Axis 9 of twelve · APH
Will the work last, and what evidence is there already? Demonstrated survival outranks predicted survival. The axis penalises a surface fixed to its moment — a production era, a topical satire, a technology — and rewards what has already outlived the conditions that produced it.
Gated at 8.5. Like Agon it requires elapsed time, which no living work possesses.
1754 works · summit gate · the rubric
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over more than two and a half millennia, through manuscript and papyrus traditions in which the Iliad is the most copied Greek literary text. The surface is fixed to a world as gone as any on the bench: the boar’s-tusk helmet (10.261–265), wine bought with captives (7.475), a host listed town by town (II), women given as prizes. The poem has outlived all of it and is read now for the shape it gave them. The topical surface still costs something: the Catalogue needs a map and a commentary. A translator’s Jove and Minerva also need a gloss, but the Greek has Zeus and Athena, and the translator’s convention is not charged to the poem.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over two thousand years, and it was continuous: three capital manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the poem never out of the schools. The surface is fixed to its moment in places: the regatta’s crews named as ancestors of Roman families (5.117–123), Catiline and Cato on the shield (8.668–670), Actium and the triple triumph of 29 BC (8.675–728), the long lament for Marcellus, dead in 23 BC (6.860–886). Those passages now need notes. But the poem has outlived the Rome it was made to celebrate, and the surface is not needed to follow it; the lament for a dead young man has outlasted its occasion and is read for itself. The topical surface is heavier than Homer’s; the survival is better attested and was never broken.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over more than two thousand years of continuous transmission, reading and translation; the codex in hand was copied in 1008. Some of the surface is tied to its moment: wealth counted in camels and she asses (1:3), an earth on pillars (9:6), treasuries of snow (38:22), a court of heaven. None of it is an obstacle now. The real cost lies in the text itself. Many of its rare words have lost a sure sense, and the third cycle reads as damaged, with Bildad given five verses and Zophar none. That is a perishing of the original, not a dated surface, and it costs the axis a step.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries: the text was copied through antiquity and Byzantium, printed in the Aldine Sophocles of 1502, and played again from the production that opened the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza in 1585. Part of the surface is fixed to its world: Delphi, the “central shrine of the earth” (480), Abae and Olympia (899–900), the lustral rite of the proclamation (240), and the law of pollution on which the plot turns. The play explains each as it goes, and none is needed to follow it. What has perished is part of the work itself. The music and dance of the odes are lost, the lyrics survive as words only, and the text has a gap at 214. That loss holds it a step from the top.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-seven centuries: papyri, Byzantine manuscripts, the first printing at Florence in 1488, and continuous translation into every major language. The surface is less fixed to its moment than that of most long works of its age: no contemporary is named, and the world is a household, a sea and a handful of islands. What is fixed is the social order. Telemachus sends his mother back to her loom: speech is for men, and the authority in the house is his (I.356–359). The servants are property, and justice is the master’s. The poem has outlived these conditions and is read partly against them. That is survival, but the surface still costs a step.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over four centuries: the play has held the stage continuously apart from the closure of 1642–60, and no rewriting displaced it. The surface is Elizabethan in places: the boy players, “an aery of children, little eyases” (2.2), the theatre quarrel of 1600–01; Wittenberg, and a Ghost from purgatory; the Danish drinking (1.4); the wager, “he hath laid on twelve for nine” (5.2); Osric’s jargon. None of it is needed to follow the play. The cost has been the stage’s long habit of cutting it, Fortinbras most often, and the text has survived that. The depth pays nothing for its moment; the slightly heavier topical surface costs a step.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text is whole and has been read without a break for well over two thousand years; the fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls, far older than the medieval codices, show it stable, and the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch differ from the Masoretic text chiefly in the ages of the patriarchs in chapters 5 and 11 and in small readings. Presence: read through in the synagogue every year in twelve weekly portions, from Bereshit to Vayechi; translated into more languages than any other book; outliving the kingdoms and the temple that produced it. Fabric: nothing of the book is lost. The step for millennia, whole and read without break, runs to 9.7, and the top of it is taken for a presence as wide as any book’s and continuous.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: sphere, dome, single opening and porch on its axis are legible from the door as built, and have outlived the empire, the cult and the city that made them. The use is continuous, a church since 609, entered daily, its structure almost unchanged; that use is why it stood when nearly all of Rome’s great buildings did not. The dome is the makers’, and has stood some nineteen centuries through earthquake, flood, sack and neglect. The losses are charged: the gilded bronze roof tiles, the porch bronze taken in the 1620s, the first attic, remade in 1747, the sculpture, the facing, the forecourt, a heavily restored floor. They alone hold it off the top.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: seven centuries, and more than eight hundred manuscripts. The surface is as fixed to its moment as any: Black and White factions, the papacy of 1300, a jubilee crowd on a Roman bridge (Inf. XVIII), Sienese spendthrifts, the sectarian mutilations of Inf. XXVIII, Florentine families who need a note (Par. XVI). The poem has outlived all of it, and outlived its cosmos too: the Ptolemaic spheres and the scholastic soul are gone, and it is read now for the shape it gave them. The topical surface still costs something. Many names need annotation, and Longfellow’s own edition carried a full apparatus of notes. Its depth pays nothing for that; its survival pays a step.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over four centuries, in two early printings and continuous editing since 1709. The surface is Jacobean in places: Gloucester’s “late eclipses in the sun and moon” (1.2), Edgar’s devils out of Harsnett’s pamphlet of 1603 on exorcism, the Fool’s “If I had a monopoly out” (1.4), a divided Britain staged before the king who had just united the crowns. None of it is needed to follow the play. The cost lies elsewhere: for about a century and a half the play survived in print while the stage played Tate, and some of the Fool’s jokes now need notes. The depth pays nothing for its moment; the eclipse costs a step.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1605, translated across the world, and its images, the windmills and the knight and squire in silhouette, known to people who have never read it. The surface is fixed to 1580–1615 as hard as any: romances almost no reader now knows; the Santa Hermandad, the galleys and their cant, Lepanto and the Goleta; the Avellaneda quarrel, the comedia polemic and the arbitristas; the Morisco expulsion with its official named; Old Christian boasts; a bodily farce whose cruelty Nabokov charged. Much needs annotation, and some of it now repels. But the book has outlived its own target. It was written against a genre that is dead, and it is read.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1868–69, translated into every major language, adapted by every generation since. It has outlived the empire, the serfdom, the Soviet state and the historiography it was written against. Its scenes need no knowledge of 1812: the oak, Natasha’s dance, Petya’s raisins, the old countess, for whom what was once an aim is “merely a pretext” (Ep. I.XII). The surface fixed to its moment is real, and it is the essays’ surface: Buckle, Gervinus and Schlosser, the quarrel over Shevardino, national types and claims about women, and a French whose social meaning a modern reader no longer hears. That surface holds the axis a step from the top; the fiction carries almost none of it.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form is whole and legible: dome, pendentives and cascade, procession under heaven. It survived the fall of its first dome, carries the second, and outlived its conditions as a model, answered by the mosques of its own city. The use has not lapsed in 1,489 years: cathedral, Latin cathedral, mosque, museum, mosque again, each new power adopting it rather than destroying it. The charge falls on the fabric. The first dome fell twenty-one years after the dedication and parts of its successor twice more; the dome is a later hand’s, the exterior leans on later buttresses, and the atrium, the silver and most of the gold are lost. It stands, in an earthquake zone, by intervention.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over two thousand years. The fifteen books survive complete; no part that carried meaning is lost, and the doubted lines are the small change of a long transmission. The poem has been read in schools and copied without break from antiquity to now, and its prophecy, ore legar populi (15.878), “So farre shall all folke reade this woork” in Golding’s English (Golding XV.995), has been fulfilled. The surface fixed to its moment is the Augustan close (15.745 to 870), with its dynastic and civil-war catalogue (15.822 to 831) and its prayer that Augustus’ ascent to heaven come late (15.868 to 870), which now needs a gloss. That close holds it a step below the summit.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: plan, three storeys, flyers, portals and the glazed wall stand as built, and the design has outlived the cult and the world that produced it, copied and answered at Reims, Amiens and after. The use is unbroken since the canons took the choir in 1221: a cathedral, a see and a pilgrimage church still. The fabric is nearly whole: structure, sculpture and most of the medieval glass, which elsewhere was broken, sold or replaced, came through the Revolution, the fire of 1836 and two World Wars. Charged, lightly where form and use survive: the rood screen taken down when the choir was remodelled, the timber roof, lost column-figures, weathered sculpture, and since 2009 an interior washed and painted with false joints, a disputed judgment of the original finish.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole. The score survives as published, with the autograph, and its one textual question, the scherzo’s repeat, is a choice between two complete versions, not a loss. Presence: continuous since 1808 and the widest the concert repertory has, in the core of every symphony orchestra’s repertory for two centuries, among the most recorded orchestral works, and its opening known to people who have never heard a concert. Fabric: the instruments have changed, to valve horns, modern timpani and strings, and the work has needed no retouching beyond the familiar reassignment of one horn call. Held below the ceiling because its survival, though continuous, is two centuries, not millennia.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is weighed as form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible — octagon, ribs, pointed profile, lantern — and has outlived the commune that produced it, as the model the Western dome copied and answered. The use is unbroken: the dome has covered the cathedral’s sanctuary since 1436 and is entered daily. The fabric is nearly all the makers’, and its surface of brick, tile and marble is fixed to no moment. Against it: cracks run through the webs, whether the dome’s own or from the drum and the piers is still asked, and the structure must be watched; and the lantern, marble and tile have needed repair. Neither touches the form, and the dome has stood through both.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Millennia, and the text whole and read without break. Form: the epic’s defining form survives entire, in a Northern and a Southern recension and many scripts, without the losses that charge a fragmentary or recovered text. Its fluidity is not loss: the layers are the work, and the Critical Edition chooses among living texts rather than recovering a lost one. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind, in recitation, temple and household reading, Kathakali, terukkūttu and wayang, vernacular retelling and school, and in the television serial of 1988 to 1990, presence and not proof. Fabric: palm-leaf and paper manuscripts are late and perishable, made good by number. Held at the middle of the range for a text of millennia read without break, below its top, because no single text ever stood still.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: axis, moat, three nested enclosures and quincunx are as legible from the causeway as when finished, and the design has outlived the state and the religion that produced it and stands on the national flag. The use is unbroken: entered for worship, Hindu and then Buddhist, for nearly nine centuries, the one great temple of Angkor never abandoned. Only the procession panel is fixed to its moment, and it has outlived its court. Charged: the lost image of Vishnu, the paint and gilding, looted statuary; collapses and rebuilding since 1908, a disputed chemical cleaning, bullet scars, lichen, bats and crowds. The lost image, the reason for the sanctuary at the summit, holds it below the top.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Form first: the text survives whole. The seven books and the story are intact, and nothing of what made the work is lost. The transmission is fluid, in recensions that differ widely in wording and content, but the variation is growth and regional dress, not loss, and the core is reconstructed with confidence; the charge on form is nil. Presence: read, recited, taught and translated without break for something like two millennia, and still recited in temples and homes; presence of that width earns its tenth, though much of it passes through the later vernacular versions. Fabric: the manuscripts are late, as for every early Indian text, the smallest charge. Millennia, the text whole and read without break: 9.6.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole and legible: axis, garden geometry, plinth, minarets, mosque, jawab and gateway stand in place, and have outlived the court that made them as a model answered from Aurangabad to Calcutta. The use survives: the tomb is still entered and visited, and it has outlived the eschatology it states, bearing without strain the reading of a monument to love. Nearly all the fabric survives. The losses are charged: the silver doors, stones prised from the inlay, the gold finial replaced by a gilt copy, the chamber’s furnishings; the Mughal planting replaced by British-period lawns and avenues; the marble yellowed, stained and cleaned again and again; and a shrinking river. None of them touches the form.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric, and all three are strong. The form survives entire, in Bach’s autograph fair copy, with the earlier versions of the preludes as evidence of its making. Presence is continuous, and unusually so for a work of 1722: while most of Bach’s music fell from use after 1750, this book was copied, taught and played without a break, by his pupils, in the circles of Mozart and Beethoven, and in print from 1801, before the revival of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. It has outlived its instrument without retouching. The surface fixed to its moment is small: a tuning question and some dance types. Charged lightly because the text comes down in more than one state.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated by three and a half centuries of reprinting, from the 1688 subscription folio onward. The poem has outlived the cosmos it hedged on: Raphael leaves the heavens open, “What if the sun / Be center to the world” (VIII.122–123), and the poem names Galileo (V.262). An undecided frame ages better than a decided one. The surface fixed to its moment still costs: the anti-papal Paradise of Fools, with its “Cowls, hoods, and habits” (III.490); the Restoration “sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine” (I.501–502); more than five hundred proper names, most of which now need a note; a doctrine of gender that dates the poem. That annotated surface pays a step.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over five centuries: through candle and brazier soot, water through the roof, structural cracks, and a cleaning some argued removed the painter’s final layer. The surface is nearly free of its moment. The della Rovere oak leaves and acorns in the ignudi’s garlands are its one topical signature, and they read as foliage. For most viewers it has outlived its theology: they come for the bodies. What holds it a step below is physical. Fresco is a mortal surface; the ceiling survives under climate control against crowds of thousands a day, and the surface seen is partly a restorer’s judgment. Read as image rather than plaster, it is as secure as any work in any medium.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over some two and a half millennia, and the trilogy has been played in every recent decade. Part of its surface is fixed to 458: the Argive alliance, the quarrel over the Areopagus, Athenian self-praise in the closing blessings. The trilogy has outlived all of that, and its gods, and the court it celebrates. Its survival was narrow. The satyr play that completed the set, Proteus, is lost, and the opening of the second play is damaged, with gaps in its first ten lines. The axis credits survival, not the risk of it. The topical surface still costs something. The trilogy’s depth pays nothing for it; its survival pays a step.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: in the repertory since its first decade, at Bayreuth since 1886 and at every major house, recorded complete since the 1930s. It has outlived its first metaphysics, Nietzsche’s recantation, modernism’s rejection of Wagner, the Nazi use of Bayreuth and the post-war stage’s stripping of its romanticism; it absorbed Wieland Wagner’s bare stage and Ponnelle’s inversion without loss. The surface fixed to its moment: the Schopenhauerian vocabulary of the Day and Night dispute; the archaising diction of the poem; a vocal demand, above all for Tristan, that each age meets rarely; and a “Liebestod” partly detached from the whole as a concert piece. 160 years, continuous, with a casting cost that is real.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty years, with nothing discounted for age. The text survives whole, as the author revised it for the separate edition of 1867. It has never been out of print or out of attention: taught across the world, translated into English many times, and staged and filmed again and again. The surface is partly fixed to its moment. The radical debates of the 1860s, the communes and the new people satirised in Lebeziatnikov (V.1), need notes. The core does not: a poor student, a theory and an axe. What holds the axis a step from the top is that topical surface alone.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: two centuries of continuous performance worldwide, a bicentenary widely marked in 2024, and an autograph on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register since 2001. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The Turkish march belongs to Vienna’s fashion for Janissary music, and the poem’s God is “ein lieber Vater” (“a loving Father”) above the starry canopy; both are now heard as period colour. The cost particular to this work is wear from use. It was conducted for the eve of Hitler’s birthday in 1942, its tune became Rhodesia’s anthem in 1974, and ceremony has worn it until it can sound like one. It has outlived each use. Two centuries are not seven.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
