The representation of ruins has ancient roots and illustrious precedents; in various epochs, a sense of searching through sites from the past has been communicated through the evocation of the remnants of the classical age. Fragmentary suggestions of antiquity elicit feelings of transience, ephemeralness, catastrophe, almost as if to indicate that nothing is impervious to the forces of time, that everything is subject to decay. The attempt to reveal traces of a sumptuous but long-vanished past has thus taken on the aspect of an illustration of the vanity of every artistic gesture, be it sculpture,