Sam Miller, Vintage 2010

Sam Miller is quick to tell us that he loves walking in strange cities. So do I. And it is this that has always bothered me about Delhi, a city I have never visited but have often longed to see: how will I get around it? I don’t want to hire a car or an autorickshaw. And apparently women shouldn’t travel alone by bus. So can one walk? I know no better means of locomotion, especially if you really want to see and understand things. For all these reasons I was heartened when I picked up Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. And when I saw the following line, which the author delivers to an auto-addict who is offering him a lift: ‘I don’t drive. And, well, I really want to walk,’ I knew I was in the company of a kindred spirit.

When he says this kind of thing, Miller tells us, people look at him with pity and disbelief, or with embarrassment, as if he were a bit touched. I’m used to this reaction too. When I go to pick up my son from school, in foul-weather gear and yomping boots, mothers in spiky heels emerging from SUVs look at me with pity and disbelief. My son isn’t yet of an age to be embarrassed.

So, safe in the knowledge that Miller and I were on the same wavelength, I set off with him, in search of a vast and unknown city. Everything in the book happens at street level. We don’t (or extremely rarely) go inside people’s apartments or office buildings. We don’t join them at social functions or in restaurants. We never really ‘meet’ anyone, we have brief encounters, the stuff of a vagrant’s life, with prison warders, rag-pickers, funeral directors, pirated computer software vendors, stall-holders, janitors. The encounters may be brief but they are not superficial. They are illuminating, sometimes amusing, often moving. And I learned a lot. Not just about Delhi's geography, monuments, traffic problems, urban planning, religious groups and politics. But about geocaching and SimCity, about the Brahma Kumaris and what ‘sealing’ a business means. I even have a new verb to add to my vocabulary: to prepone, meaning to do something earlier than you planned. I loved the story of the bulldozed mosque and the incident of the ‘fresh fruit salad’, not to mention the Hotel Alka, which advertises itself as ‘the best alternative to luxury’.

The New Statesman reviewer who said that ‘For all its entertaining eccentricities Delhi is careful to maintain a strong sense of the city’s sad heritage of religious factionalism, pollution, rioting, poverty and crime’ completely fails to catch the spirit of this book, making it sound like a worthy, brown-rice sort of endeavour leavened by a few off-the-wall jokes. It is nothing like that. It is true that Miller tells it like it is, but he doesn’t preach, he doesn’t campaign, he doesn’t soap-box. That is not to suggest that we don't learn about pollution, rioting, poverty and crime. We do. But the overall tenor of the book is one of optimism. And enjoyment at the sheer infiniteness of Delhi. Sam Miller sets out to walk the city not because he is a charmingly batty Englishman, but because there are certain things that he would never see if he didn’t. And those things deserve to be documented.

In documenting them,  Miller is even-handed and compassionate. This is a book about a megacity, but what that means is that it is a book about human beings, in all their nutty multifariousness. Sam doesn’t judge, he observes. Above all, he writes with extreme tenderness towards his fellow man (and woman). What adds an extra piquancy is the fact that he has trouble with one of his knees. A fanatical walker with a gammy leg almost seems to stand as a microcosm of Delhi itself: something indomitable, irrepressible, insistent with life, and destined to succeed despite all difficulties. For the last few nights this book was my bedside reading. I enjoyed it hugely.

Reviewed by Annabel Barber. Sam Miller is the author of Blue Guide India.

Keith Devlin, Walker & Company, 2011.

Visitors to the Camposanto, the sacred burial ground of Pisa, so sadly damaged by Allied bombers in the Second World War, find all manner of monuments lining the walls, from Roman sarcophagi to statues of the illustrious citizens of later centuries. One of these, recently cleaned up and restored, dates from 1863 and it commemorates one of Pisa’s heroes, the mathematician Leonardo da Pisa, often known as Fibonacci (a corruption of Filius Bonacci, the son of Guiglielmo Bonacci). Although no contemporary depiction of him survives, he springs from the sculptor’s imagination with classical features, a cowled head and a long tunic. He lived from around 1170 to 1250.

Fibonacci is best known today for his famous mathematical puzzle of the breeding rabbits. Shut up a pair of rabbits in an enclosure, assume that the doe will give birth to a pair of baby rabbits every month and that these two will be up and breeding a pair a month within a month. Genetically impossible of course, but the numbers can be built up into a sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on. These ‘Fibonacci’ numbers reappear in all kinds of strange places, not least as the typical number of petals in a flower.