About four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives in one witness, the Folio of 1623, probably a theatrical text and possibly shortened, with the Hecate material and the songs added by another hand. The defining form is legible whole, but a text that may not be all that was first played costs about a tenth. Presence has not broken: in print since 1623, through the later Folios and every collected edition since; on the stage since the Restoration; taught throughout the English-speaking world, translated into most written languages, and remade in opera and film. It has outlived its conditions. The Stuart compliment, Banquo as the ancestor of the king, and the king’s own Daemonologie (1597) behind the witches are history now, and the play is not read for them. The widest presence carries it to the upper end of what four centuries can show; the single, probably adapted witness holds it a step below the top.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole, all ten books, with no loss of parts, in a manuscript tradition that is Byzantine but sound. Presence: read without a break in Greek through late antiquity and Byzantium, commented on by Proclus, carried into Arabic political thought; but absent from the Latin Middle Ages for about a millennium, until the translations of the fifteenth century. Since then it has been printed, translated and taught without a break. Its surface is fixed to its moment, the Greek city, slavery taken for granted, and that has not decayed its reading. Set at the foot of the band for a text whole and read over millennia, for the Latin West’s long gap in presence, though not in the text.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Survival on the step: the thirteen books survive whole, in Augustine’s own divisions, with the author’s later account of the work in the Retractationes (II.6). Presence is unbroken: read since it was written, in the monasteries, the schools, the Reformation on both sides and the modern university; translated into the major written languages and many times into English alone, by Pusey (1838), Pine-Coffin, Chadwick, Boulding, Wills and Ruden. It has outlived its conditions: the Manichees, the court at Milan and the schools of rhetoric are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on a person. Charged: its widest presence is partly a Christian and an academic one, and the last three books are read far less than the first nine. Held below the oldest works on the step, which are older and still more widely held.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole, every scene and ode in place. The play was among the seven of Sophocles kept for reading in later antiquity and is copied in the tenth-century Laurentian manuscript, but it stood outside the Byzantine school selection of three, so its thread through Byzantium is thinner. From the Aldine of 1502 it has been printed, taught and translated without a break, and since 1800 its presence has been as wide as any ancient play’s, on the stage of every continent and in political use wherever a state forbids mourning. What has perished is part of the work itself: the music and dance of the odes, lost as for all Greek tragedy. Some lines are suspected. The lost music and the thinner Byzantine thread hold it below the highest.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1828, recorded for a century, central to the recital repertory, in a language most of its audiences do not speak. One song became a folk song and outlived its author’s name. The surface fixed to its moment is small and reads as the work’s world, not a date on it: a posthorn, a weathervane, a hurdy-gurdy, a small town of the 1820s. The piano has changed since 1827 and the work has not needed retouching. The cost is in the early record: published in two parts, the cycle was heard for decades mostly in extracts, and complete performances became usual only late in the century, so its whole public life waited a generation. Level with Op. 131, whose early history is similar.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as the Song fixed it, some 1,400 poems with ordinary variants; the loss is of the early work, little of which can be dated before his thirties, and some poems are doubtful. That touches the edge of the body, not what makes it. The presence is unbroken since the ninth century: for a thousand years a core text of Chinese education, still memorised by schoolchildren, translated into the languages of East Asia and, from the nineteenth century, of Europe. The lag of some decades before his standing rose is not long neglect. The span is some twelve and a half centuries, the text whole and read without break; the early loss and the lag hold it at the foot of that span.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated on form, presence and fabric. The score survives whole and authoritative in Beethoven’s text, with no lost or doubtful movement. It has been in the concert repertory since 1805, in every orchestra’s, and has been recorded from the early electrical era in many dozens of versions; its march is played at state funerals and memorials. The surface fixed to its moment is Napoleon, and the crossing-out has turned that date into part of the work’s meaning rather than a stain on it. Two centuries, a text whole and performed, and a presence as wide as any concert work’s earn the tenth above the usual centre that wide presence may earn. No more: two centuries do not outscore millennia.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: the opera is a staple of every major house, it is still played in the Prague theatre where it opened, and its autograph survives. It has outlived each reading of it and absorbed opposite ones. Some of its surface is fixed to its moment. The supper quotes hits of the 1780s, Una cosa rara and Fra i due litiganti, whose jokes now need notes; only the Figaro tune still lands. The secco recitative and harpsichord continuo, the class conventions of the dramma giocoso, and a seducer’s comedy now often read as assault and staged against itself all date it. So does a version question that has never been closed.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over a thousand years. The poem has been copied, recited and painted continuously since the eleventh century, across changes of dynasty and faith; it is readable to a modern Persian speaker as few texts of its age are in their own languages; and it has outlived the sultan it praises. Two costs remain. The surface is fixed in places to its moment: the praise of Mahmud, the court counsel of the Sasanian reigns, the long genealogies. And the text did not survive whole: the oldest manuscripts are two centuries late, the vulgate is swollen, and some of the most quoted couplets are doubted. That cost is the copyists’, charged here, lightly, where survival of the text is the question.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence. The text survives whole, in the Byzantine manuscripts of the Plato corpus, the oldest of AD 895, with no lacuna that touches its structure; nothing is charged to form. It was copied and read in Greek without break from Plato’s school through the Neoplatonists to Byzantium and after. In the Latin West it was unknown through the Middle Ages and returned with Ficino’s Latin translation, printed in 1484. It is now among the most widely read and taught works of ancient philosophy, translated into every major language. The Western gap of about nine centuries is real, but the text was never lost. Set at the foot of the band for a text whole over millennia, for that gap and for a presence led more by philosophy than by the widest reading.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Form, use and fabric weighed together, without an age discount. The form survives entire: four planes to a point at 14:11 on 440 cubits, the interior standing as built; it has outlived the dynasty, the cult, the language and the script, and was copied in its own tradition for two thousand years. Use is lost in kind: the burial robbed at an unknown date, the cult lapsed; in another purpose it is continuous, visited since Herodotus and entered daily. The fabric is charged: the casing gone and with it the face, some 5 per cent of the volume and all of the finish; the tunnel, the blasting, soot and graffiti. The structure is the makers’ and stands without a prop. Held off the top by the lost use and the lost face.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence. The Greek survives entire in the manuscript tradition of Plato, its form fully legible; no part that carried meaning is lost, and nothing is charged to form. It was read through antiquity and the Byzantine centuries without a break, commented on by the Neoplatonists, put into Latin in the twelfth century and again by Ficino, and since the Renaissance read, taught and translated continuously, a staple of the teaching of philosophy and of Greek in many languages. Charged lightly: in the Latin West it was little read between late antiquity and the twelfth century, and closely read only from the fifteenth, which sets it at the middle of the band for millennia rather than the top. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the Athenian prison and the Delian ship read as setting, not as dated matter.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over two thousand years, with the text whole. The poem comes down entire in the late antique capital manuscripts of Virgil, with Servius’ commentary beside it, and has been copied, taught and read in every century since. The form is wholly legible; nothing of the work is lost, and the one textual question of weight, the story that the end of the fourth book once held something else, does not touch the poem as it stands. Its presence has been continuous: read in schools and by poets, translated many times into the major European languages, revived as a living mode in the eighteenth century and again in recent versions. It stands at the foot of the band for a text whole over millennia because that presence has rested more on the school and the academy than Homer’s or Dante’s.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1827, recorded by every major quartet of the recording era, and set at the summit of the chamber repertory. The surface fixed to its moment is almost nil. There is no programme, no topical march, no text to date and no instrument now obsolete, and unlike the Ninth it has not been worn by ceremonial use. The cost is in the early record. Published after its composer’s death, for a generation or more it lived in print and in a small circle, and its public life came later. A work that had to wait for its listeners has shown its survival, but over a shorter public span than its date suggests.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, about 1,419 lines, carried among the select plays of the Byzantine manuscripts with scholia, with no scene lost. The charges are interpolation: doubled passages in the monologue, actors’ additions, and closing lines shared with other plays, all of which an editor can isolate and which take little from the work. Presence: adapted continuously in antiquity, read in the Greek East through Byzantium, printed in the first edition of Euripides at Florence in the 1490s, and staged and taught without break in modern times. The Latin West read the figure through Seneca rather than the Greek for most of the Middle Ages, the one charge on presence. Millennia, a whole text, and no break: 9.5, the foot of the band.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Millennia, with the text whole and read without a break: the step for such survival runs from 9.5 to 9.7. Presence is the widest there is: read aloud weekly for nineteen centuries, in every language, taught and translated without interruption. Form is legible and complete, with an early and large manuscript witness in the papyrus P46 and continuous copying since. The charge on form is small and real: two of the seven are widely held to be composite, and the edges of the text are disputed, Romans 16 perhaps having travelled separately and two passages argued to be later insertions (1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35; 1 Thessalonians 2:14 to 16). Presence would carry the top of the step; form keeps it at the foot.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival across some two and a half millennia, with the text whole and read without a break. Form: the play survives entire, with the ordinary corruptions of a tragic text and no part lost within it. The loss of the companion plays is charged only so far as this play was made to lean on them; it stands, and is read and performed, as a whole, and the charge sets it at the lower edge of the band rather than below it. Presence: continuous. It was one of the three plays of Aeschylus chosen for reading in the Byzantine schools, which is why it survives in many manuscripts, the Medicean codex among them; it has been translated, taught and staged since the Renaissance, and in the nineteenth century it was among the most read Greek plays in Europe. The contested attribution is no charge on survival: the text survived under the name.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, over some twenty-four centuries. The text survives whole, transmitted in the Plato corpus through late antiquity and Byzantium in medieval manuscripts, and was printed in the Aldine Plato of 1513 and in Stephanus’ edition of 1578, whose pages give its references; nothing is charged to form. Presence is of the widest kind: read in Greek without a break in the East, its close put into Latin by Cicero, and since the Renaissance read, translated and cited without interruption; it is now among the most taught texts of ancient prose and the usual first reading in philosophy across much of the world. Its surface is fixed to Athenian procedure, the counter-penalty, the water clock, the minae, and that is history: the work is read for what it pressed on. What sets it at the lower part of the figure for a text read whole for millennia is the Latin West, where it went unread for most of the Middle Ages, when only the Timaeus and, late, the Meno and Phaedo were in Latin, until Ficino’s translation of the whole corpus, printed in 1484. The text was never lost and lived in Greek throughout.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Some twenty-four centuries, the text whole and read without a break. Hippolytus is among the ten plays of the select edition transmitted with scholia through Byzantium, so it was read and taught continuously, never lost and recovered. The form is fully legible; the losses are of the music and the dance, as for all Greek drama, and a few lines are suspected, as for every tragedy, none of them charged. Its presence is wide and kept twice: printed and taught, translated into every major European language, staged through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and present a second time in Racine’s version. It takes the foot of the range a text so whole and so continuously read commands, because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of the most famous Greek tragedies, and outside the teaching of Greek it is read more in the academy than in common reading.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated, and the form is whole: the autograph, Handel’s conducting score and the Foundling Hospital parts survive, and every number is known in his own versions. Presence has been continuous for more than two and a half centuries, and the work is performed each year on every continent where choirs sing. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the da capo convention dates, and Part III’s theology is a Georgian Anglican argument. The larger cost is wear. The Christmas sing-along, the standing for the “Hallelujah”, the massed festivals and the reorchestrations made it a ritual object, heard as an occasion rather than as a work. The additions of other hands, Mozart’s, Prout’s and the festival scorings, never displaced Handel’s score, and the period-instrument performances restored it.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole. It came down in the medieval selection of seven plays, with the tenth-century Laurentian manuscript (Laur. 32.9) as the principal witness, and was first printed by Aldus in 1502; it has been edited, translated and taught since, and is staged in the modern repertory. Its lyrics are corrupt in places, as every tragedy’s are, but its form is complete. Charged against it: its presence has been narrower than that of its two Theban companions. It stood outside the Byzantine school selection of Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus and was copied less; it is performed less; and it is read more often as the third of the Theban plays than for itself. That bears on presence, not on form or fabric, and the text is neither fragmentary nor long unread.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is of millennia, and the text is whole. All ten poems come down in the order Virgil set, in the late antique capital manuscripts, the Mediceus, the Palatinus and the Romanus, with Servius’s full commentary behind them and only small textual doubts, the best known a single line in the eighth poem. Presence has been continuous: a school text in antiquity, read through the Middle Ages, in every Renaissance schoolroom, translated into every European language and still taught. The form is fully legible, and nothing in the fabric is charged. It stands at the foot of the band for a text whole and read without break because the book is now read mainly by students of Latin and of the pastoral, and the mode it founded has passed from living use.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival over a millennium and a quarter, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: read without break for twelve and a half centuries, in anthologies of his own lifetime, in the Song editions, in the Tang shi sanbai shou (1763) and in every school primer since. Presence: the widest of any Chinese poet. “Quiet Night Thought” is learned by nearly every Chinese child, and the poems are recited, set, inscribed and translated into the major languages. The charge is on form. The body as it stands is the remnant of a larger one, much of it lost in the rebellion by Li Yangbing’s account; attribution is uncertain at the margins; and the received texts of some of the most famous poems are later revisions, “Quiet Night Thought” among them. What survives survives whole and in use. Set at the foot of the millennia band, the form charged a little for loss and variance.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over millennia, and the text survives whole and read without a break. It was one of the three plays of Sophocles read in the Byzantine schools, with Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus, and so it comes down in a large manuscript tradition with its scholia; the text is sound apart from ordinary local corruption, with no substantial lacuna and no added ending of consequence. The form is whole, with no lost part that carried meaning. Its presence has been continuous in reading and teaching since antiquity. Charged against it: on the modern stage it was rarer than Oedipus Tyrannus or Antigone for most of the last two centuries, and its revival is of recent decades. That bears on presence, not on form or fabric, and places it at the foot of the band for a whole text of this age.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Some two and a half millennia, with the text whole and read without a break. Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the whole play survives, with local corruptions and a few suspect lines, chiefly in the catalogues and the list of kings, and nothing that carried its meaning is lost. Presence: one of the three plays of Aeschylus chosen for the Byzantine schools, with Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes, it was among the most copied and taught of Greek tragedies through the Middle Ages, survives in many manuscripts with scholia, has been edited since the Renaissance, and has been staged again in the modern era. Charged: its stage presence and its reading outside the schools are narrower than those of the Oresteia or the Oedipus. That places it at the foot of the band, not below it.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole. The play is complete, with no loss of parts, and its corruptions are those any Greek tragedy carries. Its presence is demonstrated: chosen for the Byzantine triad with Ajax and Oedipus Tyrannus, it was among the three plays of Sophocles most copied and taught, and so was read without break from late antiquity through the Byzantine schools into the Renaissance. It has been translated into the European languages again and again since, is staged in the modern repertory, and has passed into opera and into the vocabulary of psychology. Set at the foot of the band for a text whole and read without break over millennia, because its presence, though continuous, is narrower than that of the most read Greek tragedies, and its modern fame runs partly through Strauss.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is of millennia, and the text is whole. The four books come down complete, with no ode known lost and a text secure in all but small particulars, carried with the ancient commentaries of Porphyrion and the scholia under Acro’s name. Presence has been continuous: a school author in Rome, copied without break through the Carolingian age, printed early and constantly, translated into every European language and taught without a break. It stands at the foot of the band for a text whole and read without break for one small charge: with the retreat of Latin from schools the odes are read now more in the academy and in translation, and translation loses more of this poet than of most. The fabric is not charged: Augustus, Actium and the named friends are setting, not dependency.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the 1567 print survives complete, and nothing in the work is lost or in doubt. Presence has been continuous since the sixteenth century, which few works of any medium can claim; the Mass has never had to be revived. The charge on the fabric is small and lies in sound, not text. The original pitch, the tempo and the kind of voices are uncertain, and nineteenth-century performances were heavy and large. The surface fixed to its moment is the rite, and the Latin rite has lost its universal use since the 1960s; the Mass now lives mostly in concert and on record. The figure stands near the top of what centuries of unbroken presence earn.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival over millennia, the text whole and read without break. Alcestis is among the select plays of Euripides, transmitted with scholia in the medieval manuscripts and read in the Byzantine schools, so it reached the Renaissance through a living tradition rather than by chance survival. The ancient hypothesis survives with it and dates it. The form is fully legible: no lacuna takes a scene, and the textual problems are of the ordinary kind. Its presence has been continuous in teaching, translation, opera and the stage. Held at the middle of the band because that presence, though unbroken, is narrower than that of the Oedipus, the Medea or the Bacchae, and much of it lies in the academy and in operatic and poetic versions.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated across 150 years, with no discount for age. The form is whole: score and text are complete, and the performing version is Wagner’s. The presence is continuous: staged in every generation since 1876 in the major houses of Europe and the Americas, recorded from the 1950s, its extracts among the most performed orchestral music there is. Two charges. Presence is rationed: a cycle needs four evenings, a house of the first rank, and a Brünnhilde and a Siegfried few generations supply, so most audiences meet it in parts. And it carries wear from use: Wagner’s antisemitism, the readings of Alberich and Mime as caricature, and Bayreuth under Hitler. It has outlived each use, and the production tradition since 1951 is largely an answer to that wear.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over a century and a half: in print since 1880, translated across the world, and outliving a Soviet period that discouraged it. The core needs no notes: a father’s grief, a family’s hatred, guilt by desire, the court as a show, “It’s a spectacle they want!” (Pt. IV, Bk. XII, ch. 5). The surface is heavily fixed to the 1870s: the church-court question, “being debated everywhere at the time” (Pt. I, Bk. I, ch. 3); the new jury courts; Claude Bernard; Gogol’s troika; the Slavophile and anti-Catholic polemic, with the Poles as caricature; and the antisemitic matter, in Fyodor’s talk and the blood-libel scene, which now harms as well as dates. Much of the surface needs annotation, and part of it repels.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over a thousand years. The first datable mention is in the author’s own diary, in 1008, where a courtier calls into the women’s quarters: “このわたりに若紫やさぶらふ”
Kono watari ni wakamurasaki ya saburau
“Is Young Murasaki about here?” The tale’s millennium was kept from that entry, in 2008. It survives whole, in all fifty-four chapters, and has never stopped being read, copied, illustrated (the handscrolls of the twelfth century), staged, taught and translated. Two things hold it a step down. No autograph survives, and the text descends through medieval recensions, with variant lines. And the surface is fixed to its moment: ranks, offices, robe colours, ceremonies and calendar taboos need notes, and the tale’s own language needed a commentary within about a century and a half, as the Genji shaku shows.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: in print since the serial of 1875–77 and the book of 1878, translated into English many times and into most of the world’s written languages, read in schools in Russia and far beyond it, filmed in nearly every decade of cinema, with Greta Garbo (1935), Vivien Leigh (1948), Tatiana Samoilova (1967) and by Joe Wright (2012), and made a ballet by Rodion Shchedrin for Maya Plisetskaya (1972). It has outlived its conditions: divorce law, the zemstvo and the aftermath of emancipation are history, and the novel is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: the surfaces that have dated, the elections, the farming debate and the volunteers of the last part, which modern readers skip; and the Levin close, whose reception has cooled more than Anna’s.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated. The score came down in Bach’s fair copy and in manuscript copies, and since 1829 the work has been performed without interruption, every Holy Week, in churches and halls across Europe, the Americas and East Asia, with local traditions of its own, the Dutch among them. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the libretto’s pietist imagery of blood, wounds and the soul’s sweetness, and a Lutheran Vespers with a sermon between the parts. It has outlived both, heard by audiences who share neither. The cost particular to this work is the gap: for about eighty years before 1829 it survived on paper and not in performance.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 522 years: 369 of them in the open air, a left arm broken in 1527 and rejoined, a hammer taken to a toe in 1991, the cleaning of 2003–2004, none of it charged to the sculptor. The surface is almost free of its moment. The republic that made it an emblem is gone, and the emblem survives as an image of resistance in general; reproduction has worn it toward kitsch, and it has outlived that too. What holds it below the top is physical. The upper surfaces are weathered, a colossus stands on cracked ankles, and the work survives away from where it was set, a museum object behind a rail.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: the score has been in continuous concert life since 1914, is among the most performed and recorded orchestral works of its century, and is a standard test for orchestras and conductors. The loss of Nijinsky’s choreography is not charged: the score, which makes the work, survives whole. The surface fixed to its moment is real but small: the subtitle’s pagan Russia and the primitivism of 1913 belong to a fashion the score has outlived. The cost particular to this work is wear. Familiarity has dulled the shock that was part of its force; concert audiences hear the Augurs as a showpiece, and Fantasia set it to dinosaurs. It has outlived each domestication.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
More than four centuries. Both parts survive whole: the first in a good early quarto, the second in a quarto and a Folio whose differences are local, a scene missing from the first issue of the quarto, passages found only in the Folio, oaths purged; no part of the action is lost. The first part has been staged, read and taught without break since the 1590s; the second less so, and often within a conflation of the two, which an early manuscript and Welles’s film both make. The work has outlived its conditions: Lancastrian legitimacy and the Oldcastle quarrel are history, and the plays are read for what they pressed on. Charged: the second part’s narrower presence, the divergence of its two witnesses, and the Epilogue’s topical surface.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 1,479 years, the longest on the visual desk: through the fall of the regime the panels declare, when the Lombards took Ravenna in 751; of the empire they serve, in 1453; of the liturgy’s language; the resetting of the 1850s and 1860s; the bombing of 1944. The surface is the most topical imaginable, a reigning emperor and empress, one court’s uniforms in one decade, and it reads now as the type of a court. Glass does not fade: the colour seen is the sixth century’s. Charged in proportion: the restorer’s tesserae in the vault, the borders and the panels’ edges, and a shell stripped of the rest of its decoration. No figure or field is lost.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 370 years: through the burning of the Alcázar in 1734, from which the painting was saved damaged; the evacuation of the Prado’s collection during the Civil War; and the cleaning of 1984. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and etiquette, the guardainfante skirts, the court dwarfs, the jar and the curtsey, and none of it stands between the work and a viewer who knows nothing of the Habsburg court: the place of the one who looks is not of 1656. The room burned, the dynasty ended, and the painting is the centre of the museum that holds it. Held a step below for the fire’s damage at the centre of light, where later hands repaired the infanta’s face.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated. The autograph survived its own ink, the Dresden parts survived, and since 1859 the work has been performed without interruption, by churches of both confessions and by halls that belong to neither. The surface fixed to its moment is close to nil: a Latin Ordinary belongs to no decade, and unlike the Ninth the work has not been worn by civic use. It has outlived the confession that produced it, the Leipzig that had no use for it and the Dresden that may never have heard it. The cost is the gap: from its assembly in 1749 to 1859 the whole was performed nowhere. Parts were heard and the manuscript was sought, but it survived on paper longer than the Passion did.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 515 years in place: through the Sack of 1527, when soldiers were quartered in the room; through the restoration of 1702–1703 and later retouching; through soot, damp and the traffic of a museum corridor; and through a cleaning in the 1990s that raised no dispute of the Sistine kind. The surface is nearly free of its moment: the contemporary portraits read as ancients, and the image has outlived its programme. What holds the axis down is physical and small: fresco is a mortal surface; the seam round the added patch is visible; the lower edge is worn; the wall is seen through a cleaning and a crowd. No figure is lost. It is among the best-preserved monumental frescoes of its century.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
About four hundred and twenty years. The text survives in two substantive early printings, the Quarto of 1622 and the Folio of 1623, which differ in their oaths and in a run of lines but agree on the play: the form survives whole. Presence has been continuous: played at Whitehall in 1604, among the first plays revived after 1660, never long out of the repertory since, taught wherever English is taught, translated into most written languages, and remade in opera, ballet and film. The surface most fixed to its moment is the language of race, “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1), with the practice of blacked-up performance; both charge the presence rather than end it, and the argument they raise has kept the play on the stage. Held below the survivals of millennia, and below the presence of Hamlet, the widest of Shakespeare’s plays.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form is whole and legible: the dome on its octagon, the four minarets, the court. It has outlived the sultanate and the empire that produced it, and was inscribed as World Heritage in 2011. The use is unbroken for 451 years: through four foreign occupations and successive restorations, the prayer has not stopped. The fabric is the maker’s: no collapse, no rebuilt dome, no rebuilt minaret; the lead is a skin made to be renewed. What is charged: the painted interior, largely a nineteenth-century repainting over Sinan’s surfaces; a reported loss of tiles from the loge in 1878; the scar of 1913; and the extent of the campaign begun in 2021. Held off the top by the surface, not by its age.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival over three centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole; the difference between the texts of 1726 and 1735 is a matter of passages restored, not lost, and the restored text is the one read. Presence: the widest of any prose work in English of its century, in print continuously since 1726, translated into most written languages, read by children in abridgment and by adults whole, taught in schools and universities, adapted for film and stage. Its surface is in part a topical satire, the axis’s named penalty: Walpole as Flimnap the rope-dancer, the quarrels of the High and Low Heels, the Royal Society in the Academy of Lagado, Wood’s halfpence. All of it has outlived its occasion and is read now without the key. Charged: much of its presence is as an abridged children’s tale of the first two voyages, presence of a part rather than of the work.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form stands whole: Michelangelo’s core under the drum and dome is legible from the crossing, the gardens and the city, and has outlived its conditions as a model answered for four centuries. The use has not lapsed in four hundred years, through the Napoleonic seizure of the Papal States and the end of the temporal power. The fabric is nearly entire. Against it: the dome cracked and is held by iron rings; Bernini’s tower was raised and pulled down; the enclosed approach is gone; mosaic copies replaced the altarpieces. Held below the top by a surface fixed to its moment: Paul V’s name across the façade, the Barberini bees on the baldacchino.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: tower, axis, enclosure and gateways stand as designed, legible in their governing idea. The use survives in its own purpose: a temple of Shiva, worshipped daily for a thousand years, with interruptions in war. The god outlived the king: the royal name fell away and Rajarajesvaram became Brihadisvara, survival past the conditions that produced it. The fabric survives in its granite. The losses are named: most of the Chola painting lies under or lost to the Nayak layer, the bronzes and treasure are gone, the endowed institution has ended, and later shrines crowd the court. None takes the governing form or the use. The lost painted interior and the dispersed institution hold it below the top.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated across two hundred and forty years: a place in the repertory it has never left, performance in every major house, a recorded tradition from the Glyndebourne set of the 1930s onward, and constant use in teaching and in the conservatory. The autograph survives. The score is whole; the arias written for a Vienna revival of 1789 are known and set aside without loss. The surface fixed to its moment is real but small: the lord’s claimed right over his servants’ marriages belongs to the old regime, the Act IV arias of Marcellina and Basilio and Figaro’s tirade against women date, and the secco recitative is a convention many hearers now endure. Held below the highest marks for that dated surface and for the routine cutting of Act IV, not for age.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over six and a half centuries. The form is whole: the text survives entire in the author’s own hand, nothing lost, and nothing is charged to it. Presence is continuous: copied from the fourteenth century, then printed, translated into the languages of Europe and then of the world, taught without break in Italy as the foundation of its prose, and carried into painting, theatre, opera and film. The charges fall on presence. The Index of 1559 and the expurgated editions that followed gave readers a censored book for a time, though the full text was never lost; and outside Italy the work is read more in selection than whole, and more in the academy than out of it, though less so than most medieval prose. Fame lends nothing here; the record carries the figure.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form: the text survives whole in the Konya manuscript of 1278, copied within about five years of the poet’s death; the broken close of Book VI is a fact of the making, not a loss in transmission, and the spurious seventh book was recognised and set aside. The presence: continuous from Anatolia to India in recitation, teaching and commentary, with an order built around its reading; the order’s suppression in Turkey in 1925 interrupted the institution, not the reading. The fabric carries no charge. The span is centuries, and the early manuscript and the unbroken reading earn the upper part of that step. Not its top: much of the poem’s presence outside Persian is in excerpts and free versions, and the six books whole are read far less widely than its fame.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
