Against the bucolic background of Piranesi’s Campo Vaccino are cast up what come off as Frankenstein reconstructions of monuments in the manner of wax-museum horrors: the Porticus Deorum Consentium (79-81), the Temple of Vesta (87-93), and the Shrine of Juturna (96). Having developed Piranesi as a foil, Watkin makes immediate use of it in his third chapter. The great excavator Giacomo Boni, for example, is brought on stage dynamiting a church that stood between him and an older one of greater interest to him (116). He will come back to mind when we later encounter the intolerant excavators who had little taste for temporal complexity in their monuments. High praise indeed, and notable is his status as an “archaeologist”-but one tolerant of the complex palimpsest of Forum monuments. Piranesi’s “views of the Forum, a place he knew and loved as an architect, artist, and archaeologist, form perhaps the most captivating record of any part of a historic city” (73). Of Piranesi’s engraving of the west face of the Arch of Titus (57), for example, he writes in part that “seemed to enjoy depicting its spectacular decay, with its outer columns missing and its inner ones surviving to little more than half their original height” (58). With an eye sensitive to the romantic aesthetic of ruin and decay, Watkin gives sympathetic ekphraseis of several Piranesi engravings which clothe the Campo Vaccino and its monuments with warm associations-these will be foils for later developments. The pivotal second is written in a very genial style without much polemic. The structure of these three introductory chapters is carefully thought out. The first orients the reader by giving a depiction of life in the ancient Forum (11-29), the second describes the Forum as Piranesi saw it in the eighteenth century (30-73), and the third address the problem of what the viewer sees in the Forum that Piranesi did not see-i.e., monuments exposed by excavation or the destruction of others, and several reconstructed monuments (74-102). Lively polemic thus permeates the discussion of the monuments, and when it erupts the archaeologists (who are treated well enough otherwise) can be reduced to caricatures. But because that diachronic treatment is informed by his personal regret over the progressive loss of the beauty and organicity of the Forum as it existed at about the time it was famously engraved by Piranesi in the 18th century, the agents of that loss become the bad guys of the story. Very much in the ancient mode, Watkin justifies his taking up an old subject by staking out a claim to novelty, which is his diachronic treatment. Those with an interest in the classical Forum would, however, do well to supplement it with Claridge’s Rome (which Watkin calls invaluable: 89) or the new English translation of Coarelli. The book is a historic and aesthetic, rather than technical and scientific appreciation of the Forum, and I recommend it as a valuable counter to the classical reading which prevails on site. Watkin, a distinguished architectural historian, is a card-carrying lover of classical architecture, having defended the classical architectural vocabulary through the dark days of the modernist movement.
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