SPARE US THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS

[Bianca]

                            








                                                       Spare us the archaeologists






Peter Carl considers a claim that the Roman Forum site has been torn apart in the name of research

The Roman Forum
David Watkin
Profile Books


The Architects' Website
May 22, 2009

David Watkin’s treatment of the Roman Forum is part of the series “Wonders of the World”, under the editorship of Mary Beard. The remit of this series comprises “small [too small — at least twice the illustrations are required, and larger] books on some of the world’s most famous sites or monuments...
much more enlightening, stimulating, even controversial, than straightforward histories or guides”.

Watkin uses this opportunity to mount a sustained attack on archaeologists, who have torn apart the site leaving incomprehensible holes, unsightly preservation-roofs and an “entirely modern and unattractive” public entrance, articulated here and there by 19th and 20th century reconstructions. Watkin clearly feels the sacrifice not worth the reward — though he acknowledges that his book makes use of archaeology’s insights. The depredations of early archaeology are well-known, the archaeologists have long passed into history, there’s no putting it all back; and so it is not obvious why to beat this drum so relentlessly (raising the spectre of destroying Sta Maria in Campitelli seems like a sexed-up dossier).

[Bianca]

Most of Watkin’s book is devoted to the dismantling of the Campo Vaccino to recover the antique Forum. This provides the framework for a species of cultural history (largely anglophile) pertaining to the documentation and use of architectural details in later works, to speculations on Roman life in guidebooks and literature and to the agendas of popes and rulers responsible for organising excavations or posing among the ruins. Contained in these chapters is a useful gathering of disparate material for those interested in what is customarily omitted from guidebooks as to the destruction of churches and other buildings as well as to the extent the visible remains are the result of recent reconstructions. This book is also the only place to find the cultural history, which is necessarily compressed to Watkin’s interests and is amusingly idiosyncratic.

Because Watkin’s main concern is this later cultural history, the rewards (and controversies) of archaeology regarding the ancient Forum are summarised in the first chapters. Watkin shares with Terry Kirk the view that Piranesi recorded the Campo Vaccino in its finest state, and so a chapter is devoted to a tour of the site through his engravings. The following chapter repeats the circuit, recovering the ancient buildings missing from these engravings, because not yet excavated in the mid-18th century. This double circuit obscures the primary structure of the Arx and Forum and their place in a ritual and ceremonial network embodying a conception of city already well- established by the time of the Tarquins (late 6th century BC, before the Republic) and the backbone of all subsequent developments. This conception is to be placed in the context of the emergence of the self-governing city in the Mediterranean, apparently stimulated by Greek colonisation, beginning two centuries earlier.

[Bianca]

Suppressing the role of ancient Rome in this larger history is perhaps designed to diminish the contribution of archaeologists. While Watkin pays due respect to the works of Early Christian, Renaissance or Baroque periods, the artefact which receives highest praise — “one lecture would not be too long to point out the beauties of the entire composition” — is a watercolour drawing by Henry Parke, pupil of Soane, of the Corinthian capital and entablature of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, with a diminutive student on a ladder taking measurements. This activity seems to be the standard by which Watkin determines proper involvement with the architecture of the Forum, culminating in a list, at the end of the book, of contemporary architects who deploy classical details.

The presence or absence of beauty, and of pleasing or spoilt views, are consistent motifs in Watkin’s treatment of the Forum; and we are therefore in the presence of an argument from aesthetics and in particular from the Picturesque (always capitalised), developed in Watkin’s The English Vision, 1982.

I am not convinced this vision is sufficiently rich to account for the depth of meaning, and often bloody conflicts, which sustained Roma Instaurata in European history, from Charlemagne to Le Corbusier. However, this is the second time I have encountered so critical a view of the archaeological park that extends from the Senate to the Via Appia. Colin Rowe, whom I greatly irritated with my enthusiasm for the Forum and Palatine, would have replaced the park with a dense urban topography populated by an extraordinary cast of early 19th century European characters, from the roi de Rome in a palace down to rogues lounging by fountains.

Despite the shared inspiration, Rowe was ultimately less literal a classicist than Watkin. He required an ample urban metabolism able to accommodate the evil and ugliness which have always attended cities and he was more optimistic that modern architecture could recover civic purpose from industrialised abstraction.

Whatever one’s views on these matters, Watkin’s Roman Forum provokes the reader to recall Aristotle’s dictum that cities are about more than the provision of goods and the prevention of crime.