Fibonacci was not the first to work out this sequence and Keith Devlin is not nearly as interested in it as in Fibonacci’s contribution to the commercial revolution of 13th and 14th century Italy. These years were the age of trading breakthroughs for the Italians as they captured new routes and filled them with finished grain in return for raw materials. The Venetians strengthened their position immensely after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 had allowed them to lay their hands on ports across the Mediterranean. Florence expanded fast after 1200. Yet there was a bottleneck in the commercial background. There were experts who could manipulate an abacus as quickly as one might operate a calculator today, but the final answers were always written in Roman numerals. As soon as complex issues arose, concerning how to divide profits or change money between coins of different alloys, the system just broke down. The Arab traders, on the other hand, were using a system they had adopted from India. It comprised nine numbers, each with a single-digit symbol, 8 for VIII, for instance, and, crucially, a zero, which was recognized as a number in its own right. The man who transferred the system into Italy was, Devlin argues in this entertaining book, none other than Fibonacci.

Fibonacci’s father had been posted by Pisa to the port of Bugia, in modern Algeria, where he acted as the Pisan go-between with the Berbers. Leonardo, still a boy, went with him. He must have picked up Arabic, as he tells how he talked to merchants from Egypt and Syria, and he soon grasped the superiority of their calculations and became obsessed by them. In 1202 he published a mammoth 600-page manuscript, the Liber Abaci, ‘The Book of Calculation’. It was the first time that the system had been spelled out fully and aimed directly at Italian merchants. Everything from how to divide profits and measure land to dealing in currency exchange was covered with a myriad examples to show how each kind of calculation could be made.

No copies of the 1202 manuscript survive but there are some of the second edition of 1228. By this time, Fibonacci was famous. He had been summoned to meet the formidable Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who had set him three problems which he triumphantly solved. He wrote up the answers in his Liber quadratorum and this work has helped confirm him as the finest mathematician of the Middle Ages.

By the end of the 13th century there were a mass of simpler books of calculation and schools were teaching the system. In Florence in 1343, between 1,000 and 1,200 boys were working in abbaci schools. Until recently, however, historians have not been able to link Fibonacci directly to the introduction of the new system. The workbooks used by students and merchants did not appear to overlap with anything in Liber Abaci. Perhaps the system had come in at a less erudite level and slowly infiltrated the Italian cities. Yet later writers often named Fibonacci as the man who introduced arithmetic and algebra to Europe.

Devlin shows how the question has been resolved. Fibonacci must have realized that the huge manuscript of the Liber Abaci and another text he wrote for merchants on geometry, which was scarcely less large, were too much for the ordinary merchant to master. So he wrote a much shorter and simple text, now lost, and this can now be directly linked to the manuals to be found in the schools some decades later. Fibonacci was truly ‘the man of numbers’, both at a sophisticated level in algebra, but on the market floor.

This is a short book on a man about whom almost nothing is known. Fibonacci sometimes called himself Bigallo, perhaps a Tuscan dialect word for traveller, and he certainly knew his way around the cosmopolitan Mediterranean world of the 13th century. It was perhaps inevitable that the Hindu-Arabic system would have come to Italy in time—it was simply too useful in a complex trading world—but Devlin has certainly shown that Fibonacci deserves the credit for setting in all in motion. This is a readable and enjoyable book and I actually understood the maths!

Reviewed by Charles Freeman, historical consultant to the Blue Guides and author of Sites of Antiquity: 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World. For more on Fibonacci, see here.

Susie Harries, Chatto & Windus, 2011.

I am not quite sure how my 1961 edition of Pevsner’s Suffolk has survived long enough still to be found among the debris in the boot of my car. It surfaces and resurfaces as if carrying the persistence of its author with it. It is a paperback edition and I must have brought it when I was cycling round Suffolk churches for a school project in the summer of 1965. I was intrigued to read in this meticulous and absorbing account of Pevsner’s life that he was upset when later volumes only appeared as pricey hardbacks so depriving one of his target audiences, school children, of accessible copies. I was one of the lucky ones.

Pevsner is, of course, the acclaimed guide to The Buildings of England, eventually, with some help from collaborators, covering the whole of the country in forty-six volumes. The elderly, and—as Harries tells us, exhausted, author, gazes benignly at us over his achievement, here piled in two columns on the front cover. It is to Pevsner that one turns to check whether a church window is ‘Perp’ or ‘Dec’ and I was always rather proud that he had ventured far enough up the drive of my family home in Suffolk to note its ‘porch with Roman Doric columns’, although, alas, his date for the exterior, early 18^th century, is wrong; the façade was remodelled in the 1830s. In his old age Pevsner relaxed enough to admit he had made many such mistakes in his rigorously disciplined forays into the countryside.

