“A Place of very great Antiquity”

“A Place of very great Antiquity”

In this lecture, "A Place of very great Antiquity”: The First Western-European Encounter with the Buildings of Ancient Greece, Matthew Walker (QMUL and BSA Early Career Fellow) explores those moments when, around the turn of the eighteenth century, British and French travellers first began to record meaningful encounters with ancient Greek buildings. Visitors to Athens, Delos, Ephesus, and other locations in the ancient Greek World, wrote lengthy accounts of these sites that, though lacking in sophistication when compared with later writers on the subject, still reveal much about contemporary attitudes to ancient architecture in the period. These encounters, I argue, began the process of disentangling Greek architecture from the Roman, Vitruvian, tradition and paved the way for a more sophisticated understanding of the stylistic chronology of the built fabric of Antiquity.