Dreams of Ruins: Drawing as a Speculative Resource during the Renaissance for Understanding the Architectural Remains of Antiquity

Abstract

Whatever is unfinished or incomplete stimulates the imagination by suggesting to the mind the fragmentary object as it originated. Ruins are a veiled recollection of past reality. This article is centred upon the concept of “ruin” and serves to reflect on the earliest Renaissance representations of the architectural remains of the past. It considers how they took shape as a symbolic object but became transformed into an element for academic study; how they went from real ruins to imaginary. It highlights among these aspects the speculative and interpretative sense of these drawings, in addition to their relation with the world of projects and restoration.