Of course, one reads Pevsner for his pithy comments. One of my favourite local churches in Suffolk is Dennington but Pevsner sternly brings my enthusiasm to order by telling me that ‘Piscina and sedilia are strangely and perversely arched’ and that ‘the chancel arch is painfully incorrect’. It is a style that is utterly distinctive but often limited and I was glad that Harries put me onto another, fuller, work of his, The Leaves of Southwell [Minster]—a King Penguin of 1945 but easy to track down online—where he enthuses over the perfect marriage of stone and nature in the Minster capitals. An extract was read at his funeral.

This biography is wonderfully comprehensive. When Pevsner left his lectureship at Göttingen to seek a new life in England in 1933, he brought the intense analytical tradition of German art history with him and Harries covers this well. Pevsner was conservative by nature and sympathetic to the demands for order in Germany but never, as has been suggested in a recent, less rigorous biography, a Nazi (Harries has the advantage of sole access to his family archive, so she can provide an accurate picture). We can understand why he found the English tradition of connoisseurship gleaned from weekends nosing as a guest around country houses amateurish, but he persevered and eventually found his niches lecturing (at Birkbeck and later as Slade professor at Cambridge), advising, broadcasting (the Reith Lecturer of 1955) and writing. He was utterly professional and endlessly assiduous in accumulating architectural details. Of course, to some, this meant that he missed or ignored the human side of building. His personality, often removed and abrupt, reflected his dedication and one can understand the difficulties he experienced in his marriage with the more gregarious Lola, who suffered his long absences, self-absorption and occasional dalliances with other women. He missed her most, of course, when she died suddenly in 1963, twenty years before he did.

Outside his Buildings of England, Pevsner was perhaps best known for his championship of the Modern Movement, notably in his Pioneers of the Modern Movement, an early English work of 1936. He argued that ‘good’ modern building should reflect function, materials should not be disguised and lines should be clean without ornament. Then he was drawn into the revived interest in Victorian buildings and so became a founder of the Victorian Society (where he had to face childish ridicule for his ‘Germanic’ approach from one John Betjeman). Balancing the demands for new buildings against the varying qualities of older ones involved him in endless and often fruitless battles with planners, architects and developers alike. Pevsner was never a people person but his vast knowledge and persistence earned him increasing respect. His taste and approach could always be criticized, of course, and there were always some whose ripostes to his enthusiasms were malicious rather than scholarly. However, he held to his own vision and avoided feuds. By the end of his life the honours were flowing in profusion from across the world.

It is always hard to deal with the austere who say little about their emotions and who lose themselves in dedicated scholarship. The work can easily swamp the individual. Pevsner needed and deserved a full biography and this could hardly be bettered. Thanks to her ferreting through the family archives, her judicious sympathy for her subject, and her scholarly accounts of the academic background, Susie Harries brings to life the man who has left us an awesome legacy. Wherever we are, in any part of England, we still need to ask of an interesting building: ‘Is it in Pevsner?’

Reviewed by Charles Freeman, historical consultant to the Blue Guides and author of Sites of Antiquity: 50 sites that Explain the Classical World. His Holy Bones Holy Dust, a study of the medieval cult of relics, is reviewed here.

R.J.B. Bosworth, Yale University Press, 2011.

I first arrived in Rome in January 1966 when I was eighteen. I had had a long journey by train from London but I have never forgotten the emotional impact as my taxi sped by the Forum. All the hours I had spent trying to construe the speeches of Cicero and the odes of Horace gained meaning and since then I have never been able completely to separate ancient texts from the places they were created.

I still know of no other city where the histories and myths intermingle quite so powerfully as they do in Rome, for any period of its past one chooses. Even the traditional founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, were heirs to the myth of Aeneas. What Bosworth achieves in this sophisticated and penetrating history is to show how the Roman pasts have pervaded the political and religious life of the city since 1800. The revolutionary French, the austere and embittered popes, the leaders of the new secular government after 1870, Mussolini with his bombast of a rediscovered empire, none of these could never escape from or fail to manipulate some precedent. Every leader sought to find the ‘right’ Roman past—republican, imperial, Christian or nationalist—to use for political resonance whatever the cost. Mussolini blindly destroyed large parts of medieval Rome to claw out the imperial ruins that lay buried beneath it.

