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  • The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome
  • Laurie Nussdorfer
The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome. By David Karmon. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 320. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-199-76689-5.)

This book challenges the evidence of our eyes and of scholarly tradition. Most of Rome’s ancient buildings are gone; many have supplied columns, capitals, and pavements to later structures; and considerable contemporary documentation attests to the recycling of antique stone as lime and construction material. The historiography has almost universally decried the destruction of the city’s ancient remains by Romans down through the ages, but especially by Renaissance and Counter-Reformation popes. David Karmon argues, on the contrary, that Rome had a long tradition of preservation legislation and that the Renaissance popes—rather than being arch villains—were in fact saviors of antiquities. (His study ends with Pope Paul III, perhaps wisely, as Pope Sixtus V might have been harder to incorporate into his thesis.) When Karmon can make such claims without irony, we must believe that he does not subscribe to the conventional definition of preservation; and indeed that is the case he makes in this book. He asks us to rethink what preservation means, to look [End Page 561] afresh at the legislative evidence of concern for protecting ancient buildings, and to read “destruction” with more nuance. In other words, Karmon does the unthinkable; he takes a historicist approach to preservation policy, suggesting that we look at what it meant to the actors of the time rather than imposing modern, not very well conceived, standards on the past.

This argument is set forth in part I of the book and in its conclusion. Part II is felicitously named “object biographies,” and here we find chapters devoted to the specific history of preservation (and destruction) at three important ancient structures: the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and what is now known as the “broken bridge”—Ponte Santa Maria. If there is a slightly broad-brush approach taken in part I, the three subjects of part II receive very satisfying treatment—detailed, readable, and illuminating. By focusing on the theme of what was preserved and what was not at each of these sites, Karmon throws fresh light on the history of these buildings and of the political forces that played over them. He brings out the role of the civic government, which had early claimed to be the protector of Rome’s antiquities, so that for the first time we can trace its policies and interventions comprehensively over time. (These included the power to grant quarrying rights.) Karmon also argues vigorously that the papacy showed its commitment to preservation by the appointment of the first papal commissioner of antiquities, a post that lasted until 1870, under Paul III. If he does not go into detail on sixteenth-century papal “excavation campaigns” (that is, quarrying), his book nonetheless points up the need for a parallel study of the economic history of the Roman construction industry, complete with prices of different kinds of stone and what “ruins” supplied them.

This is a book with a bold, overarching thesis and richly textured component parts. It does assume that the only antiquities under the lens are classical. Hopefully it will inspire others to look anew at Rome’s ancient churches and their even more tortured history of preservation and destruction.

Laurie Nussdorfer
Wesleyan University
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