About four centuries. The text survives whole in one clean early print, the Folio of 1623, with no rival version and no lost part, so nothing is charged on form. It was printed without break in the later Folios of 1632, 1663 to 1664 and 1685 and in every edition since Rowe’s of 1709, and it has been read, taught and translated continuously; it is now among the most widely taught and most performed of Shakespeare’s plays. One charge is made. For a long period after 1667 the stage played the Dryden and Davenant adaptation in place of Shakespeare’s text. Reading never lapsed, so the charge is small, but a play staged throughout in its own words does not carry it.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival over centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the Kakuichi text survives whole, in manuscript and in print, and was fixed by its maker as the authoritative text of his guild of reciters; there is no recovery and no fragment to charge, and the many variant texts are a fact of its tradition, not a loss of this one. Presence: continuous for six and a half centuries, first as recitation to the biwa, then in print, in the Noh and the popular stage, and in the schools, where the opening is learned by heart. Abroad it is narrower and mostly academic, in the translations of Sadler, Kitagawa and Tsuchida, McCullough and Tyler. Fabric: the recitation that carried it is now nearly extinct, the smallest charge, since the text long ago outlived its first vehicle. Set above the middle of its band, its long span against its narrower presence abroad.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The span is some six hundred and thirty-five years. Presence is as wide as any lyric’s in any language: in Iran the Divan is kept in households beside the Qur’an, consulted by fal, memorised and quoted as proverb; the poet’s tomb in Shiraz is visited as a shrine; he is read across Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the Persian-reading world, translated into the major languages of Europe and Asia, and set to music in the classical tradition. The charge is on form. No autograph survives; the Divan is a posthumous compilation, and the number and order of couplets, with a margin of attributions, are unstable, so that the poem one reads is in part an editor’s reconstruction. The ghazal with its couplets survives entire; the order of the couplets does not survive with certainty. That sets it at 9.4.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 463 years. Form: whole, one panel, legible in every passage that carries the meaning; no part is known to be lost, and none is charged. Presence: in collections of rank from its first years, seen by a narrow public for about two centuries, then on public view in Vienna, and for the last century as widely seen as any Northern painting. Fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: oil on oak, a support that moves with climate; panels of this age have all needed conservation, and only that general risk is charged. The costumes and machines are of 1563; building beyond one’s means is not. In the band for centuries with form whole, at its middle.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
More than four centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in two authoritative witnesses, the edition of 1595 and the Bordeaux Copy in the author’s hand. Their disagreements, and a later binder’s cropping of a few marginal additions, are matters of editing, not of loss; nothing that made the work is missing. Presence: continuous since 1580, reprinted in every century, translated early into English (Florio, 1603; Cotton, 1685 to 1686) and into the European languages, read through the years of the Index, a school and university text in France and widely read elsewhere, by the general reader as well as the academy. Fabric: the Wars of Religion, the Latin and the Stoic exercises of Book I fix the surface to its moment in places, and the book has outlived them. High in the band for centuries, short of the millennial texts.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. Every part of the composition stands, and nothing that carried the meaning is lost. Presence: about five centuries in the French royal collection and the Louvre, in view but for the two years it was stolen and the wartime evacuations, and the widest presence of any painting, which earns at most a tenth. Fabric: the varnish has yellowed, laying a cast over the whole and dimming the blue of the sky; a split runs down from the top edge of the panel, stabilised long ago; the attacks of 1956 struck the lower part and were repaired. Held below the top for the dimming of the colour, which takes a real part of what the panel shows, and for the split. What the varnish takes is the coolness of the colour, not the image: the drawing in shadow and the composition survive entire.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. After 592 years the image stands complete, the inscription, the mirror and the faces all legible, on its original oak. Presence: continuous in great collections from the early sixteenth century, at the court of Margaret of Austria, in the Spanish royal collection, and on public view in London since 1842; wide presence lifts it only a little. Fabric: oak and oil in good condition for their age; the painter’s own changes, visible under infrared, are part of the making, not loss. The charge is the original frame, which is lost, and with it whatever the frame carried. Held below the top for that, and because its centuries are fewer than those of the oldest works on the scale.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order. Form: no part of the image is known to be lost. Presence: about 425 years in the chapel it was made for, in a working church open to anyone, seen as designed, at its angle, in its room, beside its pendant; few paintings of its age are still where they were made to be seen. Fabric: oil over a dark ground, which darkens, and the darkening is the smallest charge, not laid on the painter. Nothing on the surface fixes it to its moment or stands between it and a viewer: a man, a horse and a light need no note. Held below the top because the evidence is of centuries, not millennia.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than five and a half centuries. Form: whole. The figure, the head, the sword, the stone and the feather are as cast, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in Florence throughout, in the Medici courtyard until 1494, then at the seat of government, and in the Bargello since the nineteenth century, in view nearly without break since at least 1469; its fame lifts the figure little. Fabric: bronze has borne the centuries well. The charges: the lost pedestal and column, which set its height; the gilding, reduced to traces; and a patina altered by time and earlier cleaning, so that the play of gold on dark bronze that the maker intended is now inferred rather than seen. The charges are real and small against the form, and the figure sits in the middle of the row for centuries with form whole.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival of some twenty-four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the play is one of the ten select plays of Euripides transmitted with scholia, in the line that never broke, with the corrupt and suspected lines that every Greek tragedy carries and no missing scene. The lost companion plays are not the unit. The charge is presence. The play was read without break but not continuously performed, and between the Renaissance and 1900 it was among the less regarded of Euripides’ plays, faulted for its lack of plot; since the First World War it has been one of the most performed Greek tragedies in the world. That gap holds it a tenth below a text whole and read without break. It has outlived its conditions entirely: it is staged for every war since its own.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence. The dialogue survives complete in the main Plato manuscripts, the Clarke Plato of 895 among them, with no lacuna that touches its structure; nothing is charged to form, and nothing to its fabric. It was read without a break in the Greek world through late antiquity, where Olympiodorus commented on it in the sixth century, and through Byzantium. In the Latin West it went unread for about a millennium. Since its return it has been read continuously, taught wherever ancient philosophy and political theory are taught in the West, and widely translated. It has outlived the Athenian Assembly and courts it attacks. Set at the top of the band below that of a text whole and read without a break, for the Latin West’s long silence, though the text itself was never lost.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 235 years: the opera has been performed without a break since 1791, and the score survives whole in Mozart’s autograph. Its presence on the stage is wide, and earns its tenth. The charges come from a surface fixed to its moment. The spoken dialogue is cut, rewritten or replaced in most productions, so part of the unit survives in the books and not on the stage. The lines on women and on Monostatos’s blackness are now commonly altered or staged against, and the Egyptian Masonry is period dress. The alterations take back more than presence adds, and hold the axis a tenth below Don Giovanni, four years older, which carries no such charge.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival across millennia is demonstrated: the text is whole, one of the seven plays of the Sophoclean selection, carried through the Byzantine manuscripts with the tenth-century Laurentian codex at the head of the tradition, and read without a break of loss since antiquity. The form is entirely legible, with no part missing. Its presence is continuous in the Greek curriculum of the West; it has been translated many times and staged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Charged on presence, not on form: it stood outside the Byzantine school selection of Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus, and so was read less in the schools of Byzantium; and in modern teaching and staging it stands well behind the Tyrannus and Antigone.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated, in form, presence and fabric. The defining form is wholly legible: the completed score has been the standard text since its publication in 1800, and the fragment survives beside it. Presence is continuous. Unlike the Bach Passions and the Mass in B minor, which passed out of performance and had to be revived, the Requiem has never left the repertoire since the 1790s, and it is among the most performed and recorded of choral works, sung in church, concert hall and public mourning. The fabric holds: Mozart’s autograph survives in Vienna, damaged only slightly. The work has outlived the liturgical conditions that produced it. Held a step below the top by works that have survived longer with equal presence.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
About one and a half millennia, the text whole. Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the play survives entire, in seven acts, in many manuscripts and in more than one recension. The recensions are the charge: the action is certain and nothing is fragmentary, but which wording and how many stanzas are Kālidāsa’s is not settled, and every edition chooses among versions. The charge is small, about two tenths against the usual figure for the span. Presence: continuous in India, as a text of the Sanskrit curriculum and commentary for over a millennium and as a story known far beyond those who read Sanskrit; and, since 1789, translated into the major languages of Europe and Asia and staged repeatedly. Outside India its presence has narrowed since its Romantic peak to the academy and the theatre, which holds it below the top. Fabric: nothing to charge beyond the variants.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: dome, semidomes, piers, buttresses, court and minarets stand as built some 469 years ago, and the form has outlived the empire that built it as the image of its capital. The use is unbroken: a Friday mosque since 1557, entered daily. The fabric carries the charge. The painted surface of the interior is not the first campaign’s: it was renewed more than once in later centuries, and what stands now is that surface taken back toward the sixteenth-century scheme in the latest restoration. How much of the tile and the glass is original is uncertain. None of this is charged to the maker. Held below the top by the surface, not by the span.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives: the Romanesque plan, section and vault stand whole and legible inside, and the Pórtico stands in place, protected by the shell that replaced the old west front. The use has been continuous for more than nine centuries, as cathedral and as the goal of pilgrimage, and in the present century it is more used than at almost any time, the road revived. The fabric is granite and sound. The charges are real but partial: Mateo’s stone choir dismantled in 1603; the Romanesque west and north exteriors replaced; the Platerías rearranged; the Pórtico’s colour largely lost. The Baroque shell is part of the work; the fronts it displaced are losses.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible, the design entire as Wren completed it, and it has outlived its conditions as a model copied and answered for three centuries. The use is continuous in its own purpose: daily worship since 1697 and the great services of the nation, without a break, through the Blitz. The fabric was struck by bombs, the high altar destroyed in 1941 and replaced, the crossing piers consolidated after settlement; the losses were repaired and took little from what makes the work, and the piers’ distress is weighed here as endurance. Presence has been continuous and wide, the dome over the burning City in 1940 among the best-known images in Britain. Fame is not counted as permanence.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: one version, one autograph, nothing lost or in doubt, and no later hand in it. Presence: the work has been performed and printed since the 1790s, was a fixture of the concert life of London and Germany in the early nineteenth century under its name, and has been among the most played and recorded symphonies since recording began. The charge falls on the first years: no performance is documented in Mozart’s lifetime, so the work’s public life began after his death, a short silence and not a long one. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the trumpets and drums of court ceremony and the buffa tune are heard as character, not fashion.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: after about 540 years the image is whole; every figure, the composition and the handling of the surface are legible. Presence: in Medici possession, recorded by Vasari at Castello in 1550, never lost or dispersed, and now in the Uffizi among the most visited paintings in the world, though for a long period between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth it was little regarded. Fabric: tempera on canvas is a fragile combination, and a canvas of this size and age has needed care. The surface is fixed to no moment that keeps a viewer out. It stands level with Las Meninas at 9.4, which is charged for fire at its centre; nothing here burned, but the fragile support and the long eclipse keep it from the top.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: front, nave, tribune, screen, choir and dome stand as designed and completed in the first campaign, legible from the door, and the design has outlived the republic, the plague and the Counter-Reformation that made it. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a Capuchin church since 1592, and the votive church to which the city has gone each July for about four and a half centuries, a rite that outlived the Doge and Senate who instituted it. Few buildings keep both their first use and the ceremony they were built for. The fabric is the makers’, kept where water, salt and settlement wear every stone. Held off the top by a span of centuries rather than millennia, the wear and repair a lagoon site demands, and the unknown extent of what has been renewed.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
About sixteen hundred years, between the centuries and the millennia on the step. The text survives whole, in a heavy manuscript tradition copied without a break through the Middle Ages, and was printed among the first books of the Italian presses. It has outlived Rome, the order it answered and the paganism it fought. Presence is continuous but charged: the whole book is now read mainly in the academy and the seminary, and widely only in selections, the two loves of XIV.28, the nineteenth book, the robber bands of IV.4. Held at the head of the centuries and the foot of the millennia: below the texts read whole without a break for millennia, and above the works whose presence the academy alone keeps.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about three and three-quarter centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: unusually continuous. The canvas has stayed with the sitter’s family and in their palace collection in Rome since it was painted, seen by visitors for centuries and on public view in the gallery, and it is among the most widely known portraits in the world; fame is presence, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, lining, varnish and cleaning, none of it charged. Centuries with the form whole and the presence at its widest.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text is whole. It has been read without a break: carried through antiquity, chosen for the Byzantine school selection of Aristophanes with Wealth and Clouds, preserved in the principal medieval manuscripts, the Ravenna and Venice codices among them, and printed, taught and translated since. Charged against it, on the axis’s own terms: Old Comedy carries the most topical surface of any classical form, and much of the play is fixed to the winter of 405, its demagogues, its generals and its freed rowers. Its presence since antiquity has been largely in the classroom and the academy, and the stage revives it far less than the tragedies it judges. That bears on presence; form and fabric are intact.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: block, gallery, tower and front stand legible as the first campaign built them, and the enlargements, the work’s own, stand with them. The evidence of use is among the strongest any civic building in Europe can show. The palace has been the seat of Florentine government as commune, republic and duchy, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies while Florence was capital of Italy, and the town hall since, over seven centuries, interrupted only when the court moved to the Pitti and even then holding offices of state. It is entered today as town hall and as museum. The pietraforte holds. The charges are the lost ringhiera and the restoration of the interiors; fame lifts nothing.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about thirty-three centuries. Form: whole. Gold does not corrode, and the face, the headdress, the brow, the collar and the inscription stand as made. That is rarer than it sounds: nearly every other royal burial of the New Kingdom was robbed and its gold melted. Presence: for some thirty-two centuries none, the mask lying in the dark as it was meant to; since 1925, continuous and as wide as any object’s, which earns its tenth and no more, since fame is presence and not proof. Fabric: the beard came away in 2014, was reattached with epoxy, and was refixed in 2015, a small charge made good. High in the row for millennia with form whole, held off its top by the long absence from view and the repair.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two millennia. The text survives whole, all three books, through a medieval manuscript tradition, and the standard edition establishes it with no gap of substance. It has been read without a long break: heavily in the Middle Ages, when Ovid was among the most read of Latin poets, then translated into the modern languages and taught, now mainly in the academy and below the Metamorphoses and the Amores. Two charges hold it short of the top. The surface is fixed to its moment more than most classics: named porticoes, Augustus’ naval spectacle, Gaius’ Parthian campaign, the cosmetics of a season. And its present reading is narrower than its fame.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across some fourteen and a half centuries. The form is legible and whole: the circuit, the basilica, the apse and the chapel behind it, the axis to the bush. