Marco Folin. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Memory, architecture, imagination

Marco Folin
Dr Marco Folin is a Professor of History of Architecture at the University of Genoa. He has published several studies on Italian urban culture and the relationship between art and politics in the Renaissance. Among his main publications: Courts and courtly arts in Renaissance Italy. Art, culture and politics, 1395-1530 (ed.), ACC & Officina Libraria, Woodbridge 2010; A Renaissance Architecture of Power. Princely Palaces in Italian Quattrocento (ed., with S. Beltramo and F. Cantatore), Leiden, Brill (forthcoming, 2015).
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Memory, architecture, imagination
The presentation will focus on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; those mythic constructions located around the Eastern Mediterranean rim and listed by Hellenistic authors as emblems of an extraordinary architectural perfection. I will try to explain why this canon was established, in Ptolemaic Egypt (IV century BCE), and how it continued to be transmitted in Europe during the Middle Ages. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth century the first attempts to reconstruct the actual aspect of the original monuments started (which, except the pyramids, had all been destroyed): at first only on the basis of ancient descriptions. This would be supplemented later, thanks to ambitious archaeological campaigns which fuelled the imagination of several generations of European artists, writers and architects.