What I loved about this book was Bosworth’s acute sensitivity to every nuance of Rome’s past. Symbols were refashioned to meet each contemporary need, however transient it might prove. I warmed to the story of how, during the ‘revolution’ of 1848–49, the cross on St Peter’s was, in the absence of the fugitive pope, painted in republican colours, while in the 1948 elections, the Italian communists linked Giuseppe (Joseph) Garibaldi, to another Josef, Stalin. (The Church responded with ‘At the urn, God sees you but Stalin does not’.) And I never knew that the last surviving ship of the papal navy was a paddle-boat called the Immaculate Conception.

The perpetual game-playing between popes, outraged at the loss of their patrimony in 1870, and city rulers achieved high levels of drama. When in 1889 the Roman government launched a grand unveiling of the statue of Giordano Bruno, burned by the Inquisition in 1600, Pope Leo XIII retaliated by spending the day prostrate before a statue of St Peter. When the Fascists commemorated the anniversary of the March on Rome on 28^th October, Pope Pius XI countered with the institution of a new feast day, of Christ the King, for the last Sunday of October. In the great public ceremonies, blackshirts offered no competition to a pope clothed, as Pius was on one occasion, ‘in a huge silver mantle interwoven with gold’. Whatever Il Duce’s ambitions, no one knelt when Mussolini passed by. They did in their thousands when the pope did. Well might Pius XII reassert Rome’s primacy as the universal Christian centre of civilisation when the Fascist regime collapsed ignominiously in 1943. One of his successes was to secure the placing of figleaves on the virile genitalia of Fascist heroic statuary during the Holy Year of 1950.

Assiduously researched and always absorbing, this book should have an appeal far beyond lovers of Rome. Anyone sensitive to history is aware of how easily the past becomes mythical and /or fugitive. Sniff the air in Rome and, above the traffic fumes, you can sense the currents of nostalgia merging, separating, remingling, swirling around the ruins of past and present. Bosworth shows how even the most determined rewriters of history, Mussolini prominent among them, were out-manoeuvred by the insistent presence of alternative myths which subverted their proclamations of the revival of an ‘eternal city’. Rome is indeed ‘eternal’ but primarily, perhaps, in its ability to eternally manipulate its past.

Reviewed by Charles Freeman, historical consultant to the Blue Guides and author of Sites of Antiquity: 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World. His Holy Bones Holy Dust, a study of the medieval cult of relics, is reviewed here.

Roger Crowley, Faber, 2011.

The struggle by the city-states of Italy to dominate the medieval Mediterranean trade routes was a ruthless one and Venice was the key player. The famous account of Venetian merchants stealing the body of St Mark from Alexandria in 828, whether the stuff of legend or not, shows that Venetian merchants were trading in the East as early as the ninth century. Roger Crowley begins his own lively study of Venice’s fortunes in the eleventh century, but he is soon off to his first great set-piece, the notorious Fourth Crusade of 1204.

The crusaders who had answered the call from Pope Innocent III to free the Holy Land had booked a fleet of Venetian galleys to take them there. Crowley tells the tale of what actually happened when they could not pay up: a free-booting enterprise which ends with the sacking of Constantinople, the greatest Christian city of the Mediterranean, by the crusaders.  Whether or not this shocking diversion was manipulated by the aged, and blind, Venetian doge, Enrico Dandolo, who led the expedition, the Venetians were quick to ensure that harbours and trading posts of the shattered Byzantine Empire along the routes back to Venice now became theirs. Booty, including the fine copper horses that were placed on St Mark’s and a mass of sacred relics, looted from the heretical Greeks, flowed back into Europe.

Crowley tells this story with great panache. Then he turns his attention to the problems of control of the Stato da Mar, the Venetian Empire, that followed. Crete was vital as a staging post but with its people tenaciously clinging to their Greek Orthodoxy and resentful of the Venetian settlers, there were continual revolts. The Venetians never pretended that they ruled in the interests of their subjects and suppression was harsh, especially when a revolt of 1363 was crushed with the help of mercenaries. Everyone in Venice knew how vital the Cretan harbours were to their prosperity and the city exploded with flamboyant celebrations in St Mark’s Square as soon as the galleys brought home the news of a successful repression.

