The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (review)

The revolution in taste and sensibility that took the architecture of Europe from baroque to Greek Revival needed more than ideology; it needed facts. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the West did not have an accurate knowledge of the forms and proportions of the buildings of ancient Greece. Le Roy was the man to provide it—or almost. He got the first edition of his Ruins into print (1758) before his British rivals, Stuart and Revett, published the first volume of their Antiquities of Athens (1762); and his second, much expanded edition (1770), before Stuart published the major monuments of Athens (1787). But Le Roy was inaccurate in detail, and it was the British work that became the essential source from which the first Greek Revivalists drew. Even so, he made a difference: he showed the Parthenon and the Erechtheum to the West. The Ruins is one of those books that help to make the climate at the time and get almost forgotten afterward, and it is good to have this new translation of the second edition. The book is handsomely presented, and Robin Middleton's enormous introduction is a monograph in itself.