Du Bellay’s Cendre and the Formless Signifier

La poudreuse cendre, “the dusty ashes,” is the lexical guide to this chapter. Signifying a persistent, formless materiality, this formulation is repeated like a mantra throughout Les Antiquitez. Cendre and poudre play an operative role in Du Bellay’s poetics, for the two words are used to describe the matter of literary tradition itself and to rethink the nature of poetic representation. We will first give a mini-history of the cendre topos in the literary and biblical tradition, which will help us think about the nature of signs and their signified vis-à-vis Rome. Then we will look at how Du Bellay uses repetition in order to evoke the innumerable permutations of Rome. And finally with architecture we go back to the exegi monumentum topos as it is played out in the afterlife of Du Bellay’s sonnets. Under the long shadow of a ruinous antiquity, Du Bellay crafts his monuments as fluid, mutable things.

The Rebirth of Poetics

This chapter traces the genealogy of the immortality of poetry topos from antiquity to the sixteenth century. It argues that the Renaissance poetics of ruins’s yearning for timelessness is accomplished through the strategy of a temporal multiplicity, a process that transmutes the past and in turn open its own transformation, from author to author, reader to reader. In other words, Renaissance poetry, implicitly or explicitly, hopes to transcend its temporal and spatial horizons (aspiring to be a monument), yet finds its survival in the immanent world, by being recycled, cited, and transformed by successors (living as a ruin). This tension—to be within or without time—drives much of the discourse surrounding ruins. Architectural destruction always compels poets to create works that rise above the sublunary world, while at the same time it inevitably leads them back into the thickets of exchange and mediation. The chapter ends with close-reading of several sonnets of Shakespeare.

Epilogue

The Epilogue departs from the Renaissance and returns to my Japanese friend’s perplexing question: why ruins after all? As it turns out, though there might not be physical ruins in East Asia, there is a long tradition of poems about ruins. When viewing the site of a fallen samurai castle in which only the tall summer grass remains, Bashō, in his fifteenth-century Journey to the Narrow North, re-writes an eighth-century Chinese poem by Du Fu. The poetics of ruins, East and West, is finally a poetics of mutability—not so much a mode of survival that depends on a work’s imperishability but rather an artistic process of continuous transmission, translation, and transformation.

Spenser’s Moniment and the Allegory of Ruins

This chapter argues that Spenser’s career, punctuated in an analogous way by the word moniment, not only measures the distance his writings have traversed, but also maps a larger itinerary of his poetic project which engages in a fundamental rethinking of the activities of monument-making and its dialectical other, ruination. In the English poet, monuments and ruins function as allegorical signifiers that shape both the content and the form of his work. The destruction of Roman temples in A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldings (1569) or The Ruines of Rome (1591) is a sort of righteous disenchantment. In the attempt to turn a ruin back to a monument, idolatry threatens to re-emerge, as in The Ruines of Time (1591). Monuments in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) are supposed to instruct; yet more often than not, they are on the verge of catastrophe. For Spenser, true, lasting monuments are those that spur the mind to action.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Erotics of Fragments

The erotics of ruins is the focus of this chapter. It examines the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an important text in Renaissance humanism not only because of its prominent treatment of ruins but also because it is one of the more poignant essays on how rekindling a relationship to the classical past is an enterprise fraught with a Petrarchan frustration. Traditionally translated as The Strife of Love in a Dream, the text recounts the phantasmagorical journey of Poliphilo as he searches for his Polia amidst a made-up world of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Etruscan antiquities.

Introduction A Japanese Friend

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse that became an inspirational force in the poetic imagination, artistic expression, and historical inquiry of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. The ruin functions as a privileged cipher or master topos that marks the rupture between the world of the humanists and the world of antiquity. The Renaissance sees a new understanding of both ruins and poetics, made possible by sustained meditation on the crumbled monuments of antiquity. The book imagines fluid multiplicity rather than fixed monumentalization as a survival strategy in the classical tradition. Its method is avowedly a philological one. This approach is particularly appropriate to the subject matter, since both philology and the study of ruins are fundamentally concerned with the figure of synecdoche, about imagining the whole through their parts. To make its case, the book uses three words with particularly rich semantic reach and deep etymological roots: vestigium in Petrarch, cendre in Du Bellay, and moniment in Spenser. They form “word clouds” in their authors’ œuvres: verbal constellations of associations that provide different iterations of the materiality of memory.

Petrarch’s Vestigia and the Presence of Absence

Any study of Renaissance ruins must begin with Petrarch, for he was one of the first thinkers to recognize that the signs of antiquity were scattered, dispersed, mutilated, which necessitated their reconstruction and renovation. This chapter argues that Petrarch’s existential encounter with the past can be conceived of as an investigation, a search for vestigia. The poetics of ruins for Petrarch is one in which his reflection on the ruins of Rome broadens into a meditation of lost time; this discourse then prompts him to compose fragmentary works that attempt to recollect his scattered self. I give a brief semantic history of vestigium; it explores Petrarch’s search for Laura’s footprints in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta as guided by a dissembling imitation of Dante’s work; in his epic, the Africa, Rome as a city is textualized and made whole through a careful reworking of its predecessors, Aeneid and Pharsalia; there is a kinship between contemplating ruins and writing letters in Petrarch’s epistles, which are modeled after Cicero’s. The chapter finally offers some thoughts on the relationship between gathering the fragments of Petrarch’s self in the Secretum and collecting the fragments of ancient manuscripts in his epistolary collection.

The Rebirth of Ruins

This chapter argues that how the idea that material ruins could be objects of empirical knowledge was born in the Renaissance and defined the period as such. Rome, the proverbial palimpsestic city, came to be written and rewritten upon. The identity of the “Eternal City” perdured in its temporal mutations and representations, surviving multiple displacements and spoliation. Rome moved from the singularity of the medieval palimpsest to the multiplicity of the early modern print. As a building’s constituent parts—pediments, cornices, shafts, and bases of columns—were ripped from its original site and transported across the city and beyond, guidebooks, prints, récits de voyage, mirabilia and other memorabilia carried Roman images far and wide.