The fourteenth century also saw the culmination of centuries of struggle with Genoa. The Genoese had been masters of the sea almost as early as the Venetians. Yet Venice’s success in the Fourth Crusade had edged them out and they were determined on revenge. The wars were debilitating and in 1379 nearly ended in utter disaster for Venice when the Genoese captured Chioggia, just a few miles south of the city. Venice was isolated and the Genoese stranglehold began to suffocate her.  The charismatic Venetian naval commander, Vettor Pisani, who had been brought back and imprisoned in the city after an earlier defeat, was the Venetians’ last hope and by popular acclaim he was released. Crowley regales us with the story of how Pisani, with a revitalised fleet behind him,  finally out-manoeuvred the resilient enemy.

After these dramatic events, Crowley pauses to draw breath and there are more reflective chapters on the Venetian state and empire in the fifteenth century, the intricacies of diplomacy and the management of the fleets, with the lucrative pilgrimage trade to the East among the sources of new income. Yet by the fifteenth century there is a new threat after the Ottoman empire begins its inexorable expansion over the eastern Mediterranean. Crowley makes another set-piece of the fall of Negroponte, the island of Euboea, in 1470, and then there is the devastating loss of nerve by the Venetians at the battle of Zonchio in the Ionian Sea in August 1499, when Venice failed to engage the Ottoman fleet and so lost the initiative for ever.

This is a fast-paced and enjoyable book. Perhaps Crowley concentrates too much on the big moments when all seemed lost or won and the blood flows freely—but read City of Fortune and you will understand with what trepidation the arrival of a galley from the East was greeted. Did it bear news of a defeat that could put all in jeopardy or of another conquest which would keep the fabulous riches of the Orient flooding into the city? Each was equally possible and Crowley vividly reminds us that the survival of Venice was as precarious in the fourteenth century as it is today.

Reviewed by Charles Freeman, historical consultant to the Blue Guides and author of Sites of Antiquity: 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World. His Holy Bones Holy Dust, a study of the medieval cult of relics, is reviewed here.

Paul Stephenson, Quercus 2009. Paperback August 2011. ISBN: 978-1-84916-002-5

In Istanbul, on the north side of Divan Yolu, the street that follows the course of the Mese or ‘Central Way’ of old Constantinople, stands a decayed porphyry stump known as Çemberlitaş, the ‘Hooped Column’. In its heyday it would have been much more splendid, for it was, according to Blue Guide Istanbul (6th ed. 2011), ‘erected by Constantine to commemorate the dedication of the city as capital of the Roman Empire on 11th May 330. It stood at the centre of the Forum of Constantine, a colonnaded oval portico adorned with statues of pagan deities, Roman emperors and Christian saints, and thought to have been the inspiration for what Bernini later built in front of St Peter’s in Rome.’ What is also interesting about the column is the statue that would have crowned it, a colossal likeness of Constantine as Sol Invictus, the Unconquered and Unconquerable Sun, with the orb of the world in his hand and a crown of brazen sunrays glittering on his head.

In his Hymn to God the Father, John Donne makes use of a popular metaphysical pun:

…swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now...

The transference of pagan sun of the heavens to Christian son of God, victorious over death, is something that happened long before Donne’s time. And Constantine’s adoption of the sun/son cult and his public portrayal of himself as brazen victor were significant and deliberate—at least Paul Stephenson thinks so. But why? Was it because he was sincere in his Christian faith? Or was it simple political expediency? Biographies have been written that seek to prove both these theses. Stephenson’s argument is slightly different. Constantine’s devotion to Christ is not what turned Christianity into the majority faith of the Eastern Empire. He is neither the hero that the partisan Christian historian Eusebius sought to portray (4th century) nor the villain that the apostased Catholic convert Edward Gibbon depicts (18th century), with sour scorn, as using ‘the altars of the church as a convenient footstool to the throne of the empire’.

Instead, Stephenson focuses on something else: the army. Constantine grew up in an age when emperors were raised high and then capriciously felled by their barracksmen. The military had enormous power, which, in the right hands, could be cleverly channelled. For Stephenson, Constantine used the army as the driving force and ‘chief instrument of his political will’, aggressively adopting the Victor persona, something which the army accepted wholeheartedly because of what Stephenson calls the ‘established Roman theology of victory’. After the decisive Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius and sent him to his death in the Tiber waters, floundering helplessly in his heavy armour, the bringer of that victory was Christ. We need not trouble ourselves with how, with whether Constantine really did have a vision of a Cross. The fact is that from then on it was Christ and not Zeus or Sol who became the emperor’s patron deity and it was under Christ’s banner that the imperial legions fought.

