BOOKS

Sigrid de Jong’s Rediscovering Architecture is about several things at once. Most evidently, it is a book about a group of three famous, if not iconic, archaic Greek-Doric temples: Paestum’s Temple of Hera I, built around 530 BCE, the oldest and most idiosyncratic of the three, commonly referred to in the eighteenth century as the Basilica because visitors could not believe such a peculiar building had been a temple; the Temple of Athena, constructed ca. 520BCE, the smallest of the three; and the Temple of Hera II, built ca. 460 BCE, the largest and the most conventional. At the time of their rediscovery around the middle of the eighteenth century, these structures were met with a variety of reactions, including vivid and often dismissive descriptions expressing everything from astonishment to distaste. These temples did not resemble any buildings with which eighteenth-century visitors were familiar; Paestum turned accepted ideas of classical architecture upside down. De Jong notes, for instance, that it is known that JohannWolfgang vonGoethe, upon arriving on the site of these porous limestone temples with their rough columns, was at first uncertain whether he was seeing rocks or ruins. And Antoine Vaudoyer, visiting Paestum in the summer of 1787, found the temples “of heavy and clumsy character,” with “the form, the grace and subtlety of Hercules” (47). The temples were the subject of captivating drawings and paintings, as in Thomas Hardwick’s sketchbooks and William Turner’s dramatic watercolors (many of which provide beautiful illustrations for this book), and of lavish publications. BetweenGabrielPierre-Martin Dumont’s Suitte [Suite] de plans (ca. 1750) and Paolo Antonio Paoli’s Paesti (1784), mid-eighteenth-century authors produced no less than seven monographs on the temples of Paestum. De Jong’s book is also about the life of the temples in eighteenth-century architectural thought. Rather than starting from an analysis of built forms, it unfolds from the human responses to them. Paestum generated half a century of controversy, mainly in France, England, and Italy. These debates revolved around the central concerns of eighteenth-century architectural, artistic, and aesthetic thinking, among them ideas about primitivism, the beginnings of civilization, and the origins of architecture. One could argue, and De Jong does convincingly, that Paestum functioned as a testing ground for eighteenth-century architectural discourse. Some themes even originated there, often because preconceptions were overturned in light of Paestum’s unusual buildings. De Jong reconstructs the site’s preeminent and crucial role in architectural aesthetics and artistic debates by considering visitors who encountered Paestum in very different ways. She offers extended and detailed examinations of a diverse range of sources, including letters, diaries, books, drawings, paintings, and engravings—many of them rarely or never before published and all attractively reproduced here. Through this evidence, she shows how visitors’ engagement with Paestum often developed in several stages, marked by the interactions of theory and experience. De Jong’s main hypothesis is that the perception of Paestum did not alter as a result of changing architectural ideas; rather, architectural thought evolved alongside and on the basis of the experience of Paestum. The third layer of Rediscovering Architecture concerns architectural experience. De Jong’s emphasis on varied encounters with and perceptions of Paestum is what makes this book different from earlier treatments. It is also what makes the book stand out from most other scholarly publications on eighteenth-century architectural discourse; its significance extends far beyond the time period under consideration. Obviously, the book investigates an era in which the direct experience of architecture acquired a central position in architectural theory, as in the ideas and writings of Jacques-François Blondel, Julien-David Le Roy, and Sir John Soane, to name a few. The oeuvre of Giambattista Piranesi, who was also involved with Paestum, would be unthinkable without these developments. The impact of architecture on the beholder became an essential component of the value placed on a building. De Jong’s meticulous analysis of this process provides insights that have important implications for architecture well beyond the eighteenth century. Such studies of architectural experience are rare. The structure of the book, which is divided into three parts, each comprising two chapters, reflects the diversity of travelers’ responses to Paestum. The first part, “Aesthetic Experiences,” analyzes written and visual records of visitors’ impressions in light of two prominent aesthetic concepts of the period: the sublime and the picturesque. Many accounts of “sublime”