The inspiration for John Pinto's Speaking Ruins comes from the sculpture of Janus at the gates of the American Academy in Rome. P. understands the rôle of an architect in the eighteenth century as having a similar duality as that of the Roman god. While one side looks to the past seeking inspiration, the other looks to the future, designing and creating a new architecture.
Speaking Ruins follows a chronological sequence that works well with the main focus of the book: Gianbattista Piranesi. It helps readers to find their way around the complexity of Piranesi's work. We see how Piranesi's career develops over time, but also his dualistic attitude towards antiquity: a parallel to Janus in itself. While Piranesi sought precision in his archaeological plans — using a thick line to represent what was still there and thinner one for what he had reconstructed — his vivid imagination induced him to draw distorted (although evocative in their Romanticism) views of the Roman monuments and to create new objects from fragments that he found on sites such as Hadrian's Villa (for example, the Warwick vase).
The first two chapters — ‘The Perspective of Janus’ and ‘Taste, Ornament on the Antique’ — set the context for Piranesi's work with a look at the work of Carlo Fontana, Francesco Bianchini, Fischer von Erlach and Filippo Juvarra. This was a period of profound change in taste and artistic creation; from the baroque to the neoclassical based on the ‘pureness’ of Greek art as understood by Wincklemann. Ch. 3 — ‘Piranesi's Speaking Ruins’ — analyses Piranesi's relationship with Roman architecture, an interest which led him to measure buildings carefully and study them from the inside, paying special attention to how they were designed and built. Piranesi approached ancient architecture with what P. calls ‘layered topography’ (112). In his Vedute, Piranesi presents Roman buildings as they were preserved in his time, mixed in with the modern buildings of Rome. For his work on the Campo Marzio he presents the area as a ruin, an imagined artificial view of antiquity without modern additions, while in Antichità romane he reconstructs the original buildings, although he indicates the parts that he has added. Here P. shows how Roman art was losing its prominence to Greek art as demonstrated by the fierce intellectual battle between Piranesi and David Le Roy. It is Piranesi's praise of Roman architecture that might have undermined his chances of success in a world of austere neoclassical tastes based on the Greek ideal (85 and 97–8). While his fame in the modern world is well known, the contrast with Piranesi's reputation in his own lifetime is something that might have been usefully developed.
In ch. 4 — ‘Giovanni Battista and Francesco Piranesi: the Late Archaeological Publications’ — P. discusses Piranesi's work on four major archaeological sites: Hadrian's Villa, Lago Fucino, Pompeii and Paestum. This work was done in collaboration with Piranesi's son, Francesco. The chapter feels slightly unbalanced as Hadrian's Villa gets less attention than the other sites. While P. has discussed Piranesi's research on the Villa in other publications, the book would have benefited from a longer treatment, especially since the site played (as we are reminded several times) a key rôle in this period.
In the final chapter — ‘A Wider Prospect’ — P. goes back to the beginning, chronologically at least. Here P. follows the journeys of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett to Athens and Robert Wood and James Dawkins to Palmyra in the 1750s. They influenced each other and produced seminal works on the architecture and antiquities of the cities they visited. The chapter is fascinating, but it feels displaced — more like an appendix. Not because it is irrelevant, but because it might usefully have been incorporated into other chapters, as these figures were contemporaries of Piranesi and influenced him. It also shows the pivotal rôle of Rome as a place where those who were interested in antiquity met and worked together.
Speaking Ruins frequently adopts the tone of a panegyric with P. sometimes too hastily crediting Piranesi as a pioneer. Piranesi is said to have understood ruins as ‘engaged in an epic and an unending battle with the forces of nature’ (117). But relationship between ruin and nature was not new, and Pope Pius II had already seen Hadrian's Villa in a similar light in 1461. Perhaps more worrying is the fact that P. does not acknowledge Pirro Ligorio as the first to name the buildings of Hadrian's Villa after the terms used in the Historia Augusta. P. seems to imply that Piranesi was the first to do so (159).
Footnotes and bibliography could have been more accurate. Frustratingly, the individual works of each author are not ordered chronologically; recent bibliography on art dealing in Rome and on Hadrian's Villa is also missing. It seems odd too that P. chooses to use a secondary bibliography to quote important texts like Piranesi's views on the parlanti ruine that gave the book its title (1) or quotes Winckelmann from a translation (2 n. 4). Although not free from faults, P.’s Speaking Ruins is a valuable book, particularly for its aim to include architecture in the field of the classical reception and for successfully presenting an overview of Piranesi's work.