Constantine’s mother had been a Christian but the world into which her son was born was a pagan one. Christ, like any other god, was a divine being to be flattered and appeased. Constantine’s devotion to his god was not that of a pious Christian as we would understand the term today. Nor was it simply a cyncial political stunt. The truth falls somewhere in between, and Constantine’s reign is, Stephenson thinks, ‘a case study in the interaction of faith and power.’

Readable and convincing, the book presents a portrait of a great soldier and propagandist, a man who believed his earthly power and success were due to the intervention of the god of the Christians. Thus it was that he adopted that cult as his personal totem. He certainly never heard or believed that the meek were blessed and would inherit the earth.

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

4th June–27th November 2011

www.labiennale.org

The Biennale, the world’s leading modern art exhibition, is upon us once again. ‘An exuberant invitation to take part in growth and change’ (Rev John-Henry Bowden, former Chaplain of St George’s, Venice)? Or the emperor’s new clothes?

Well, Jackie Wullschlager , the Financial Times’ influential art critic and no enemy of the new, really doesn’t like British artist Mike Nelson’s installation: it is ‘fatuous, self-regarding art’ and ‘the most vapid show the British pavilion has ever sponsored’.  But among the things she does like are the three Tintorettos. Sorry, Tintorettos? Not by any chance by Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto because of his father’s trade of cloth dyeing, with the not very modern dates of 1519–94?

Indeed, the very same. Two of the three paintings are from the Accademia (the Creation of the Animals and the Transport of the Body of St Mark), the third is a Last Supper from the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore ‘painted in the last year of his [Tintoretto’s] life … the last of numerous paintings he produced on this subject, one which had fascinated him all his life … what is memorable above all is the disquieting presence of ethereal spirits and angels which emerge from the dark background, perhaps harbingers of the death of this deeply religious painter’ (quoted from Alta Macadam’s Blue Guide Venice).

But the Biennale’s Chairman, Paolo Baratta, has a simple explanation: the show hasn’t lost faith in the new, Tintoretto’s works are exhibited in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini ‘as a warning to living artists to not indulge in conventions!’ (the exclamation mark is from his press release). And while Curator Bice Curiger maybe protests a little much she is surely right when she says, ‘These paintings by Tintoretto, one of the most experimental artists in the history of Italian art, exert a special appeal today with their almost febrile, ecstatic lighting and a near reckless approach to composition that overturns the well-defined, classical order of the Renaissance. The works will play a prominent role in establishing an artistic, historical and emotional relationship to the local context.’

All excellent, and we at the Blue Guides look forward with enthusiasm to a creeping juxtaposition of great, historical Venetian art alongside the thoroughly modern in the pavilions of the Giardini and halls of the Arsenale at future Biennales.

Reviewed by Thomas Howells

Venice is covered in a number of Blue Guides: there is the main Blue Guide Venice 8th edition, by Alta Macadam, as well as a Blue Guide Literary Companion Venice.  And just out, The Venice Lido by Robin Saikia, in the new Blue Guides Travel Monograph series.

By Robert Hewison and published by Yale University Press, £45

Viewed from 160 years later it is not always easy to take Ruskin seriously: his romanticisation of the Gothic and demonisation of the Renaissance verges on the absurd, while curious relationships first with his beautiful and lively young wife - with whom he honeymooned in Venice and who divorced him shortly thereafter - and in later life with an adolescent girl who died young, are difficult to explain.

Neverthess Ruskin writes beautifully, his scholarship is superb, and his vision of mediaeval Europe as a pre-industrial, artisanal, feudal Utopia, while certainly wrong, is not without attraction.

This latest book linking the two perennially absorbing, and closely related, subjects of Ruskin and Venice is well reviewed in Apollo Magazine by Christopher Newall:

"Ruskin on Venice offers much more than a series of glimpses of its subject at different stages of his life: by linking Ruskin’s various stays in Venice together into a larger evolution of thought, it provides an unfolding drama of his myriad preoccupations and ever-fluctuating state of mind."

Read the whole review.

Ruskin inevitably crops up in all the Blue Gudies' Venice books: both he and his wife Effie are anthologised in Literary Companion Venice, and of course his presence is also recorded in the recent Blue Guide Travel Monograph on the Venice Lido.

The latest book by Charles Freeman, freelance academic historian and historical consultant to the Blue Guides (published by Yale University Press, 2011; ISBN 978-0-300-12571-9).

