall of light in different ways; it wears and weathers too, and part of the charm of old buildings is the patination of age, which mitigates their separation, as creations of artifice, from the organic world of nature. Initially perfectly sharp edges are softened, impeccable evenness is varied by the discolouration of rain and the mottling of lichens; small plants may begin to sprout in cracks around window frames and cornices.

In reality, all of these picturesque signs of age are the beginning of a process that, if neglected, can lead to serious damage and even collapse. It is a sobering experience for an art historian to travel in the company of a builder, as I recently discovered: where you admire the beauty of the architectural form poignantly heightened by the signs of age and desuetude, he will remind you that water has infiltrated the mortar and that without a very expensive restoration the building will eventually be uninhabitable.

Such moments remind us of the enormous effort required to maintain human order against the entropy of nature: in a garden, the effort has to be constantly renewed; great buildings, on the other hand - unlike today's skyscrapers, outwardly impressive but in reality doomed to periodic replacement - can be so solidly constructed in the first place that they are still sound after thousands of years. And the first requirement of a building is to remain standing, defying the force of gravity that wants to pull the vast weight of masonry down to where, according to the laws of nature, it belongs: on the ground.

Ruins, the reassertion of the forces of nature over the will of man, have always had melancholy associations, as symbols of a mortality greater than that of individual men: the mortality of a whole society, of a civilisation itself. In the modern period, the most famous ruins were those of Rome, even though there were countless other ancient remains all over Italy and across Europe. Rome was the centre of the empire whose collapse was the greatest disaster Western civilisation had known; the whole of modern Europe, in fact, emerged figuratively speaking from those ruins.

From the 14th to the 18th centuries - when there was a renewed interest in the Greek monuments of Paestum and Sicily, and when it became possible again to visit Greece - artists and scholars sought the vestiges of the world they were striving to recover. Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet, it was said: her very ruins teach us how great Rome was.

It is these artists who dominate the opening section of Geelong Gallery's fine exhibition devoted to this evocative theme. One thing that is immediately apparent is that the artists of the seicento, while deeply responsive to the resonance of these remains of ancient Rome, feel quite at liberty to combine them in different ways or to move them to other sites altogether: thus there is a charming etching by Jan van der Velde (1615) in which he relocates the most popular of all ancient buildings, the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, into a flat northern landscape.

Claude Lorrain too, in the beautiful little National Gallery of Victoria painting, situates the temple on a low hill in a gentle landscape with shepherds on the left. The association of ancient grandeur with the romantic bucolic theme may seem slightly incongruous, but is perhaps motivated by the passage in Virgil's first Eclogue, where one of the shepherds tells the other about his visit to the great city. Of course the Forum was by then a cow pasture - it was known as the Campo Vaccino - disconcertingly returning to the primitive state in which Virgil had imagined it, in Aeneid VIII, before the foundation of Rome. The centrepiece of this room, indeed, is the large early Claude view of the Forum.

The Forum, in modern times, was not only grazed by cattle - shared with scholars, artists and Grand Tourists - but also buried in metres of mud deposited by various floods of the Tiber. One result was that visitors were much closer to the tops of monuments than they are today, to capitals and entablatures, and also to the inside of the barrel vaults of the Arch of Septimius Severus, for example. (This experience probably impressed the young Masaccio on his visit to Rome in 1423 and inspired the painted vault of his Trinity that he painted a couple of years later at Santa Maria Novella in Florence.) A striking photograph from about 1890 in the exhibition shows the arch by then excavated, but the ground level behind still as it had been in the 18th century.

The capriccio of imaginary ruins or of real ones in arbitrary or poetic settings is still found in the 18th century, but there is also a new concern for the accurate depiction of sites. There are probably two reasons for this. The first is the new standard of archeological accuracy and scholarship established in the writings of Johann Winckelmann and through the excavations of the second half of the century, especially at Pompeii and Herculaneum. This concern for accuracy is combined with a proto-romantic sense of the sublime in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's dramatic views of the various monuments of ancient Rome, in which small contemporary figures seem to flail around like puppets beneath the cyclopaean masses.

The other reason for greater accuracy was the demand of the Grand Tourists for souvenirs of their stay in Italy. These collectors naturally wanted paintings that helped them remember, and no doubt recount, their stay in the Eternal City and elsewhere. One such picture is the impressive view of the Forum and the Capitol by Bernardo Bellotto, painted a couple of decades before Edward Gibbon explored the same places. As he famously recalls in his autobiography, "it was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."

Romanticism brought not only an exalted sense of the grandeur of the ancient ruins, as exemplified in Piranesi's work, but also the characteristic obsession with death and decay and the futility of all human endeavours expressed in Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias. It also coincided with a vast extension of what one may think of as the canon of ruins for the purposes both of archeological research and poetic contemplation. Thus in addition to the newly discovered ruins of Greece, which transformed our understanding of classical art, there were also countless new sites discovered in the Middle East and in Asia.

At home there was also an internal renewal of the canon, corresponding to another set of romantic themes, the rediscovery of the middle ages and gothic architecture and the proto-nationalistic renewal of interest in local cultural traditions: the northern peoples of Europe started to take an interest in their own history and their own ruins. Britain in particular rediscovered the magnificent and tragic remains of monasteries suppressed by Henry VIII. Images of several of these are included in the exhibition, including John Buckle's evocative watercolour of Fountains Abbey, and several works by or after Turner.

The show has a coda downstairs displaying more of the remarkable prints of Piranesi, juxtaposed with modern photographs of some of the sites. In the main section, there also are more recent works by Australian artists, including views of Rome by Lionel Lindsay: the Church of San Lorenzo, built around the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and the strange round Temple of Romulus - not the founder of the city of Rome but the son of Maxentius - later incorporated into the Church of SS Cosmas and Damian.

But it really concludes with a reflection on the theme of the ruin in Australian art. Obviously the situation here could not offer a greater contrast with Italy, as Australians visiting the peninsula are still constantly reminded today. The stark reality is that Australia is a land where, for all practical purposes, nothing was built before the arrival of the English. The Aborigines had been here for thousands of years, long enough to have changed the flora of the continent, but without establishing permanent structures. It is part of the singular pathos of this land, where even today most of the buildings around us are the first erected on the soil.

Nonetheless, the romantic attachment to ruins is such that dilapidated colonial houses in the Rocks in Sydney, some of the earliest residential buildings in Australia, and run-down, abandoned farmhouses became subjects of Australian art as early as a century ago. As the exhibition's curator, Colin Holden, points out, the Port Arthur jail in Tasmania was drawn and painted by artists almost as soon as it was decommissioned. And I recall, as a child, playing in the hollow shell of Trial Bay jail, thinking that it was as atmospheric as a medieval fortress.

In the post-war years Hill End became a popular site for the theme in Australian landscape, discovered by Donald Friend and represented here in paintings by Margaret Olley and Russell Drysdale, including that most typical feature of almost completely ruined Australian farmhouses, the chimney stack standing when all else is gone. Hill End is hardly Rome, and the associations are sentimental rather than sublime, but the attraction of these humble subjects suggests the importance, in feeling truly at home somewhere, of tangible evidence that others have dwelt there before ourselves.

In Search of the Picturesque:  The Architectural Ruin In Art
Geelong Gallery, Geelong, Victoria, To June 24