With this volume—a type of guidebook—Gilbert Gorski and James Packer set out to treat the Roman Forum as an architectural entity, detailing the relationships between its many monuments and buildings. The result is a lavish volume, packed full of colour illustrations; it is also large, weighing almost three kilograms. Production quality is thus to the fore, even if it comes at a premium in terms of price.
Rather than a conventional archaeological guidebook, the focus is primarily on the provision of architectural reconstruction drawings. This format links to the tradition of architectural drawing and reconstruction that lay at the heart of the work of the Prix de Rome scholars from the seventeenth century onwards, and the production, in the nineteenth century, of the lavish volumes by Luigi Canina (e.g. Reference Canina1851). The latter's work included images, both of the standing remains and their architectural reconstruction. By the end of that century, however, the veracity of his reconstruction drawings had come into question. Murray's (Reference Murray1888) Handbook of Rome and its environs stated categorically: “the imaginative archaeology of Canina [. . .] can do nothing but mislead the student” (p. 21). In the process, the very practice of reconstruction itself had been brought into question; as Flint (Reference Flint2000: 2–3, 139–66) points out, the unseen proved to be problematic because you cannot know what you cannot see.
Although this book seeks to show the architectural relationships within the Forum, it only goes some way to addressing this issue. The authors define the Forum in terms of its component monuments, providing a section on each; for example, the various temples (including that of Vesta, and of Antoninus and Faustina), basilicas, arches, columns and minor monuments (e.g. the rostra). These sections form the core of the volume in Part 2; they are preceded in Part 1 with a discussion of the ‘Augustan reconstruction of the Forum (31 BCE–14 CE)’ and the chronology of the Forum ‘From Tiberius to Phocas (14–608 CE)’, and the volume concludes, in Part 3, with an overview of the Forum over time. The decision to treat the Roman Forum in isolation from the Forum of Julius Caesar and the Forum of Augustus is strange given that these latter spaces were physically joined to, and altered the very nature of, the original Forum. We do, however, find discussion of movement through the Roman Forum at the time of Augustus (pp. 336–47), and the book is at its most successful when, for example, highlighting changes in the experience of entering the Forum from the Vicus Tuscus at different dates (fig. 21.7 and fig. 21.8, p. 343).
The authors provide useful notes that refer the reader to the sources of information, ancient and modern, that underlie the new reconstruction drawings. There is, however, a sense of unease in viewing these images—will they be seen by the naïve as ‘real’? At the heart of this unease is the method of reconstruction itself. For example, the Parthian Arch is placed with certainty in the Forum; the authors’ reconstruction combines the evidence of extant foundation walls with representations of the arch as featured on coins. But with two different coin images to choose from, the authors have had to decide which they believe to be more correct. Moreover, some elements of the representations on the coins are also rejected by the authors as “an earlier design” for the monument, on the basis that “the columns could not have had the same proportions as the surviving capital and entablature fragments” (pp. 306–307). This particular example poses wider questions about the ways in which monuments were represented on coins and how these images may be used to reconstruct their actual appearance.
There are some niggling tendencies across the volume. For example, the authors reconstruct the thought processes of emperors: “Severus must have appreciated [his Arch's] innovative decoration” (p. 50). More significantly, our gaze into the recreated Forum is characterised by a seemingly neutral, or perhaps ‘objective’, viewpoint, and the scenes enlivened by the inclusion of rainbows, a snow-scene and lighting that looks ‘pretty’. Yet, the choice of viewpoint, along with decisions about lighting as a result of the time of day or season of the year, produces an inevitably subjective rendering of the Forum. Also inserted into the images are trees on the skyline, as well as the authors themselves, clad in togas in the Domus Tiberiana!
Issues of polychromy are hardly explored in favour of rendering the reconstructed buildings in white. The result verges on the picturesque of the nineteenth century, and the potency of a space—the Forum Romanum—designed to reveal the power of the state and its emperor is simply absent. A particular issue is that buildings from earlier periods do not appear to age or require restoration as time passes. Worryingly, when such restoration is acknowledged, as in the case of the Temple of Concordia on the basis on a third-century AD inscription (CIL VI 89), this later version of the temple is then teleported back in time to be included—along with its third-century AD inscription—in the reconstructions of the Forum dating to AD 14, 98 and 211.
The questions around the purpose of such reconstructions are as strong in the twenty-first century as they were 100 or more years ago. However diligent the process of reconstruction may be, the choices of style, content and composition determine the outcome. This book will be a source for the discussion of the value of reconstruction in archaeology and the problem of how to reveal the unseen or unknown—a question with which our predecessors grappled in response to the advent of photography. Such new technologies provide opportunities and may alter our perceptions of the unseen, but the nineteenth-century debate over reconstruction remains relevant to archaeology today. My understanding is that the images are not available in any open-access format, presumably in the hope of their monetisation. If your library can afford it, this book will provide your students with a set of illustrations for their critique and the discussion of the role of reconstruction in archaeology.
