https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/07/19/tales-of-the-burning-world/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:15:34 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/07/19/tales-of-the-burning-world/comment-page-1/#comment-9600 Thu, 19 Jul 2012 18:16:26 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2014#comment-9600 One of the jarring experiences I had when I first went to Rome was that I went into what looked on the outside to be beautiful medieval churches only to find that the interior was slathered over with a thick layer of baroque kitsch. Obviously everything in that previous sentence involves my own historical and aesthetic sensibilities. But it got me thinking about the fact that the idea that old buildings should be preserved as they were when they were old is a relatively recent phenomenon in the West — especially in Rome, where they’ve been using ruins as the frames for new buildings, or just as quarries for stone, for about 1500 years. It used to be that when the inside of your 800-year-old church got decript, you would fix it up, using whatever the aesthetic at the time was. Eventually people felt uneasy with that, but that meant they just felt the interior (“left” = tried to meticulously maintain in situ as it inevitably aged) as it was after its last renovation.

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