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This paper considers the ruin as a special genre of representation involving special objects. The paper examines the temporality of the ruin, the mediality of the ruin – especially the relation between image and word – and the historical positioning of the idea of the ruin in relation to antiquity and the modern era. The author analyzes aspects of the basic visual and phenomenological “grammar” of the ruin and comments on some of the implications for our understanding of the representation of history and historical change. The ruin's “deep sense of voicefullness” (as Ruskin calls it) is conveyed precisely through the silence of the material remains (and hence also their quality as images). The ruin, the paper argues, is as much an ancient idea as it is a product of modernity, but it allows us, paradoxically, both to understand times other than our own and to maintain historical difference and to keep a distance from the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]