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a monastic community has lived here without a known break since the sixth century, and the liturgy is still sung in the church, as few buildings anywhere can show. An unusually large share of the founding fabric survives: the granite walls of the church, the roof trusses with their inscriptions, the carved doors, the apse mosaic, much of the circuit. The charges are real and small against that: a later ceiling hides the trusses, parts of the wall were rebuilt, later buildings crowd the enclosure, and the bell tower changes its silhouette.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: 175 years, read continuously since the 1920s, translated, taught and adapted worldwide. The book has outlived the industry it records, and that industry is its surface: the oil economy, the processing of chs. 94–98, the whaling law of chs. 89–90, Maury’s circular of 1851 (ch. 44). Some of it is now error: “we account the whale immortal in his species” (ch. 105). The narrator’s racial typing dates the voice, though the same voice mocks those who stare at Ishmael and Queequeg, “as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro” (ch. 13). Held a step down by an eclipse nearly total and more surface to annotate. What lasts needs no gloss: the Symphony, the chase, the Castaway.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated: Part One has stood for 218 years, Part Two for 194, and the text survives whole. Its phrases live in common German speech: des Pudels Kern, the two souls in one breast, the Gretchenfrage. The surface is fixed in places, and it is charged: the Walpurgis Night’s Dream mocks the critics and philosophers of the 1790s, and Part Two’s topical matter, from the paper money to the quarrel over whether fire or water made the earth and the Baccalaureus’s Fichtean idealism, needs notes. Outside German, survival is narrower: Part One is read and sung, Part Two seldom staged. Nationalist, National Socialist and East German appropriation bent its reception; the work survived each, but its readers had to recover it.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 721 years: the loss of the palace it leaned on and of its portico; the nineteenth century’s neglect and retouching, the twentieth’s damp; a bombing in 1944 that destroyed Mantegna’s frescoes a few hundred metres away; three restorations. The surface is little fixed to its moment: Paduan dress reads as the furniture of Judaea, the purse is as legible now as in 1305, and the donor reads as any man offering what he has. What holds the axis down is real loss, charged in proportion: the secco blue gone in patches from the vault, the skies and the Virgin’s mantle, the gilt reliefs dark, the Judgment’s lower zones worn. The image survives whole; its colour survives thinned.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 485 years: against censure from its first decade, the draperies of 1565 and after, candle soot over centuries, and the cleaning of 1990–1994. The surface is mostly free of its moment. Biagio as Minos was topical satire and now reads as a demon with ass’s ears; the Counter-Reformation quarrel has outlived its moment and become part of the work’s history. What holds the axis is how it survived. The draperies are another hand’s and are not charged as making, but the work did not last as made: twenty-four years after its unveiling it was altered, and one passage of Michelangelo’s surface is gone for good. Survival in altered form is still survival, and the composition is intact.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the charge falls on the form. The play survives near whole and legible, but the passage lost after line 1329 takes Agave’s lament over the reassembled body of her son and the opening of the god’s closing speech, the place where the recognition would come to rest. What happens there can still be followed; a part that carried meaning is gone, and that holds the axis below a text whole and read without break. Presence adds little: read and played in antiquity, reworked in Byzantium, thinner in the medieval West and the Renaissance, and now among the most performed and translated of Greek tragedies. The surface pays nothing beyond the loss.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated. The work has outlived its composer; the Habsburg world; a ban of twelve years in the countries that made it; and a wider eclipse between the wars, when it was kept by a handful of conductors and by one recording, Walter’s, two months before the Anschluss. Since the 1960s it has been as continuously performed and recorded as any symphony. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the Ländler and waltz are Vienna before 1914, and the work knows it, which is why they are coarsened. The cost is the eclipse: the span of demonstrated centrality is sixty years. Lightly, the farewell frame has partly detached it into a sentimental listening habit.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Centuries, and the text whole. Form: the play survives entire in Racine’s own printed and revised text, with nothing lost and no question of authenticity; nothing is charged. Presence: performed from 1677, in the repertory of the Comédie-Française since its founding in 1680, taught in French schools without a break, translated into the main European languages and staged in them. Fabric: nothing to charge. The charge is on presence outside French: in the English-speaking world the play lives on the stage in versions and in the academy more than in common reading, and its verse, which is its life, does not travel. Three and a half centuries of unbroken performance in its own language place it high among works of its age; the narrower presence abroad keeps it below the top, and well below the millennial texts.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The form is legible: beginning and end are present, and each fragment is ordered within by its links. Only the sequence of the fragments is uncertain, and since the poet never fixed it, that is unfinishedness, not loss; a small charge remains, because the manuscripts “differ as to the arrangement of the Tales”, as Skeat records. Presence is continuous for six centuries: more than eighty manuscripts, Caxton’s press, every century’s editions. The larger charge is to the form as read: the loss of final -e made the metre illegible from the sixteenth century until Tyrwhitt, and for some two centuries the printed work carried tales not Chaucer’s. Restoration has made both good. The fabric is excellent: Ellesmere and Hengwrt, within a decade of the poet’s death.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The text survives nearly whole: six books, lacunae mostly of a few lines, and an unfinished close that is the author’s, not the transmission’s. The loss takes little from the defining form. But the transmission was narrow: two Carolingian manuscripts of the ninth century at Leiden, the Oblongus and the Quadratus, with fragments of a third, and a near silence of about a thousand years until Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript in a German monastery in 1417. Presence since is continuous and wide: printed at Brescia about 1473, edited by the great philologists, translated into every major European language, taught wherever Latin is. It stands high in the band for a text long unread, because what was recovered was near whole, and below every work read without break across the millennia.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated twice over. The object has lasted five centuries in princely and royal hands, from Brussels in 1517 to the Escorial in 1593 and then the Prado. And the work has outlived the world that gave its images sense: Brabant proverbs, late-medieval moral theology, a disputed patron and occasion. Almost every key is gone, and the picture is more alive than when they were in hand. The nude centre ties little of its surface to period dress. What costs it a step is the kind of life it now has: part of its fame is as a spectacle of the bizarre, a survival partly of surface.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole in the first edition of 1818, with the single bar Beethoven added at the head of the Adagio after engraving. One textual question is real, the A sharp, but it concerns a note, not a movement, and the work is in no doubt. Presence is the cost. Its public life began late, through Liszt, and it remains the least often played of the great sonatas because few can play it; but since the later nineteenth century it has stood continuously in the repertory of the major pianists and in the recorded catalogue. Fabric: little of its surface is fixed to its moment. Written past its instrument, it has needed no retouching on the modern piano. The late start is charged.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over some eight hundred and fifty years. Form: the text survives whole, in many manuscripts, with the ordinary variance of a much-copied Persian poem and no loss of any part that carried its meaning; nothing is recovered or fragmentary. Presence: continuous across the Persianate world since its composition, copied, illustrated, recited and taught through Iran, Central Asia, Anatolia and India; in Europe since the nineteenth century, and now widely read in English. Fabric: manuscript variance only. This is the step for centuries, the text whole and read without break. Held below the top of that step because its presence outside the Persianate languages is about a century and a half old, because even within them it has been read in the shadow of Rumi, and because a survival of centuries does not stand level with the millennia of Homer or Job.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence. The text survives complete in the medieval Greek tradition of Plato’s works, the whole dialogue as transmitted, nothing lost or reassembled, with an ancient commentary, Hermias’, beside it. Presence was continuous in Greek, in late antique commentary and in Byzantium, and since the fifteenth century it has been read, translated and taught without a break, in philosophy and in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: Lysias and the handbook writers are history now, and the work is read for what it made of them. What holds it there is presence. In the Latin West it was largely unknown for close to a millennium, until Leonardo Bruni translated part of it and Ficino the whole, and its life now lies mainly in the academy, in philosophy, classics and rhetoric, more than in common reading.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: octagon, two ambulatories, drum, dome and Rock stand in the relation built in the year 72, legible from the door, and the form has outlived the Umayyad caliphate and every power that has held the city since. The use is continuous: a sacred building for thirteen centuries, a Muslim shrine but for eighty-eight years as a church, and entered for its own purpose today. Its presence is of the widest, which earns no more than a tenth. The fabric carries the charges: the dome fell in 1015 and is a rebuilding, its covering renewed several times; the Umayyad exterior mosaic is lost, and its tile was largely renewed in the twentieth century. The interior is largely the first builders’.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: square, circle, four porticoes and dome stand as one idea, and the idea has outlived the conditions that produced it, a churchman’s retirement and a republic’s villa culture, as a model copied for 450 years. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a private dwelling since Almerico’s day, through three families, still lived in for part of the year; few buildings on the desk have kept their first use so completely. The fabric is largely the makers’ and their completer’s; the frescoes, stucco and statues of the century after show investment, not loss. What holds the axis off the top is small: the dome as built against the design as published, a view gone suburban on one quarter, and a surface of orders that has gone in and out of fashion, though the building never has.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: every church stands as cut, plan, section and trench system legible as made, and the form has outlived the Zagwe dynasty, the Solomonic restoration that displaced it, the invasions of the sixteenth century and the fall of the empire. The use is continuous in its own purpose: these are working churches, served by priests and visited by pilgrims, with liturgy and feasts held in them for some eight centuries. The charge is to fabric. The tuff is soft and weathers; water has entered the rock, cracked walls and effaced carving; paintings are damaged; past repairs used materials that harmed the rock; and the temporary shelters of the late 2000s still stand, protecting the work and altering it as seen. Nothing in a monolith can be replaced: what erodes is lost.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole and legible after more than five centuries. The presence is continuous: in St Peter’s, in view and in use as an altar image, among the most seen sculptures in the world, though presence earns little on its own. It left Rome once, for the New York World’s Fair of 1964. The fabric carries a charge. On 21 May 1972 a man with a hammer broke off the Virgin’s left arm at the elbow and shattered her nose, an eyelid and part of the veil; the group was restored from its own recovered marble, with marble dust and resin where fragments were lost, and is now seen behind a screen of bulletproof acrylic.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the defining form is whole and legible, all ten figures, the box, the gold and the colour, and the panel is among the best kept of its time, its blues, reds and whites still sharp. The wings are lost, and they were part of the altarpiece; but the unit is the panel, and the panel carried the meaning. Presence: continuous for nearly six centuries, though for a long stretch within the Escorial and a royal collection rather than open to view; since it came to the Prado, wide. Fabric: what the panel has suffered and had repaired in nearly six centuries is the smallest charge. Held in the lower part of its range for the lost wings and the repairs.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at five centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the campaign made, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous and central, from the bier in 1520 to San Pietro in Montorio, to Paris after 1797, and to the Vatican since its return; it has been on view in Rome for nearly all its life. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the lower zone’s shadows are reported to have darkened, which takes some of the drama the lower zone was built on, and a restoration of the 1970s is charged lightly. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and gesture, and none of it stands between the work and a viewer: a boy in convulsion and a light beyond reach need no court.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated: more than a century and a half in the choral repertory without a lapse, recordings by every generation of conductors (Klemperer’s of the early 1960s among them), and choirs amateur and professional across the world. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The text is scripture, and the one period word is in the title: “deutsch”, which meant Luther’s language when the work was made and could be heard as a nation’s after 1871. That reading has attached to it at times, and the work has outlived it. Its standing has also moved with taste: the Wagnerians dismissed it, and it was slower to settle in France. Held a step below the top for that.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: plan, elevation, vaults, flyers and portals are the makers’, and the design has outlived the bishop, the commune and the conditions that made it, as a model copied and answered. The use is continuous: a cathedral since the thirteenth century, save for the years of the Revolution, it came through both World Wars standing. Charged: most of the thirteenth-century glass, so that the room stands in a light its makers did not design, a real loss to its form; the rood screen; the labyrinth, taken up in 1828 and relaid in 1894; the portals’ paint, surviving as traces; the nineteenth-century restoration of the west front and its sculpture; and structural distress met by later iron. Among buildings centuries old, whole and in use, the loss of the light holds it in the lower part of the range.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a thousand years. Form: reported whole, the figure, the dwarf, the four attributes, the locks and the ring standing, all that carries the meaning; no condition report was consulted, and no loss is charged that cannot be named. Presence: the bronze was made for use, bathed, dressed, garlanded and carried, and it has been withdrawn from worship into a museum, which takes from it the procession and the dressing, a use that was part of the work; how it survived between the Chola period and its finding is not known. Against that, the form it carries has never left worship, and the image is now read across the world. Fabric: bronze, the most durable of its materials; patina and the wear of ritual handling are ordinary. Charged a little for the lost use and the gap in presence.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 954 years. Form: whole. The image is the image Guo Xi made, titled, dated and signed by him on the silk; nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: the scroll came down through collections into the Qing imperial collection, and since 1949 it has been in Taipei, where it stands as the emblem of Northern Song landscape. Fabric: remounting and the ordinary repairs of a silk scroll of its age; what later owners added to the scroll bears on survival only. Centuries, with the form whole: the figure sits in the middle of that row, held below its upper part by the condition of silk more than nine centuries old.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival over close to five centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole as published, with one question, whether the last book’s text is certainly the author’s, which is a question of what survives and a small one. Presence: continuous in France, read, edited and taught since the sixteenth century; translated into English from 1653 and repeatedly since, by Urquhart and Motteux, Le Clercq, Cohen, Frame, Screech and Raffel. Charged: its presence beyond French is narrower than that of the widest survivors, since Cervantes is read where Rabelais is cited; the difficulty of its French has made it a scholar’s book for many readers; and much of its satire is fixed to its moment, the Sorbonne, the decretals and the quarrels of the Gallican church, the surface the axis penalises.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a span of about seven and a half centuries. The form is whole and legible: manuscripts of the poet’s own century and the next survive, and Foruzanfar’s edition gives a text sound enough to read the body as Rumi left it. The charge on form: the later Divan was swollen with hundreds of ghazals by other hands, the true body was recovered only in the 1950s and 1960s, and the attribution of a margin of poems is still argued. The presence is continuous and wider than a book’s, in the sama of the Mevlevi order, in sung ghazal across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and South Asia, in schooling, and now in translation and paraphrase across the world, which earns a tenth at most and proves nothing. The fabric carries no charge.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Centuries, and the text whole. Form: the play survives entire in Racine’s own revised text, with nothing lost and no question of authenticity. Presence: printed, performed and taught without a break since 1667, among the most played tragedies in the repertory of the Comédie-Française, and read in every French school. Fabric: nothing in it is fixed to its moment except the précieux turns, and they have not dated the play. The charge is on presence outside French: Racine is famously resistant to translation and is played abroad far less than he is read about, and the presence beyond his language is narrower than that of Sophocles or Shakespeare. That places it in the lower part of the range for works that have lasted centuries.