Tintern Abbey and the Romance of the Ruin

Tintern Abbey, in Wales' Wye Valley, was founded by French Cistercian monks in 1131. Like Britain's other great abbeys, it fell victim to Henry VIII's campaign to dissolve Britain's powerful monasteries and sever ties with Rome. It was forced to close in 1536. Stripped of valuable materials, like lead from its roof, it fell into decay, forgotten and ignored for two hundred years.

Romantic revival

Interest in Tintern Abbey, especially its Gothic church, revived in the eighteenth century with the rise of the Romantic movement. Reacting to the times, especially the growth of industrialised society, the Romantics set store on nature, emotion and imagination. People with leisure and means escaped urban living in search of picturesque views and wild places.

The imposing remains and landscape of Tintern captured the imagination of hordes of visitors, including two of the most famous eighteenth century artists: the poet Wordsworth and the painter J.M.W. Turner. In his famous poem written during a visit to Tintern in 1798 Wordsworth described how, "'mid the din/Of towns and cities" memories of the sight brought him 'tranquil restoration'. The place evoked 'unremembered pleasures' that gave him 'life and food/For future years'. Turner's ethereal, almost eery, watercolour emphasises the scale and former grandeur of Tintern's Gothic church, since fallen and wreathed in ivy.

Sublime ruins

The Romantic aesthetic challenged Enlightenment thinking and the value placed on reason and science. The picturesque celebrated the untamed, the irregular and the sublime - defined by the philosopher Kant as that 'which is absolutely great'.

As in Wordsworth's poem, there was some nostalgia for a more authentic past. The Romantic movement fed the Gothic Revival: a new interest in medieval times, particularly twelfth to fifteenth century church architecture. The fascination with ruins of that period, buildings that were half-art, half-nature, likewise grew from concerns about the impact and ugliness of industrialization. As well as evoking the power of nature, ruins brought home "the transitory value of human possessions", as Sir Walter Scott wrote, and the ephemeral nature of human existence and endeavour.

The enduring charm of ruins

Though especially loved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the popularity of ruins dates back to the Renaissance, when artists and scholars rediscovered the glories of classical antiquity. Neoclassical architects built pseudo-Roman and Gothic ruins as landscape features for stately homes. The garden of Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, England, contains a 'fake' gothic ruin built by the legendary landscape artist, Capability Brown.

The romance of the ruin persists today. Many tourists visit monuments to drink in their atmosphere rather than to learn about history. Abbeys, castles and other relics of the past evoke nostalgia for times that seem simpler and more noble. At Tintern Abbey, the craftsmanship, in the tracery of the windows and the decorative stonework atop massive pillars, stands in stark contrast to modern architecture and mass-produced goods.

References

Louis Hawes. 1983. Constable's Hadleigh Castle and British Romantic Ruin Painting. The Art Bulletin, Vol. 65, No. 3