The subtitle, 'How Relics shaped the History of Medieval Europe', sounds more universal than it actually is: the relics in question are exclusively Christian; the book makes no mention of the hair from the Prophet's beard in Istanbul, for example, or any shrines there may have been in Muslim Spain. This is not a criticism; it is simply a fact that helps one to know what one is getting. We are talking about early Christianity, a subject on which Mr Freeman is extremely knowledgeable (and no less opinionated).

The book is a splendid read. It begins with a stirring account of the murder of Thomas Becket and goes on to examine the multifarious and mysterious ways in which early Church Fathers got distracted from the task of helping their flock to follow Christ's model and fretted instead about whether the Holy Foreskin needed to have been rejoined to Jesus' body after the Resurrection, or whether women entered Heaven in male form, as being representative of a higher state of being.

Freeman is particularly good on the vulnerability of relic cults to the onslaughts of science. 'When an earthquake hit Venice in 1511,' he tells us, 'the Patriarch interpreted it as a sign from God in response to the increase of sodomy in the city. After all, the city's prostitutes had been complaining that their own business was suffering as a consequence of this diversion in sexual behaviour. The diarist Marino Sanudo, who recorded the earthquake with his customary detachment, noted that the ensuing days of fasting, procession and preaching might have helped improve piety, "but as a remedy for earthquakes, which are a natural phenomenon, this was no good at all"....Sanudo is reflecting a growing understanding of the natural world.'

And yet, and yet... We may enjoy a little giggle at the idea that St Helena of Athyra possessed a ring that could quench sexual passion and owned a handkerchief that cured toothache, but how many of us have fondled crystals, tied copper bangles to our wrists, kept a scarab beetle in our pockets? The human need for tangible totems or amulets is as strong today as it ever was. A large part of the immense appeal of Freeman's book is that it reminds us all of this foible. Which, on the scale of foibles, is a relatively harmless one. To the medieval mind, 'Relics are the portents of heaven shining in their glory among the dross of sinful humanity.' Nowadays we grope after transcendence in a variety of other ways. But the hope of shining glory is undimmed.

Reviewed by Tonsor

Charles Freeman is the author of Sites of Antiquity: from Ancient Egypt to the Fall of Rome, 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World, published by Blue Guides.

And publication of Freeman's book coincides with the British Museum's new major exhibition, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, housed in what was the British Museum's Reading Room - the circular building in the middle of the central court - and here favourably reviewed in the Economist. Also in Minerva Magazine.  Until 9 October 2011.

By David Watkin (Profile Books, hardback 2009; paperback June 2011)

‘Archaeology often brings to light relics—mysterious foundations, tumbled blocks, a charred sacrificial pit, the decaying stumps of dead houses—fascinating to the scholar but a stunning bore to the simple visitor.’ So wrote Dilys Powell in The Villa Ariadne. Archaeologists can be monomaniacs and their interests are often distressingly narrow. So it was with some anticipation that I took up David Watkin’s The Roman Forum, whose contentions are very clear: ‘Archaeologists have eliminated much evidence of the fascinating post-antique life of the Forum,’ and their labours have made ‘visiting parts of the Forum about as attractive as looking into the hole made in New York on 9/11.’ Ouch! These accusations run like leitmotifs throughout the book, together with the curious conspiracy theory that guidebooks are complicit; that there are things they ‘do not want us to see’.

If one works night and day to produce guidebooks, it is difficult not to get on the defensive. The Portico of the Dii Consentes doesn’t ‘turn out’ to be a modern reconstruction. Pay attention to your Blue Guide! It clearly says that it dates from 1858. There is no plot to keep visitors in the dark about the churches of San Lorenzo in Miranda or Santi Luca e Martina. They are just never, ever open. But for Watkin, everything was better in the time of Piranesi. Piranesi, he tells us, with the authority of one who knew him in a former life, recorded the Forum ‘at the last time when it was still a place of poetry, capable of inspiring great painters, writers and thinkers.’ Glum stuff, but the threnody does begin to strike a chord and the aimiable style in which the bad news is delivered soon reels you in. Watkin laments the fact that the Forum has been turned inside out: its surviving churches open away from it, no longer into it; it has been severed from the life of the city and turned into a visitors’ theme park. Up until a very few years ago, entry was free and one could use the Forum as a thoroughfare; Romans going about their daily business could loiter and linger in it. Now you have to queue to be admitted through a turnstile, custodians are bossy and offhand, and no one who is not a tourist (or an archaeologist) ever goes there. The magnificent ‘challenge of the relationship between ancient and modern’ has been obscured.

