Reconnecting with Rome

Chapter 8 focuses on Jones’s presentation of cultural decline. While he explored this issue across all of his works, his approach to the possibility of renewal is demonstrated most explicitly in the painted inscriptions which unite diverse fragments of ancient literature into new visual forms. Examining Jones’s inscriptional practice provides a way in to his vision of cultural inheritance and the process by which he believed that Rome had passed on the classical and spiritual heritage to the modern world. This chapter contextualises Jones’s developing understanding of cultural dynamics through focusing on the dialogues he maintained with three of his friends: Christopher Dawson, Jackson Knight, and T. S. Eliot. Jones’s engagement with their visions of Rome—in particular their arguments for the inclusive power of Catholicism and for the importance of Virgil in the Western tradition—is examined through close readings of his inscriptions alongside evidence drawn from archival letters, essays, and marginalia.