Fake heritage or faithful homage, why we reconstruct the past
In a modern world filled with digital manipulation, where truth is a matter of majorities, and where Fake News is the news, seeing is not necessarily believing. Thank goodness, then, for the honesty of buildings. What could be more truthful than the rough granite of a historic castle, the delicately carved marble of an ancient statue or the exposed steel of a much-loved landmark?
Perhaps not.
Venice’s watery profile is famous the world over, immortalised in oil by Canaletto and posted digitally on Instagram by millions of tourists every year. Thousands decide to sit down to an overpriced cappuccino in St Mark’s Square and drink in the view at the heart of one of the most magnificent Renaissance cities in existence: the ornate domes of the basilica, the gothic arcades of the Doge’s Palace and the russet-red exclamation mark of the bell tower.
But that bell tower is not the one Canaletto painted. It is a copy of the medieval campanile that collapsed in 1902, and dates to 1912. This is not a Venetian conspiracy: no one pretends the tower is anything but a 20th-century facsimile. It is an honest reconstruction and you can see it repeated the world over. The plush interior of the White House in Washington, DC might look like it dates from the early 19th century, but it is younger than both Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The building was completely gutted between 1948 and 1952, during the Truman administration, after it was deemed structurally unsafe. Just the shell was left. Some of Frankfurt’s “medieval” old town is less than two decades old, while Wuhan’s Yellow Crane Tower has been rebuilt at least seven times since the 1st century CE.
Why is this relevant? The 21st century has brought opportunities for heritage fakery to flourish. Advances in technology have made our ability to construct and replicate the past easier, and more difficult to detect. It is now possible to reconstruct a version of Tutankhamun’s tomb that is accurate down to the micron — but just because we can, does it mean we should?
The loss of significant historic buildings through war, fire or natural disaster — from the ancient city of Palmyra to Notre-Dame cathedral to the Glasgow School of Art — means the question is often in the news.
Reproduced heritage is, therefore, all around us. Welcome to a world of mock-ruins, sham castles and false Adams. Welcome to a mirage of walls, ceilings and entire towns, a place where buildings are but a single-course deep and ancient monuments antiqued to give them the patina of age.
Back in 2020 I wrote a book on the subject for Yale University Press and now I'm hosting a series on the same topic for Martin Randall Travel
The focus of this series is not to identify Whodunnit. The perpetrators of heritage fraud are often well known and some are so embarrassingly incompetent that it’s a wonder anyone could be so gullible as to believe them. Instead, I am more interested in a Whydoit. Why emulate or fake heritage? Why build a ruined castle, lay out a pretend town, or assemble our early ancestors from a jabberwocky of animal parts? What are the reasons for physically reconstructing or falsifying the past?
There is, as we shall discover, no simple, nor single answer. We might begin with clear-cut stories of charlatanism but we soon map more consequential reasons why humans replicate heritage, some noble, beautiful even, while others are driven by darker desires.
Join me every Wednesday from 6 Nov to 11 Dec at 5pm UK time. Book here:
Heritage Conservation | Heritage Tourism | Social & Community Engagement | Project Management | Placemaking & Destination Marketing | HKU MSc Architectural Conservation
2moVery insightful and interesting! Thank you for sharing.
Head of Building Conservation at English Heritage
2moVery interesting, so is the sense of place and people's perception and experiences more significant than the evidential values the facsimiles have replaced? (whether the average person can tell what is original or not)