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In the long eighteenth century, Venice was memorialized in painted vedute, or viewpaintings, which became both a style and a subject matter, buoyed by the popularity of the tableaux as souvenirs for Grand Tour travellers. The veduta, along with its fantasy counterpart, the capriccio, re-created the view as well as the perceptual experience of the spectator, engaging the processes of visual apprehension involved in the incision of the image onto the retina. Vedutisti, or view-painters, would use the camera obscura to achieve verisimilitude in a painting, while enlarging known monuments so as to activate the sense memory of the viewer. The Venetian veduta, in cross-pollination with picturesque landscape painting, facilitated the transformation from nature to art within the eye, projecting the perspectivized two-dimensional visual field onto the three-dimensional visual world, making pictures of the world around us, transforming the way we view the landscape today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its outset in the 14th century, the poetics of ruin underwent a gradual mutation from nostalgic lamentation to romancing reverie. However, it was during the age of Enlightenment, and in the context of archaeological discoveries and picturesque voyages, that the perception of ruin acquired a more objective dimension. Nevertheless, the imaginative approach still persisted in the various representations of ruins, mainly through the medium of assemblage, displacement or distortion. These are, in fact, the strategies of capriccio, an artistic category which, although theoretically mistrusted, was quite in vogue during the age of Enlightenment. Even more interestingly, the caprice was not limited to painting, as it was introduced - in the form of the so-called fabrique - in the garden design as well, which, by that time, was largely considered as closely related to landscape painting itself. This text attempts to examine the ruin as an object/place meant to concentrate and display a complex set of meanings, pertaining to patrimony, history, time or destiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]