Chaos and anarchy represent the opposite
pole to an ordered life. Nothing works any more, everything is devastated, everything is falling apart. City walls, buildings that once afforded protection, have fallen victim to the excesses of armed conflict.
Infernal threats, ambushes, fiery rain and other catastrophes were described even in the Bible. Pillaging and plunder were part of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Cruel deeds familiar from the Bible, or those described by other people or experienced personally, inspired painters in the transitional period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and were picked out as a central theme in their pictures.
In the 18th century it became fashionable to build artificial ruins in parks and landscape gardens. Ruins became an image of human inadequacy in the attempt to come to terms with nature. 18th century landscape painters used ruin motifs in order to suggest the mysterious magic of pain, the sadness of beauty, to viewers.
In the first half of the last century the world had to endure two wars that costs millions of people their lives and reduced many cities to rubble. Countless ruins remained. Few of them have survived. Overgrown with grass, ivy and Virginia creeper they now tower up out of the landscape like many others from various epochs bearing witness to those who see them of the vanity of human endeavour, of transience, of death; filling them with horror, but at the same time exuding a feeling of gloom and sadness, of melancholy.
In this book, the author delivers a detailed assessment of ruins as a phenomenon in architecture, landscape design, fine art, film and the media. The result is an extraordinarily intense contribution to the theme of transience.