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three and a half centuries. Form: whole. The embrace, the elder son, the light and the dark are legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost; the open question of finish is not damage and is not charged here. Presence: in Saint Petersburg since the eighteenth century, through revolution, war and the siege of the city, on view for most of that time, little reproduced before the nineteenth century and central now. Fabric: the darks are deep, and the technical history cannot be confirmed here. The surface is fixed to its moment in nothing that matters; the costume is biblical invention, not period fashion. High for centuries with form whole, held in the lower part of that band.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five and a half centuries. The form is whole: one panel, legible to its corners, its image intact. Charged: the long-argued possibility that the upper edge was trimmed, held open here (if it was, the charge is to form only in so far as something above the sky was lost, and the picture as it stands is complete), and the usual losses of glaze and repaint a panel of this age carries. Presence: long in private keeping, and continuously in public view in New York since 1935. Wide fame earns at most a tenth. Held low in its row for the open question at the top edge and the lesser public presence of its first centuries.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four hundred and sixty years. The form is whole: no part that carries the meaning is lost, and the composition reads entire. The presence is exceptional: in the room it was painted for, on the wall it was painted for, continuously, through the fall of the Republic, the Napoleonic suppressions that dispersed so much of Venice, and two world wars. The Scuola survived as a confraternity, and the picture has been in view to anyone entering the building for the whole of that time. Few paintings of its size have so unbroken a presence in place. The charge falls on the fabric: the painter’s dark grounds have darkened, and some passages now read as dusk where they were once lighter, which costs a little legibility in the shadows and nothing in the form.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: both rooms stand as designed and completed, the stair, desks, ceiling and floor in place, and the design has outlived its conditions, studied and answered for four centuries. The use survives in part: the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana is still a working library holding its manuscripts and the building is entered daily, but the books have long left the desks for storage, and the hall is now visited more than read in; that change is charged modestly. The fabric has lost little, and the completion by other hands is part of the work. The building is better known among architects than to the wider public, and fame is not counted as permanence.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over nearly three centuries, from 1729 to now. The text survives whole, as printed, with nothing lost and no question of transmission. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any prose work of its century: never out of print, anthologised and taught in schools and universities wherever English is read, and translated widely. The axis penalises a topical satire, and this is one: its surfaces are the famine of 1729, the absentee landlord, Lent and the price of a carcass in shillings. But it has wholly outlived that occasion and is read for what the occasion pressed on, the reverse of a surface fixed to its moment. Charged a little because much of its presence is as the classroom’s example of irony, read for its device, and because its particulars now need annotation.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival over centuries, with the form whole. The composition reads as it was made: frieze, cloud, passage and heaven. Presence is the rarer fact. The canvas has stayed in the church for which it was painted, over the burial it shows, for about 440 years, in a living parish; even through the two centuries of the painter’s eclipse it was in view in Toledo, and since the revival it has been among the most visited pictures in Spain. Fame is presence, not proof, and counts for little here. Repairs by later hands bear on survival only. The surface is fixed to its moment in its ruffs and in a parish’s claims, and none of that stands between a viewer and a burial watched by heaven. The eclipse and a fabric repaired keep the figure from rising further.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival over five centuries, judged on the edition. The form is whole: the image survives in many impressions from Dürer’s lifetime, and its defining form is fully legible in good ones. Its presence has been continuous since 1513, collected, copied and reproduced without a break; the print has never been out of view. Against that, paper and ink are fragile, impressions vary widely, late, worn or retouched sheets weaken the image, and the fate of the copper plate is not established. The charges are small, because the edition is the unit and enough early impressions stand for the work as made to be seen. Fragility and variance keep it from the highest figures.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five and a half centuries. Form: the hall, the street, the figures, the two lights and the perspective are all legible, and nothing the meaning rests on is missing from view. Presence: for centuries obscure, and in wide view only from the nineteenth century and above all the twentieth; fame now lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: charged as any wood panel of its age is charged, at the ordinary rate. The figure stands in the middle of the row for works of these centuries with form whole, held there by the long obscurity and the worn surface rather than lowered by them.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form is whole: every element the makers planned stands, from the portal and the hinge to both shells and the madrasas. It has outlived its conditions: the dynasty fell in 1722, the capital went to Shiraz and then to Tehran, and the building was copied for three centuries. The use is unbroken since the 1630s, in the purpose it was built for; renamed after 1979, it changed its dedication and not its use. The brick structure is intact. The skin is the loss: the thin glaze of haft-rangi has cost the surfaces, the dome’s exterior and parts of the portal and iwans were re-tiled from the 1930s onward, and the dome was restored again in the 2010s. Held below the top because the skin is part of what makes the work and a part of the skin is renewed.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 464 years. Form: whole. The image is the image made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: known through the family’s copies in its first generations, held long in Spanish royal hands, now in the Prado, and in the last century one of the most reproduced images of the macabre. Fame is presence and lifts the figure by little. Fabric: an oak panel, cleaned and restored, its legibility recovered and nothing taken from it. Centuries with form whole carry 9.2 to 9.7, and the panel sits in the lower half of that row, because its span is centuries rather than millennia and its continuous presence to public view is far shorter than its age.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than five centuries. The form is whole as far as can be known: the arrangement that carries the meaning, body, slab, shroud, wounds, jar and mourners, stands, and nothing in it is known to be lost or replaced. The presence is two centuries at the centre of the Brera and of the painter’s image; its path before Milan is not recorded here and is neither credited nor charged, and fame lifts the figure only a little. The fabric is the charge: tempera on canvas is a fragile support, more vulnerable than panel or oil, and a glue-bound tempera surface tends to wear and dull. It stands above The Swing (9.2), for twice the span, and below Las Meninas (9.4), whose presence has been continuous.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is legible and whole, and the type has been copied and answered for centuries. The use is continuous: the Friday mosque of the city, on a site of congregational prayer for some twelve centuries and in its present governing form for about nine. The fabric carries the charge. The Seljuk domes stand in their original brick, but the hypostyle was burned in the early twelfth century and rebuilt, has been repaired under every later dynasty, and was damaged in the war of the 1980s and restored; the tile has been renewed again and again. Heavy rebuilding of parts holds it below the highest marks.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about five and a half centuries. Form: whole. The centre, both wings and the closed exterior survive, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: in Florence since 1483, on the altar of Sant’Egidio for centuries and now in the Uffizi, continuously in view and continuously the reference for Netherlandish painting in Italy. Fabric: the ordinary history of oil on panel of its age, with cleaning and restoration whose dates are not given here, and no loss known that takes from the form. Centuries with the form whole place it in the top row. The surface fixed to its moment, costume, a patron’s family, Flemish faces, stands between the work and no viewer. It sits within the row, below works of longer span or wider presence.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at six centuries. Form is whole: the composition, the three episodes, the heads and the light all read, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence is continuous: the fresco has been on its wall and in view since it was painted, studied by painters from the fifteenth century on; it survived the eighteenth century remodelling of the chapel, in which the vault and lunettes of the cycle were lost, and the fire of 1771 in the Carmine, which spared the chapel. Fabric carries the charge: smoke, candle soot and old varnishes darkened the surface for two centuries, the cleaning of 1983 to 1990 removed them, and passages applied a secco are thinned or lost. Held below the top of its row for the fabric’s history.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: crypt, choir, Trinity Chapel, Corona, nave, transepts and tower stand as built, and the eastern arm still reads as an ascent to a shrine. Its focus is lost: the shrine was destroyed in 1538, and its place is empty. The use has been continuous for more than nine centuries, a cathedral with services daily; the monastic community ended in 1540, and the pilgrimage that compelled the eastern arm ended with the shrine, revived only in part in modern times. The fabric carries the rest: much glass smashed in the 1640s, the Norman northwest tower replaced by a copy in 1834, the stone renewed continually. The form whole and in use carries it high; those losses hold it in the lower part of its band.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole, with nothing of the design lost, and the image has outlived the republic that vowed it, which fell in 1797, and the plague that occasioned it. The use is continuous in its own purpose since 1687, and the vow is still kept every 21 November by the city crossing on the votive bridge: a building’s first ritual use unbroken for more than three centuries, which is rare. The fabric is largely original, but it is charged for the condition of Venice itself: a church on piles in a sinking lagoon at its most exposed point, its Istrian stone weathered, its exterior and dome restored again and again. A span of about three hundred and forty years, form whole and in use. Held toward the foot of its band because the span is centuries, not millennia, and the risk of the site is real.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: plan, section, vaults, flyers and the double ambulatory stand as built and are legible from the west door, and the governing idea has outlived the world that made it, studied and answered still. The use has been continuous for eight centuries, as the cathedral of Bourges. The fabric of the body is largely original, with much of the choir glass of about 1215 in place. Charged against it: the fall of the north tower in 1506 and its rebuilding in another style, a failure of the work’s own endurance; the south tower’s need for a buttress pier; the loss of much of the first nave and clerestory glass; damage to the portal sculpture; restoration. What makes the work, its interior volume, survives whole.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form: whole. Every figure and every element of the composition stands; nothing that carried the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in a monastic church for about two centuries, then in Dresden since the 1750s and at the centre of its gallery. Fame is presence and lifts the figure by at most a tenth. Fabric: a canvas of its age, with the ordinary history of lining, varnish and cleaning, and no known loss that takes from the image; the state of the paint layer is known thinly. The charge is for the loss of the first setting, the altar the picture was made to stand above, which takes something from what the ledge and the pointing hand do.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then fabric, then presence. Form: after about five and a half centuries the image is whole and legible; no figure is lost, and no part of the composition is missing from the surface. Fabric is charged a little: tempera on joined boards, with abrasion and old retouching, none of which takes a figure or a gesture. Presence is charged a little more: some three centuries in a private villa, and a museum life that became pre-eminent only after the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the painter. The surface is fixed to no moment that stands between the work and a viewer; its gods outlived the humanist circle that read them. The long obscurity and the tempera hold it in the lower half of its step.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole; everything that carries the meaning stands as carved. Presence: continuous, in the villa for which it was made, through the Borghese line and the state’s purchase in 1902, admired by visitors from the 1620s on and famous without interruption. Fabric: marble, with ordinary wear at the surface. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held a step below the top of its row for the thinnest leaves and the finger tips, the group’s most fragile passages, where breaks and repairs are reported that could not be confirmed. The couplet, an early addition, is part of the one work and costs nothing here.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than five centuries. Form: whole. The defining form, the composite body and its face of serpents, stands as carved; the decapitation is the carving, not damage. Some edges are worn, and any colour it bore is gone; that is fabric. Presence is charged: buried for more than two and a half centuries after the Conquest, then reburied because it was feared, it was not continuously present to attention; since the 1820s its presence has been continuous and central, and since 1964 it has stood in Mexico’s national museum. Fabric: basalt, as durable as stone gets. The strongest of the twelve, set below the top of its row for the burials and any lost colour, and raised a little by its presence since.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form survives whole: the five domes, the cross, the narthex, the façade and the programme are legible as the church’s life made them, and the design has outlived the Republic that built it. Use is continuous since consecration: state chapel until 1797, cathedral since 1807, worship daily. The charges are of fabric and of a living threat. Of the façade mosaics only one is original; a large share of the interior mosaic was remade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on new cartoons; the horses on the loggia are copies; the floor has sunk and been relaid in parts; the narthex floods, and salt rises in marble and brick.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Molière’s company published it in 1667; there is no loss and no rival version. Presence: three and a half centuries in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, founded in 1680 with Molière’s plays at its core, and in performance throughout the French-speaking world; read in French schools without a break; translated into the major European languages, and kept on the English stage in Wilbur’s version and in the adaptations of Tony Harrison and Martin Crimp. Fabric: its surface is fixed to a society, the court of Louis XIV, its salons and the marshals’ tribunal, but the play has outlived those conditions and is read for what they pressed on. A single society’s comedy, whose presence beyond French rests on a few translations, and a survival of centuries, not millennia: that holds the figure where it is.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over 526 years. Form: the face, the hand, the hair and both inscriptions are legible as made, and nothing that carries the meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: kept by the maker, so far as is known, then in the town hall of Nuremberg, acquired for Munich in 1805, and in the Alte Pinakothek since the gallery opened in 1836; it has been in view and in attention for most of its life, and since the nineteenth century its image has stood for German art. Fabric: a lime panel of its age, whose full conservation record is not established, and that uncertainty keeps the figure below the top.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Centuries of demonstrated survival: about five hundred years in print from the edition of 1522, and three and a half in the received text, read without a break. Form: the text survives whole, in versions, and the version scored is the one that has been read, so form is not charged. Presence is of the widest: read, taught and retold across China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, translated into many languages, staged, illustrated, made into television serials and games; its figures are household names, and Guan Yu is worshipped in temples. What holds it below the texts of millennia: a little for the versions, since the received text is a seventeenth century reshaping of a book whose earliest form is lost, and a little for the surface of its campaigns, which few modern readers read whole.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is whole: Vignola’s plan and body, della Porta’s front and dome and the later decoration stand, and the type has outlived the conditions that made it, a reforming council’s demands and a new order’s first generation. The use is continuous in its own purpose: the Society’s church in Rome since 1584, through the order’s suppression in 1773 and its restoration in 1814, and still in daily worship. The fabric is largely the builders’ and decorators’. The principal loss, the silver statue of Ignatius, melted and replaced, is a part of one altar and is charged lightly. Some four hundred and forty years with form whole and use unbroken stand in the upper band; its presence is wide in Rome and among historians, narrower in general fame.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form: whole. Body, slab, lid and inscription are legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: in the Amerbach Cabinet in the sixteenth century, bought with it by the city of Basel in 1661, and shown publicly there since, in one of the oldest public collections in Europe; it survived the iconoclasm of its own city within the decade of its making and has been in view ever since. Its fame grew late, and fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of a panel of its age, cleaning, varnish and repair, with no loss known that touches the form. It stands level with Mantegna’s Lamentation (9.3).
