Sublime

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.

From there he went to Venice, where he offered military advice on defending against a threatened Turkish invasion. Always interested in the flow of water and its military uses, he devised a mobile wooden lock that he believed could allow the Isonzo River to flood a valley that would be used by any invaders.1 Like many of his visionary schemes, it w

In the second century CE, the ‘villa’ (as it is now euphemistically known) that Hadrian built at Tivoli, a few miles from Rome, was bigger than the town of Pompeii itself. And there he re-created for himself a miniature Roman Empire, with replicas of the greatest imperial monuments and treasures – from Egyptian waterways to the famous temple of Aph