Contemporary Artists and Ancient Rome: The Ruin That Won't Stay Ruined
Ancient Rome has not left contemporary art alone, and contemporary art has not left ancient Rome alone. The relationship between them is different from the academic tradition’s engagement — less archaeologically earnest, more ironic, more interested in the tension between the ruin and its meanings than in the reconstruction of what the ruin was before it ruined. Contemporary artists approaching Rome approach a subject already saturated with prior appropriations: the neoclassical, the Victorian, the fascist, the cinematic. To paint or photograph or install Rome now is to navigate a layered history of representations that is itself part of the subject.
Cy Twombly lived in Rome for much of his adult life and made the city’s relationship to its own antiquity a persistent concern of his work. His Fifty Days at Ilium, a series of paintings responding to the Iliad, deploys the visual vocabulary of classical inscription — scratched letters, smeared wax, paint that imitates the surface of aged stone — to make a connection between ancient text and contemporary mark-making that bypasses the academic tradition entirely. His Rome is not reconstructed or idealized; it is inhabited, the ancient present in the modern through fragments of text and gesture rather than through pictorial illusion. The ruin appears as surface rather than as subject: the texture of things that have lasted through time and carry that duration as a visual quality.
Giorgio de Chirico’s Pittura metafisica paintings from the 1910s — the empty piazzas, the classical colonnades, the shadows extending beyond their sources in impossible directions — are not straightforwardly about Rome but are unthinkable without Rome. De Chirico grew up in Greece, was educated in Munich, lived in Paris, and brought to his Italian period a conception of classical space that was simultaneously nostalgic and threatening: the ancient world as a dream landscape, accessible but uninhabitable, present in the modern city as an atmosphere rather than a monument. His colonnades are the colonnades of the Roman forum experienced as the subject of anxiety rather than pride.
Anselm Kiefer’s engagement with antiquity — specifically with Roman history as a site of cultural catastrophe and cultural transmission — moves through the specifically German inflection of the Roman inheritance. His paintings of the Roman landscape — vast, ruined, burdened with lead and ash and the materials of industrial civilization — approach Rome through the lens of what the Roman tradition meant to fascism, and specifically to the nationalist ideology that used the Roman inheritance as legitimation for contemporary barbarism. Kiefer’s Rome is not the serene marble of Alma-Tadema or the virtuous Republic of David; it is the Rome that Mussolini used, the Rome that justified empire by reference to empire, the Rome that demonstrated how the classical tradition could be appropriated for purposes that the classical world would not have recognized.
The photography tradition has its own engagement with Roman ruins that is continuous from Piranesi’s photographic spirit — the careful attention to what remains, the interest in the ruin as a statement about time — through the twentieth century to the present. Luigi Ghirri’s photographs of Italian landscape and monument, taken in the 1970s and 1980s, treat the ancient and the contemporary as simultaneous presences without privileging either. A Roman aqueduct appears in the same visual register as a highway overpass; a fragment of classical sculpture occupies the same frame as a gas station sign. This is not irony at Rome’s expense but a description of how antiquity actually exists in the Italian landscape: not as monument separate from the contemporary world but as element within it, encountered in the same visual field as everything else.
The installation tradition has produced some of the most interesting contemporary engagements with Roman material. Jorge Silvetti’s renovation of the Temple of Romulus in Rome’s Forum — which involved making visible the relationship between the ancient temple, its medieval conversion to a church entrance, and its subsequent archaeological excavation — is an architectural installation that uses the Roman ruin’s layered temporality as its primary material. The building’s history of uses, each leaving traces on the structure, is made legible rather than resolved into a single historical moment.
What contemporary art brings to ancient Rome that the academic tradition could not is a willingness to engage with the ruins as ruins — as things damaged by time, carrying that damage as part of their meaning — rather than as imperfect versions of the complete originals that reconstruction or pictorial imagination should restore. The ruin is not a failure of survival but a specific form of existence, and the specific form tells you things about time and loss and cultural transmission that the complete original could not. Contemporary art found this, and made it available as a way of seeing Rome that the Victorian reconstruction project had obscured.