Foundations of a modern discipline 29elder brother had explored to great depth in architecture.
Written in four volumes between 1688 and 1697, Charles
Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes en ce qui
regarde les arts et les sciences clearly aligned Rome and its
humanist apologists with a regressive attachment to ‘les
anciens’. Greece offered the counter-model of antiquity,
behind which fell (modern) France.
This ‘dispute’ followed an axis running between Paris and
Rome. On one side could be found the late-humanist appre-
ciation that antiquity’s shadow over contemporary civiliza-
tion lent life and culture meaning. Rome remained a
monolithic idea and, as a constellation of monuments and
ruins, it connected the present to a grand past. As the French
aristocracy would soon discover, all authority (including that
of Rome) had to prove itself consistently worthy. Parisian
thinkers presented Greece as a counterweight to Rome. It was
an older antiquity, a model with deeper roots from which
Rome itself had drawn, an advanced society upon which
rested 2,000 years of Western culture.
Expeditions to Greece became increasingly feasible from
the middle of the eighteenth century as the Ottoman Empire
began to stagnate and wane. The French archaeologist Julien-
David Le Roy and the British team of James ‘Athenian’ Stuart
and Nicholas Revett published measured drawings of the
Greek monuments based on extensive site studies: Le Roy’s
Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758),
and the Britons’ more expansive four- (later fi ve-) volume
study The Antiquities of Athens (1762–1816, 1830).^27 The
eighteenth century thus witnessed an explosion of knowledge
of the former Greek Empire that was called to rally behind
‘les modernes’.
Whereas a classical tradition had both risen and been
sustained for centuries alongside the architecture of ancient
Rome, the buildings and monuments of Greece had been a
largely inert presence in the history of architecture – known
in literature, but at a remove: an infl uential corpus known
through descriptions rather than by fi rst-hand experience.
The Prussian Johann Joachim Winckelmann described
Rome’s cultural splendour as owing a direct debt to the
greater magnifi cence of the former Greek Empire, publishing
Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in