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: plan, bowed bays, interlaced dome and lantern stand as Guarini built them, and the governing idea is legible from the floor. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a church since its consecration in 1680, still serving worship on Piazza Castello. No loss to dome or plan is known, but the extent of damage in the Second World War and of later restoration is not established here, and the figure carries a small charge for that. The form has outlived the court and the Theatine culture that made it. Held in the lower part of its band because its presence long ran through regional and specialist attention, and because its exterior was never given a front of its own.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: peristyle, frieze, balustrade, drum and dome stand as one idea, and the idea has outlived the court it was meant for, the patronage of the Catholic Monarchs and the humanist Rome that made it, as a model copied and answered for five centuries. The use is continuous in its purpose, a consecrated chapel over the holy spot, entered and visited. Its presence is wide in the tradition and modest on the ground, a small building in a convent court, known to architects more than to crowds. The fabric is largely the makers’, with later work charged, chiefly on the dome and lantern and in the crypt, its extent argued. Centuries, form whole and in use: the later work at the top holds it low in that measure.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 590 years. Form: whole. Every part that carries the meaning survives as painted: donor, Virgin, Child, angel, loggia, garden, parapet, city and mountains; nothing is lost or replaced. Presence: in the Louvre for over two centuries, continuously on view and continuously studied; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a small oak panel with the ordinary history of its age, cleaned of discoloured varnish in a campaign completed in 2024 without loss to the image. Centuries, form whole: the figure sits in the lower half of that band because the panel is less widely present than the very few images known to everyone, and because the fabric has been treated.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over more than two centuries, the text whole and performed. The score has been in print since 1800, published by its maker, and the work has been performed without a break since 1798, never needing revival, a rare case among the oratorios of its century, Messiah the other. It is a staple of choral societies and orchestras in German, in English and in other languages, and it has been recorded continually. The surface fixed to its moment is larger than the Ninth’s: the English text of 1800 is stiff and has been revised, the pictorialism was judged naive in the nineteenth century and is now heard as period charm, and Eve’s place beside Adam is a document of its age. None of these interrupted performance. The figure sits below the Ninth and Winterreise for that surface, and for a presence more ceremonial and choral than central to concert life.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, vault and the east arm round the shrine are legible as built, and the church has outlived the monastery, the cult of the saint, the Plantagenets and the confessional state that made it. The governing use survives: coronation in this building without a break from Edward I in 1274 to Charles III in 2023, daily worship, burial into the twentieth century. The charges: the monastic use was lost at the Dissolution of 1540; the shrine lost its cult at the Reformation; the exterior has been refaced and restored again and again, under Wren, Scott and Pearson and in the twentieth century; and the church was bombed in 1941. Centuries, form whole and in use, with use and fabric charged.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over more than five centuries. The form survives whole and legible: front, porch, nave and chapels stand as one system, and the building has outlived the Gonzaga, the Mantuan state and the humanist argument that produced it, as a model copied and answered ever since. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a church since the late fifteenth century, the relic still kept beneath the crossing and still venerated. The fabric is largely the builders’ own brick, and the later campaigns are part of the one work, not loss. What holds the figure in the lower part of its range: a surface much repainted and in places restored, a fabric whose present condition is not established here, and a presence not the widest a building can have.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: nave, both choirs, both transepts, the chapter house, the front and the three towers stand, and nothing of the unit has fallen to ruin. The use is unbroken: a cathedral since 1092, its purpose carried through the Reformation, Catholic before it and Church of England since. The fabric carries the charges: centuries of repair, as in every limestone church; the medieval glass largely lost; the crossing tower fallen once in the thirteenth century, an endurance that failed and is charged here; the shrines that were the Angel Choir’s purpose lost; and the central and western spires gone from the silhouette, outside the unit but a loss to what the building was. The charges are real and moderate against a whole form.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about 36,000 years, and the images are legible, many as fresh as when drawn, because rockfall sealed the cave and left its air still. The losses are calcite veils, the scratches of bears over some figures, and faded or flaked passages; none takes a principal panel. Few surviving images in any medium are older, and none of comparable achievement. Presence is the charge. The work was out of all human sight for many millennia, has been known for thirty-two years, and since its discovery has been seen by a handful, its public presence carried by photograph, film and facsimile. Fabric is under constant monitoring. The figure sits low in the upper range: form whole across an unmatched span, presence charged.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. The form is whole: all five scenes stand, nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced, and the triptych still opens and closes. Presence: in the cathedral it was made for through nearly all its life, with one interruption, when the French took it to Paris in 1794; it came back in 1815, and in the two decades between it was in public view. Its standing has never fallen. The fabric is oak panel, with the ordinary history of cleaning, varnish and conservation of a panel of its age. Continuous presence in place lifts the figure a little within the band for centuries with form whole; the removal is a small charge, and the work does not reach the millennial survivors.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: facade, columns, dome and interior stand as completed in 1737, and the idea has outlived the plague, the vow and the empire that produced it, which ended in 1918. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a church in daily service for nearly three centuries, a parish church still. The fabric is largely original, with the dome fresco restored in the early 2000s. The charge is to setting: the glacis, the river and the approach toward the Hofburg are gone, and the facade now addresses a square of traffic. That is a loss to how the form was meant to be seen, not to the form, and with the span of under three centuries it holds the axis at 9.3.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 213 years. The text survives whole, as published in 1813, with no lost parts and no contested version, and nothing is charged on form. Presence: three editions in its first four years, in 1813, 1813 and 1817; in print without a break since Bentley’s Standard Novels took it up in 1833; taught wherever English literature is taught; adapted on film in 1940, as a BBC serial in 1995 and by Joe Wright in 2005, and rewritten without end. Its surface is fixed hard to its moment, the entail, the militia quartered at Meryton, the economics of the Regency gentry, and it has outlived every one of those conditions. The span is centuries, but only just over two, and presence among the widest of any English novel adds little to it: the book does not stand level with works read for millennia.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: plan, section, interior orders and front stand as completed by about 1610, unaltered in their governing idea, and the building has outlived the republic, the doge and the ceremony it was made to receive; it has been copied, answered and drawn for four centuries. The use as a church has run without a break, though the monastic use was broken by the Napoleonic suppression of 1806 and the monastery put to other uses until its restoration; the church and the choir remain in liturgical use. The fabric has held in a city of subsidence and high water, on piles in the lagoon, and the church’s presence is among the widest a building of its period can have. Held below the top by the break in monastic use and the loss of the ceremony that gave the presbytery its purpose.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five hundred and eighty years. Form: whole. Both figures, the loggia, the garden and the inscription stand and read on the wall the fresco was painted for. Presence: continuous, in view in a working convent until the suppression of 1866 and in a public museum since, an image known across the world; fame earns a tenth at most and is not where the figure rests. Fabric: the fresco has been restored, the extent of loss and retouching is not stated here, and a wall painting has the fragility of its wall. Nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Placed in the lower half of the band for a form whole across centuries, by the restoration and the exposure, not at its top.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole. The two figures, the two clouds and the gold void are fully legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous. The screens are held by Kennin-ji, designated a National Treasure, shown in rotation at the Kyoto National Museum, and reproduced to the point of ubiquity in Japan; the temple itself shows a high-resolution facsimile. Fabric: gold leaf on paper is fragile in its kind, and the screens need rotation to last; the present state of the surface is not stated here. The row for centuries with form whole, in its lower half for the fragility of the kind, with wide presence adding at most a tenth.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole as completed in 1515: plan, section, buttresses, chapels, turrets and vault are the makers’, and the first glass is in its frames in twenty-five of twenty-six windows. It has outlived the dynasty that founded it, the dynasty that finished it and the religion of its chantry. The use has run for some five centuries, the same institution singing in the same room, though the chantry Masses ended at the Reformation. The glass came through the Reformation and the Civil War, and was stored through the Second World War. The fabric is charged: a Victorian west window, a reordered east end, much restored glass, lost altar fittings.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 388 years. Form: the composition and its figures stand as painted, and no loss is known at the centre of the image. Presence: in the Medici collection from 1638 and in the Pitti since, in one city throughout and, since the Pitti became a public gallery, continuously on view; known across Europe through the letter and through reproduction, though not of the widest fame, which in any case lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, lining, varnish and cleaning. The occasion fixes the canvas to the Thirty Years’ War; the argument does not. It sits in the lower middle of the band for centuries, below the widest presences.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Centuries, with the widest presence. The hundred chapters have been in print since 1592 and read without a break for more than four hundred years, in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and in translation across the world since Arthur Waley’s abridged Monkey of 1942; its figures are present to children, the stage, the screen and games as well as to scholars, though fame of that kind is credited by a tenth at most. Form survives whole: the hundred chapters stand. Two small charges fall on the text. The 1592 edition was largely displaced in the Qing by commented and abridged editions, and recovered its standing only in the twentieth century; and the chapter on Tripitaka’s parents is held to be a Qing addition, so that the hundred chapters as read are not quite the hundred as first printed. A survival of four centuries stands below the millennia, and the figure sits in the middle of the band for centuries.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Three hundred and seven years, on the step at which centuries take 9.2 to 9.6. Form: the text is whole and has been read without a break. Presence: never out of print, translated into very many languages, read by children in abridgment and by scholars entire, adapted without pause; but the widest presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is presence, not proof. Charged: the book is more read in abridgment than whole, and the spiritual matter that fills much of the whole is skipped by many who know the story, a charge on the presence of the text, not of the myth. It has outlived the slave trade it takes part in and the mercantile empire it imagines, and those parts are read now against it, which is survival of another kind. Not level with the millennial texts.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two millennia, and the text survives whole: all five books and every poem, carried through the medieval manuscript tradition and printed since the fifteenth century, with only the variants usual for a classical author. Form carries no charge. Presence is continuous but narrower than the Metamorphoses: the book was read in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as part of Ovid, taught in Latin schools, translated steadily, and returned to wide attention in the twentieth century by the poets of exile. For a long stretch it was read mainly as a lesser Ovid, and that is a charge on presence. The charge holds the axis a step below a text read whole without break; the presence was narrowed, never broken.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about five thousand one hundred years. Form: as it can be read, whole, with both faces legible in every register; no loss that carries meaning is known. Presence: charged. The object was deposited in a temple and lay buried for most of its existence, out of all attention, until the season of 1897 to 1898; since then it has been on view in Cairo and is among the most reproduced objects of antiquity, which is presence and earns only a little. Fabric: hard stone, with surface wear consistent with its age, the smallest charge. Millennia of survival with the form whole argue high in the row; the long burial holds the figure low within it. The strongest of the twelve.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The group on its pedestal in its square has stood in the open air beside a lagoon for 530 years, and it is legible entire: horse, rider, stance, face, free foreleg. Presence: continuous and wide, in public view every day of that time, never moved from its place except for its protection in the two world wars. Fabric is the charge: the original partial gilding is lost, the bronze has suffered corrosion from salt air and pollution and has needed repair and restoration, and the pedestal stone has weathered. None of it takes the form. Nothing in the proposition is fixed to its moment: force mastered by will has outlived the condotta and the Republic both. The highest of the twelve, held from the top by the fabric.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives and is legible: the shaft of 1198, the belfry of 1568, the court, the church of 1506 and its Renaissance ring, in place and whole. The use is unbroken: the tower has called the city to prayer for over eight centuries, first from the minaret and then with bells, and the precinct has been a cathedral since 1248. The charges: the tower lost its first crown in the fourteenth century, made good by the belfry, which is the work’s own; the crossing failed twice, in 1511 and in 1888, the second time with neighbouring vaults and piers, a failure of the first builders’ structure; and the west portals and other fabric were completed or renewed in the nineteenth century.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at close to four centuries. Form: whole. The four figures, the tomb, the inscription and the shadow, all that carries the meaning, are legible, and no loss or replacement in them is known. Presence: continuous, in the French royal collection from the later seventeenth century and in the Louvre since the museum opened, among the most reproduced paintings of French classicism and of the art-historical canon; the popular literature of the late twentieth century carried it far outside painting, which is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: no history of damage or restoration is documented here, and the evidence of condition is general rather than particular. Set above The Swing’s 9.2 on this axis for the longer span and the unbroken public presence, and below the top of the band for that general evidence.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: the line of the abbey on the rock, the courts, the church with its towers and dome, the terrace and the paired wings stand as designed, and they have outlived the conditions that produced them, the Counter-Reformation estate, the monastery as residence and the empire it was built to receive. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a Benedictine community has lived on this rock since 1089 and in this building since it was made, and its school is still taught here; the house was not dissolved under Joseph II. The charges fall on fabric: roofs and tower caps rebuilt, by report after a fire soon after completion, and surfaces renewed more than once. Some three centuries, the form whole and in use.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: in print since 1799, the six quartets complete and none of them in doubt. Presence is continuous. Haydn’s late quartets never left the repertory of professional and amateur players, and Nos. 3, 4 and 5 are among the most performed quartets in existence, over a span of more than two centuries. Nothing in the fabric has needed retouching. The surface fixed to its moment, a court commission and a wartime hymn, reads as the work’s world, not a date on it. The charge is in the unit: the set is heard whole more on record than in the hall, where its members are played singly.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 364 years. Form: whole. The canvas is the canvas Rembrandt finished; nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced, and unlike The Night Watch it was not cut down. Presence: in the city’s possession, now in the Rijksmuseum on loan from the City of Amsterdam, and at the centre of the Dutch seventeenth century as the museum shows it. Its image has passed far beyond the museum, which is presence and lifts the figure by a tenth at most. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age. With the form whole, at a little over three and a half centuries, the figure sits in the lower part of the band that centuries earn, as the span requires.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in the revision of 1761 that Voltaire made himself; nothing is lost. Presence is wide and continuous: read since 1759 despite its condemnation, taught in every French curriculum and everywhere in translation as the standard text of the Enlightenment, and translated into most written languages. The span is two and a half centuries, and the figure stands in the middle of what that span allows, below the texts of millennia. The charge is the rubric’s own, a surface fixed to its moment: Admiral Byng, the Jesuits of Paraguay, the Seven Years’ War, the Lisbon disaster, Fréron and the Paris quarrels of chapter 22 are topical satire, and a reader now needs notes for some of them. The book has outlived them all: the argument stands without its targets.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made; nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced, and the composition reads as it was built. Presence: on public view in Vienna, and now among the best known pictures of its century; fame is presence, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: an oak panel of this age carries the ordinary history of joins, cracks, retouching, varnish and later restoration, and no loss is known that touches the form. The surface is fixed to a moment in costume and custom, and it has outlived that moment entirely: the feast reads without a gloss. In the band for centuries with form whole, toward its foot.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Two thousand years, read without a break: copied, taught and imitated through the Middle Ages, printed from the first decades of printing, translated into every major European language. The single letters survive whole in form. The charges are on form and on presence. Sappho’s letter came down apart from the rest; parts of the double letters are held to rest on late witnesses, and interpolation is suspected in places; the authorship of the fifteenth letter and of the pairs has been disputed. The book as read is a little less secure than a text handed down whole. And for a long stretch it was read mainly in the academy and dismissed as juvenilia, recovered only in the last half century, though the neglect was of esteem, not of presence: it stayed in print and in the schools. Those charges hold it a step below a whole text continuously read.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole and legible: enclosure, court, tower and the T-plan hall stand as the Aghlabids laid them out, and the building has outlived the Aghlabids, the Fatimids, the Zirids, the Hafsids and the Ottomans, and the eclipse of its city after the Hilali invasions. The use is continuous: a congregational mosque for some twelve centuries, still in prayer. The fabric is in great part of the ninth century: the arcades of the hall, the dome before the mihrab, the mihrab, the minbar and, on most accounts, the minaret. The charges: repairs and rebuildings of walls, buttresses and court arcades under the Hafsids and later, and modern restoration of unsettled extent. Form whole and in use across centuries.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about 3,370 years, and the form is whole, with its colour nearly as made, which is very rare for ancient polychromy. The losses are small against what makes the work: the uraeus broken away, the rims of the ears chipped, some paint worn at the crown’s edges. The empty left eye is not a loss; the socket bears no sign of an inlay ever fixed. Presence carries the charge: for some 3,250 years the bust lay buried in an abandoned workshop, seen by no one, a survival of fabric and not of attention. Since 1924 its presence has been continuous and among the widest of any ancient object. Stucco over limestone: fragile, and sound.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about 365 years. The form is whole: the image is the one the painter finished, the woman, the stream, the bread, the wall and the light standing as painted. Presence: held in Dutch collections from its making; carried through two centuries in which it survived as a picture while its painter’s name nearly lapsed; then at the centre of his small corpus, publicly shown in the Rijksmuseum and among the most visited pictures in the Netherlands. Fame is presence and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: lining and varnish are the ordinary record of an oil of its age, and weigh lightly. Centuries with the form whole place it high in its row; a canvas is not a work of millennia, and it stands a tenth below Las Meninas at 9.4.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about six and a quarter centuries. Form: whole. Both panels survive, interiors and exteriors, with the composition entire; nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: hidden for most of its life in private collections and seen by few until its exhibition and purchase in the early twentieth century; since 1929 on view in the National Gallery and central to the image of its period. Fabric: tempera and gold have held well for their age; the losses that can be named are in the colour, a darkening of some of the blues and a tarnishing of silver leaf, with the ordinary history of cleaning and conservation. