Renascent Nature in the Ruins: Joachim du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome

Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558) is traditionally read as a text about human-made culture: the grandeur and ruin of Rome. Nevertheless, through a moral condemnation of imperial Rome’s pride and its violent origins, Du Bellay describes the effects Rome’s fall had on the nonhuman landscape, thus inviting a re-evaluation of the relation between humans and nonhuman nature. His juxtaposition of the destructiveness of history’s blindness to nature with the landscape’s re-emergence from the ruined remains of Roman culture yields images that challenge us to rethink conservation in relation to a nature that changes over time, and which is inseparable from culture and its ruins, while at the same time redefining the traditional presupposition of what we categorize as ‘nature writing’.