Piet De Jong’s Architecture

“The Art of Antiquity: Piet de Jong and the Athenian Agora” by John K. Papadopoulos

I promised a review of this substantial book (330 pages). I’m going to do it in a number of parts, firstly by looking at how De Jong’s architectural reconstructions are shown.

The subject of reconstruction and its role in archaeology is a fascinating one to me. I grew up with a view of Roman and Medieval Britain that was heavily dependent on the pictures drawn by Alan Sorrel for the guide books at sites managed by the (then) Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in the 1960’s. Working closely with archaeologists, Sorrel managed to construct a picture of the past that was convincing – at least for a schoolboy!

Alan Sorrel’s 1937 reconstruction of the Roman city of Caerwent (Venta Silurum)

More recently I was lucky enough to take a class with Dr. Anna Simandiraki-Grimshaw who opened up for me the extent to which our understanding of the past comes from reconstructions rather than from the evidence itself.

Even the act of naming a space in an excavated building gives it a (perhaps) spurious existence. The “Queen’s Megaron” at Knossos is a good example, becoming at once populated with high-elite females on (as far as can be seen) the basis only of Evans’s naming. De Jong’s reconstruction drawing (Art of Antiquity, p3) gives presence to that idea in the Herakleion Museum. So, to understand our view of the past it is helpful to look at re-constructions as works of art in their own right.

The Art of Antiquity helps in this respect with the work of De Jong, presenting 8 of his architectural reconstructions as part of the book. There are examples from Knossos, Pylos and Mycenae (a small, monochrome reconstruction of Grave Circle A) as well as from the Athenian Agora.

The reconstructions (almost all water colours) share a common pallet of muted, sandy, tones. They are characterised by De Jong’s simple lines and the geometric shapes and flat surfaces that are inevitable in an architecture that has no knowledge of arches. There are usually a few figures that give scale to the space portrayed but rarely is there any additional “dressing” in the form of other artefacts.

Piet De Jong’s reconstruction of the Queen’s Megaron at Knossos.

De Jong’s pictures also seem to have a great sense of the fall of light and shade. From my perspective they leave more open to the viewer than the works of others like Emile Gileron, fils, or his successors and are thus more successful by conveying a sense of the space while avoiding the risk of appearing more “correct” than they can possibly be.

Emile Giliéron’s imagining of the same space for Evans.

Of course, the hand of the artist intrudes into these reconstructions. The discarded glove in the lower picture has echoes of works by André de Chirico who studied under Emile Giliéron’s father and to me the artefacts and the curiously flat figures fit uncomfortably in the space.

Later reconstructions (like the one below) feed more on Giliéron’s work, than De Jong’s. I am not sure that providing a greater population makes the space seem any more “real”, especially since (in this example) it projects into everyday life (if that’s how we can characterise what went on at Knossos) a fashion style that was probably only used for ceremonial or ritual circumstances.

This is by-the-by, however, although it does serve to demonstrate De Jong’s restrained style in relation to others, a style which I feel is more successful in relation to communicating the nature of architectural space in archaeological sites.