III - Ruins: Temporality and Transformation

Summary

Abstract

“Ruins: Temporality and Transformation” examines the ways in which the ruins and derelict structures that are an important component in many of Ruisdael's landscape paintings suggest a key role of the man-made within the natural world. It examines just how ruins in landscapes convey a sense of temporality, which I call “biological time.” That is, each living thing follows its own course in time; a concept that appears in contemporaneous medical literature. This chapter analyzes the way ruinous buildings are set off by elements—vegetation, rushing water, clouded skies, and light effects—that make manifest different stages of transience and endurance. Ruisdael's views of Amsterdam from its scruffy outskirts provide another perspective on this theme.

Keywords: temporality, biological time, botany, Amsterdam

Things Fall Apart: Broken Bridges

Ruisdael's ruins, like his depictions of dunes and grainfields, provide an oblique view of the human presence within nature. Though on occasion his works include the sorts of monumental sites and picturesque structures that appear in pictures by other artists, unlike them he always subordinates the works of man within the natural environment. Nonetheless, traces of human existence in these landscapes are a reminder that people as well as non-human nature are part of a wider ecology of time as well as place. Two examples from the 1646 Dresden sketchbook, the Farmstead with the Ruins of Brederode (figure 50) and the High Stone Footbridge (figure 51), treat ruins both as subsumed in a wider landscape and as incidental to everyday life.1 In Ruisdael's drawing, Brederode, surrounded by the out-buildings of a farm, is sketched in lightly. The dilapidated castle provides a background to two workmen who concentrate on the activity at hand; the grindstone in the foreground is given more definition than the monument. Likewise, in the drawing of the High

Stone Footbridge, the bridge is placed aslant and though somewhat derelict is clearly still in use. In both drawings the black chalk is handled with delicacy, each entity—sky, brush, trees, water, and the man-made structure—is distinguished by tone and texture but (with the slight exception of the workmen) no one element stands out. Both drawings introduce motifs—a derelict bridge and sluices as well as a ruinous monument—that continue as important motifs in Ruisdael's work. They also exhibit his somewhat idiosyncratic approach marked by indirection and contextualization.