Print, Peril, and Precariousness. Illustrating Ancient Greek Architecture in the Late Seventeenth Century.

This paper showcases Matthew's current research into the first British and French encounters with the ruins of the ancient Hellenic world. In it, he will show that, though crude by comparison with later images of the same subject matter, these prints and drawings reveal much about early modern attitudes to the legacy of the built fabric of ancient Greece. In particular, they communicate the impressiveness and scale of the ruins, the considerable hardship travellers endured to get to them, and the vulnerability of the sites themselves in the face of local vandalism, spoliation, and neglect.

Matthew Walker is Assistant Professor in British Architecture in the department of Art History at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Previously a Lecturer in Architectural History at Queen Mary University of London from 2018 to 2025, and prior to that, he taught in the architecture school of the University of New Mexico, and in the art history department of Oxford University. Matthew also held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. Matthew has a BA from Oxford and an MA and PhD from the University of York. His research concerns intellectual engagement with architectural design and practice in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain and his first book, Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. His current projects include a new book, The Greek Revival. A Prehistory, which concerns British and French engagement with ancient Greek and Eastern Mediterranean architecture in the long seventeenth century; a scholarly edition of David Loggan's celebrated Oxford and Cambridge Illustrata; and he is co-editing, with Professor Anthony Geraghty, the letters of Sir Christopher Wren.

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