The seventh chapter explores the developing aesthetic value now attached to Rome’s ruins, tracing for instance the way in which they move up scale from illustrations in books or in the background staffage of Renaissance painting to become the foregrounded subject matter in the paintings of the Baroque era and especially the eighteenth century. Engraved views, vedute and photographs provided tourists with inexpensive and portable souvenirs. The ruins have by now acquired full aesthetic validation as the principal subject matter of paintings by Claude or in the engravings of Piranesi. Thanks to the aesthetic appreciation of the ruins, images of them become common features of interior decoration.

Petrarch initiated ruin-tourism, and that flowered in the period of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Arguably, the ruins of Rome were the first to generate the production of a considerable variety of souvenirs, portable objects manufactured expressly for visitors to take away. Now a souvenir is only desirable if the object it represents is deemed attractive: the ruin-aesthetic was so well established by the time of the Grand Tour that ruins moved from the background of paintings into the foreground; they became the subject. In the engravings of Piranesi the ruins of Rome reached their peak of aesthetic appeal. The aesthetic validation of ruins is to the fore, since the English decorated the interiors of their houses with scenes of ruination. They also brought home architectural models of ruins in cork or marble for display; their porcelain and fans were decorated with ruin motifs.