In the Western world the period from the mid-eighteenth through the nineteenth century was a time of expanding historical consciousness, a period that saw the birth of modern historiography, a profusion of historical novels and paintings, and the widespread production of historical plays. Historical buildings, in themselves already of intense interest to people of the day, also found their way into the multiplyingcultural forms as concrete presences anchoring a novelist s, poet s, painter s, or, eventually, filmmaker s vision of the past. In recent years a number of blockbuster films have...