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Avebury
Re: Alexander Keiller's Avebury/The Sanctuary
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VBB wrote:
What Ruskin said:

‘Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan. But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place.’


I’m not entirely sure what Ruskin has to do with this; he died 50 years before the concept of conservation (as we now understand it) was even around – and that didn’t really take shape until the publication of Plenderleith and Werner’s ground-breaking book The Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art: Treatment, Repair and Restoration in 1956. Ruskin was a Victorian art critic, not a restorer and, certainly not a conservator. Ruskin’s views that you site have little or no relevance to present day conservation/restoration practices – either in general or the re-erection of the Avebury Henge in particular.

Avebury is a special case, so special that I’m not even sure we can use the words conservation or restoration to describe what some of us would like to see take place there. Perhaps the one word that is the most applicable is re-erection. That is certainly not ‘setting up a Lie in their place’ but legitimately re-erecting the megaliths in their (as near as damn it) original position. I’m not saying it should be done in one go but I am saying (with the proper care and attention) that it is an objective worth striving for.

Thanks Mr S for initating this thread – it’s certainly brought the issue to the fore again.


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Littlestone
Posted by Littlestone
24th January 2013ce
16:07

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