Despite the underlying crotchetiness, the book is immensely enjoyable. Watkin’s love for the Forum, his breadth of knowledge, and his wistfulness about what might have been (in a Peter Pan world) are ingenuous, impressive and infectious—a beguiling combination. The chapter on the despoliation of the Forum’s monuments in the service of the new St Peter’s is a superb read. No visitor should ever again imagine that the mere march of time had anything to do with it. What Watkin cannot admit, though, is that if archaeologists hadn’t got their hands on the Forum when they did (in the late 19th century), the urban planners certainly would have. And the challenging relationship between ancient and modern would now be as desperate a tussle there as it is at Largo Argentina.

Nevertheless, if you’re travelling to Rome—either for the first or the fiftieth time—I recommend that you get this book. Not only will it add whole layers of meaning to your visit, but it will also force to you answer the following testing questions: if archaeologists are to be banished, who will take their place (and who will pay for it)? What is the point of a desert like the Forum in the centre of a busy and increasingly cramped-feeling capital city? And whose opinion was nearer to the mark: Palladio’s, for whom the Forum offered ‘not the spectacle of ancient glory but rather the possibility of recreating it’; or Pevsner’s, for whom the Forum belongs ‘to the civilisation of Antiquity, not to what we usually mean when we speak of European civilisation’? Watkin loves the Baroque churches that were built over the ancient ruins in the 17th century. But did their architects believe they were ‘recreating’, or did they believe they were moving forward into a ‘modern’ era?

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

Blue Guide Rome (10th edition) has extensive coverage of the Forum, with a map of the site and detailed notes on all its monuments, past, present and conjectural.

by Ferdinand Mount, published by Simon & Schuster 2010, in paperback April 2011

There’s a brilliant new idea on every page of Ferdinand Mount’s meandering, fascinating comparison of various aspects of the modern world with those of Classical times.  And like all good original thinking, when so well expressed, the ideas seem obvious after the event: Roman baths and modern spas, ancient gyms and the body beautiful, stuffed dormice and modern foodyism, the pre-Christian Eastern mystery religions of the Roman Empire and the post-Christian ditto of the Western world.

And many of the ideas merit a book in themselves: for example, I was not familiar with Vaihinger’s post-Kantian arguments for ‘as-if’ Christianity (it’s not true but you’ll have a nicer time if you behave as if it was), an interesting idea which we will hear more of as the arguments of what Mount calls the ‘anti-God botherers’ (Dawkins and his fellow-travellers) rumble on.

Maybe a major pulled punch or missed angle: the ancient world worked because of slavery.  You do not have to be a Hegelian Marxist to appreciate that some ancients could be pretty free to do all sorts of things because many had no freedom at all.  The similarity with the modern world is often missed: while Christianity with its then new idea of the equality of souls spelled the decline and eventual abolition of ancient world slavery, the modern world has found a very good substitute.  It’s called ‘free trade’ or ‘globalisation’, and it has again freed a substantial middle class to hang around in gyms, spas and restaurants and do all the things Mount so wittily describes.

And he does bang on about sex. I am not sure how interesting a point it is that the ancients were promiscuous and that so are many in the 21st-century West. Much more fun on the subject (and not much to do with the ancient world) is Mount’s account of the evolution of ideas about sex in the 20th century. ‘The word buggery was never far from our lips,’ he quotes Virginia Woolf as saying in the 1920s, squirming no doubt in self-congratulatory excitement, after Lytton Strachey has used the really naughty word ‘semen’, and they talk about IT in a really grown up way, unlike those straight-laced Victorians to whom they felt so eminently superior. And the poor little consumptive D.H. Lawrence went on and on about IT, also in a really grown up way. But Mount’s point is excellent: the result wasn’t a world of bearded Joy of Sex seventies fellows enshrining Sex as the Point of Everything; on the contrary, the logical conclusion was utter triviality: humdrum shagging, which is apparently where we are now.

Extracting unified themes from a thousand years of rapid intellectual experiment and development in ancient times to compare to those of our own is not always easy.  For example, while Mount does find a Greek philosopher with some remarkably Popperian ideas about scientific discovery, it is not clear that Romans, never seriously interested in new inventions or in the advance of science really had much in common with the 21st century in terms of  scientific attitudes.

But these are quibbles. As I say, brilliant, a fascinating idea on every page. Here I have covered about one and a half ideas inadequately; he has 385 pages of them.  I think I will read it again.

Reviewed by Tom Brompton

Blue Guides publish Sites of Antiquity: from Ancient Egypt to the Fall of Rome, 50 Sites that Explain the Classical World.