The return to myth seen in the art of the last ten-odd years was a kind of return to the mother. Yet to return to the mother, one must kill the father—if one takes at least one of those myths seriously, at any rate. Whether or no, the return to myth was inevitably difficult.

For their part of this journey, Anne and Patrick Poirier chose the route of looking at the actual past. Their reconstructions of antique cities—detailed models, often quite large in size, but small in relative scale—were made with the help of site plans and measurements of classical ruins. This scientific methodology, however,