The Hephaestion in Athens, from which I have just returned, reminded me of those classical buildings which lie silently in the back of Poussin paintings like Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. Gillian Rose once wrote that that painting depicted not simply an act of infinite love, but a finite act of political justice. She went on:
“The magnificent, gleaming, classical buildings, which frame and focus this political act, convey no malignant foreboding, but are perfect displays of the architectural orders: they do not and cannot in themselves stand for the unjust city or for intrinsically unjust law. On the contrary, they present the rational order which throws into relief the specific act of injustice perpetrated by the current representatives of the city – an act which takes place outside the boundary walls of the built city.
“The gathering of the ashes is a protest against arbitrary power; it is not a protest against power and law as such. To oppose anarchic, individual love or good to civil or public ill is to deny the third which gives meaning to both—this is the other meaning of the third city—the just city and just act, the just man and the just woman. In Poussin’s painting, this transcendent but mournable justice is configured, its absence given presence, in the architectural perspective which frames and focuses the enacted justice of the two women.
“To see the built forms themselves as ciphers of the unjust city has political consequences: it perpetuates endless dying and endless tyranny, and it ruins the possibility of political action.”
(Gillian Rose, ‘Athens and Jerusalem: a Tale of Three Cities’ in Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 25-6.)