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held in the middle of that row for the long concealment and the altered colour.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole after six centuries: the nine bays, the steps, the entablature and the upper storey stand as the first campaign left them, the grey on white legible, and the form has outlived the guild’s charity in a republic that made it, as a model copied on the square and across the continent. The use is continuous in its own purpose: the building has received and cared for children since 1445 and does so still, a continuity of first use few buildings can match. The fabric carries the charges: the church was remade in the eighteenth century, the interior adapted many times for the institution and recast for the museum in 2016, the wheel opened and closed, surfaces renewed by restoration.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole. The three figures are the figures Bernini carved, with nothing that carries meaning lost or replaced. Presence: nearly three centuries in the Villa Ludovisi, a private collection though a known one, then since 1908 on view in the Galleria Borghese, continuously before the public; its presence is very wide, which earns at most a tenth. Fabric: surface cleaning is the ordinary history of an exhibited marble, and the base is weighed as survival only. Its setting has changed, and it now stands free in the centre of a room, which alters how it is seen but not what survives. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, held in the lower part of its row for the long private keeping and for the unsettled history of the base.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at three hundred and seventy eight years. Form: whole. The image survives legible: the sun, the road of light, the architecture and the departure all carry as they were made. Presence: in collections since its making and on public view in the National Gallery for two centuries, central to the display in which Turner chose to be measured against it. Fame lifts the figure only a little, and its presence, though high, is not of the widest: it is a connoisseur’s picture more than a world image. Fabric, the smallest charge: thin glazes and small figures are reported worn and restored, which is not established in detail. The span is under four centuries. The figure sits in the lower half of the row for centuries with form whole.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half thousand years. Form: almost whole. The figure, the head, both hands, the papyrus, both inlaid eyes and much of the paint survive; the loss is the brush in the right hand and the original setting. The brush’s absence is legible, since the hand keeps its shape. Presence: for most of its existence the figure was out of view, sealed in a tomb, which was its intended state; since 1850 it has been continuously present, in the Louvre for more than a century and a half and among the most reproduced works of ancient art. Fame lifts it no more than a tenth. Fabric: the limestone is sound and the paint worn but remarkable for its survival.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible after 370 years: platform, gates, court, cloisters, prayer hall, domes and minarets all stand, and the design has outlived the empire that made it, copied and answered. The use has run since 1656 as the city’s congregational mosque, with one break: after 1857 the British occupied it and closed it to worship, its demolition was discussed and not carried out, and it was returned some years later. The break is short in a long life, but real, and the city fabric that gave the platform its meaning was in part cleared about it. The sandstone has weathered and been repaired, some stone replaced. The span, the break and the clearing hold it where it is.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival over two millennia is demonstrated. The three-book edition survives whole. The five-book first edition is lost, but by the author’s own revision, as the prefatory epigram says, and the loss is not the work’s. The doubtful 3.5 and the usual interpolations are a small charge on form. The book has been copied and read without break from the Carolingian age, taught in the medieval schools, translated in the Renaissance and studied ever since. It has been read less than the Metamorphoses, at times eclipsed by it or held in suspicion for its matter, and in the modern age chiefly in the Latin classroom and the academy, which holds it below the top of the axis. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment beyond what the book makes into matter: Rome, its races and its festivals.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the two terraced houses, the plaza, the stream and the kivas as they were before Coronado’s men came; the later doors, windows and ovens change the face, not the governing order. The use is continuous: habitation by the same people for the same purpose for more than five centuries, through Spanish conquest, the Revolt of 1680, the shelling of 1847 and the twentieth century, with ceremony unbroken. The fabric is wholly renewed and renewing, and no adobe surface is old. That is survival by maintenance, a smaller charge than any ruin, but a charge. What holds the figure: the uncertainty of what fabric is original and how old the oldest walls are, and the loss of the earlier church.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about three hundred years, the image whole and legible, with no loss known that takes from the work. Presence: on public view at the National Gallery for nearly two centuries, continuously before the public, and among the best known Venetian views, widely reproduced; fame is presence, not proof, and adds a tenth at most. It has outlived its first conditions: the yard is gone, and the canvas now carries the city it shows. Fabric: oil on canvas; the condition is reported as good and legible, and its history in detail is not known here. Held at 9.3, near the foot of what centuries with form whole can earn, because three centuries are not millennia; raised within that for its state and its presence.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: three arches, two rows of shops, the gap at the middle, the corridor along the east side and round the Mannelli tower, all legible as built and added. The use survives without a break: a crossing in daily use since 1345, its shops in commerce throughout and its goldsmiths in place since 1593. The fabric has been charged. The approaches at both ends, and the buildings the corridor ran through there, were blown up in 1944 and rebuilt; the flood of 1966 wrecked the shops; the back-shops have been altered piecemeal; and the corridor was damaged by the bomb of 1993 near the Uffizi. Centuries, with form whole and in use, set the band at 9.2 to 9.7; the rebuilding at the ends and in the shop fabric holds it in the lower half, and the widest presence lifts it a tenth.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five hundred and thirty years. Form: the image and the inscriptions are legible, and nothing that carries the work’s meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: a scroll is by nature kept rolled and shown seldom, and this one has passed through the custody of collectors to the museum, not on continuous view; but it has been held throughout as the emblem of its painter and his manner, copied by the schools that claimed him, and is now a National Treasure shown in rotation. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: ink on paper is the most fragile of supports, and wear, remounting and toning are its ordinary history. The lower part of the row for centuries with form whole.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, over two thousand years. The form is whole: podium, stair, porch, cella, colonnade, entablature and pediment survive, and the building is often called the best-preserved Roman temple, a claim the evidence supports. It has outlived the empire, the cult and the colony, and it has been copied and answered. Its use was never abandoned: civic, domestic, religious, archival and museum uses in turn, and that continuous use is why it stands. But its own use as a temple is lost, and the cella was altered for later purposes. The fabric is largely the original limestone, weathered and repeatedly restored; its bronze letters are lost and its forum is gone. The lost cult, the lost forum and the reworked interior hold the figure in the lower part of the band for form whole across millennia and kept in use.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at four centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image Hals made: the face, the hat, the collar, the embroidered sleeve and the inscription survive legible, and nothing that carries meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in private hands for about two and a half centuries and little valued for much of that time; shown in London from the 1870s, in the national collection since 1897 and on public view there since 1900. Its fame since the Hertford purchase is very wide and lifts the figure by a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, nothing charged that cannot be named. Its long neglect is a fact of presence, not a loss.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 113 years: in print throughout, edited twice for the Pléiade, in 1954 and 1987–89, and in English from 1922. The surface is heavily fixed: the genealogies of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the actors of the narrator’s schooldays (“our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got, our second Delaunay”, Combray II), the Dreyfus Affair, the fashions of the Bois. But the work narrates the death of that surface, and the first volume already mourns it as “the death of the gods.” (Noms de pays : le nom). The surface has become the work’s own world. Two costs remain: the annotation it asks for, and a text of the last volumes that is not fixed, with two versions of the sixth.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Three survivals are weighed together, form first, and the form carries the axis. The governing idea is legible whole from the stylobate and the standing fronts: an eight-columned peristyle on a curved platform round a two-room cella, copied and answered as a model for twenty-four centuries and continuously the emblem of the civilisation that made it. The use was long: temple, church, Latin cathedral and mosque, substantially intact for more than two thousand years until the explosion of 1687, and in view daily since. What holds the axis is loss, charged in proportion to what it carried: the pediment centres, the defaced metopes and the interior the form was shaped for; roof and paint gone, the long sides opened, the sculpture divided since 1801, part of the stone new marble.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is weighed on its span, one hundred and sixty-nine years, and on the widest presence that span allows. The form survives whole, in the editions of 1857 and 1873, with Flaubert’s manuscripts and drafts preserved; nothing is lost and nothing is charged. It has been in print without a break since 1857, taught in French schools and in courses on the novel everywhere, translated into English many times (Eleanor Marx Aveling in 1886, Steegmuller, Wall and Davis among others) and into most written languages, filmed by Renoir (1934), Minnelli (1949) and Chabrol (1991), and remade by Posy Simmonds as Gemma Bovery (1999). Its surfaces, the July Monarchy, the officiers de santé, provincial credit, are history, and it is read for what they pressed on. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and that holds the figure where it is.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, without an age discount. The form survives whole: the hill as stupa, mandala and path is legible from the plain, the programme is in its order and nearly complete, and it has outlived its dynasty, its court and its religion in its own land. The use broke in kind for most of a thousand years and has come back in kind: the Vesak night, the walk to the summit. The fabric is charged in full: the soft andesite weathered; heads taken from most of the 504 Buddhas; the summit found collapsed and reset in 1907–11; the square terraces taken down to concrete and put back in 1975–83; stupas bombed in 1985 and rebuilt. The makers’ stone on modern bones, twice taken apart, with its heads missing, holds it below the top.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text of 1861 survives whole and settled, with no fragment, no recovered text and no crux of consequence. The court removed six poems from the book of 1857, but the edition of 1861 never held them, and the six themselves survived in Les Épaves (Brussels, 1866) and in every complete edition since; the charge on form is nil. Presence: continuous since publication, taught in French schools and universities, in the Pléiade, translated into every major language and repeatedly into English, quoted in common speech. That is the widest presence a span of a hundred and sixty-five years can show, and it earns the tenth above the usual figure, and no more: the book does not stand level with texts that have lasted millennia.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in Whitman’s own final arrangement; nothing is lost, and the many editions are a surplus of text, not a loss of it. Presence: continuous since 1855 and wide, in print without a break, taught wherever American literature is taught, translated into most written languages, quoted in public life, set to music and read beyond the academy. A hundred and seventy-one years is less than two centuries, and the widest presence such a span can show earns the top of what it can show, and no more: it does not stand level with the texts that have lasted millennia. The surface fixed to its moment, the exposition poems, the Suez and the cable of “Passage to India”, the nationalist boosting, is the smaller part and does not carry the book.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Survival so far is demonstrated, and the axis weighs what the work is built to bear. It has outlived its occasion, a war lost in 1939; its patron, the Republic; the regime it opposed, and its own exile of forty-four years, ended on Picasso’s condition that liberties return first; the attack of 1974; and its use as propaganda, now and then, by every side. The surface is free of its moment. The title names one town on one day and nothing on the canvas does, and the image serves wars Picasso never saw. What holds it is physical. Rolled, shipped and re-stretched many times between 1937 and the late 1950s, the canvas is fragile and is no longer lent. The paint of 1974 was another hand’s and is not charged.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1847. Charlotte Brontë’s edition of 1850, which normalised the punctuation and softened the spelling of Joseph’s speech, is known and set aside; the modern critical text restores the first, and no part is lost. The printer’s misprints of 1847 are a small charge on the fabric, and are made good. Presence: in print since 1850 without a break, translated into most written languages, taught across the English-speaking world and beyond, filmed by William Wyler (1939), by Luis Buñuel as Abismos de pasión (1954) and by Andrea Arnold (2011), made an opera by Bernard Herrmann and by Carlisle Floyd, and a song by Kate Bush (1978). The entail and the Yorkshire farm are history, and the book is read for what they carried. Held below the top because a survival of under two centuries does not stand with the works of millennia.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: in the repertory of the Opéra-Comique from 1902 without a break, abroad within a few years and at every major house since; recorded complete since 1941, under occupation, and continuously after. It has outlived symbolism, which is dead; the play, which is rarely staged and is now carried by the opera; and modernism’s dismissal of Debussy as atmosphere, which Boulez reversed. It has absorbed stagings as opposite as Wilson’s and Tcherniakov’s. The surface fixed to its moment: the symbolist diction, “petit père” and the repeated half-sentences, which drew laughter in 1902; the fairytale décor the text requires; a casting need for a boy’s voice; and a quietness that empties houses unless the staging is strong, a connoisseur’s opera rather than a staple. 124 years, continuous, with a frequency cost that is real.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is weighed over seventy-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Orwell finished it, the Appendix with it, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: the widest a book of its age can show. It has been in print without break since 1949, is translated into most written languages and taught in schools across the English-speaking world and beyond, was filmed for BBC television in 1954 and by Michael Radford in 1984, and is read again at each turn of political deceit. Fabric: its surface is the rationed London of 1948, and it has outlived the year of its title without becoming a period piece. The widest presence lifts the axis above what seventy-seven years alone would show, and no further: a survival of decades does not stand level with a survival of millennia.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 426 years, and in place: the canvas hangs on the wall it was painted for, beside the companions it was painted with. Its altarpiece’s first version burned in Berlin in 1945. It came through a reputation that fell for two centuries, Poussin, as Félibien reports him, saying Caravaggio had come to destroy painting; through candle smoke; and through restorations whose extent could not be verified. Its surface, the clothes of 1600, was the most topical of its age and now reads as a period’s costume. What holds the axis is physical. The ground has darkened, sinking the shadows and the space behind the left group: not the painter’s charge, but the work’s condition.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 212 years, scored with no discount for age: through damage in a road accident when the Prado’s paintings were evacuated in the Civil War, and through the restoration after it. The surface is fixed to its moment in one respect: the shakos and greatcoats of a Napoleonic army, and a patriotic occasion. That surface has been outlived. The image is read now as any execution by any state, and the uniform is no longer seen as French. What holds it a step below is the surface seen, in part restored after damage and to that extent a restorer’s judgment. Read as an image, it is among the most secure in painting.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is a hundred and eleven years. The form survives whole and as Kafka authorised it, published in his lifetime and revised by him, with nothing lost and no editorial question about its shape. The presence is as wide as a century allows: in print continuously, translated into most written languages and many times into English, taught in schools and universities across the world, adapted for stage, film and opera, and so present in common reference that waking as an insect needs no source named. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the commercial traveller and the lodgers are period setting, but the book does not depend on them. It stands at the widest a century can show and no higher, since a century does not outscore millennia.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then on presence. The text survives whole, in Blake’s own etched copies, with nothing lost, and the work as words and designs survives in the copies themselves, which are its form. Presence spans more than two centuries, but for about seventy years the book was all but unread, a few copies in a few hands, until Gilchrist’s Life of 1863; that is long neglect, and it is charged. Since then presence has been of the widest: The Tyger and London are among the most anthologised and taught poems in English, read in schools across the English-speaking world and set to music again and again. A further charge: most readers meet the words in type, without the designs, so the work as etched reaches far fewer than its text, a gap facsimiles and the online archive have narrowed.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 112 years, with no discount for age. The book sold poorly on publication; B. W. Huebsch published it in New York in 1916, and it has been read since wherever literature in English is taught. “Araby” and “The Dead” are among the most anthologised stories in the language, and John Huston filmed “The Dead” in 1987. The text is whole: what separates the text of 1914 from the critical texts of 1967 and 1993 is words and points, not matter. It has outlived its conditions. The Castle, the Parnell split, the municipal ward and the Revival’s quarrels are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: its surface is fixed to one city in one decade, its coins, shops, songs, priests and politicians named, and it needs more annotation than its plainness suggests.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form survives whole: the undulating oval under the coffered dome and lantern, and the façade’s counter-rhythms, are legible exactly as built, and the form outlived its conditions twice over, the Baroque that produced it and the century and a half in which that Baroque was despised. The use is continuous in its own purpose, through the suppressions and the Risorgimento: a working church still. The structure is the maker’s; the stucco has been renewed; the medallion’s painting is lost; the restoration of the 1990s remade render; the crossroads is now a traffic junction. Held below the top because the record is 380 years, not nineteen centuries, and the survival of stucco is renewal rather than endurance. The geometry has not needed renewal at all.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over nearly four centuries. The text survives whole, in two authorised printings, 1638 and 1645, and in the poet’s own working manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, with nothing lost; there is no charge on form or fabric. Presence: in print in Milton’s poems continuously since 1645, taught without break wherever English poetry is taught, among the most argued-over short poems in English criticism, and with phrases that live outside the academy. The charge is on presence. The poem is read today mainly in the academy and by readers of poetry, its classical and ecclesiastical apparatus increasingly needs annotation, and its church politics of 1637 is a surface fixed to its moment. Its life in the language keeps the charge small.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated. The image has lasted about a thousand years on silk, through the fall of dynasties and successive owners, whose seals, with Dong Qichang’s inscription, belong to the record. It has outlived the conditions that produced it, the cosmology of the Northern Song and a recluse’s way of life. Mountains, water and a road do not date; only the travellers’ loads and the temple roofs fix the surface to a time. The cost is physical and in proportion: the silk has darkened, so the light colour barely reads and the mist and waterfall are less luminous than they were. That takes from the image, not the structure.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: Beethoven’s score is in print, with nothing lost or in doubt, and two centuries after its first performance the text is complete and performed. Presence has been continuous but rationed. The work needs a large and very able chorus and four soloists, it is too long for the liturgy it sets, and it is heard far less often than the Ninth. In the last century it has stood at the summit of the choral repertory, recorded by every major conductor of choral music. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the occasion is forgotten, and the war in the Agnus Dei is heard as any war. Held below the top for the rationed presence.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries since the making and more than a century and a half since publication. Form: whole; all eighty-two images survive in the plates, in the first edition and in Goya’s proofs. Presence: continuous since 1863 and of the widest kind, in every major print room, in endless reproduction, and in a fixed place in the account of modern art and of war. Fabric: the copper plates survive, worn by later printings and steel-faced, so that later editions misrepresent the tonal range; the first edition and the proofs carry the image as made. The figure sits at the seam of two centuries, with a light charge for half a century without any public and for the worn later states.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A hundred and twenty-two years since the premiere. The text survives whole, and nothing is charged on form. Presence is as wide as the span allows: staged continuously since 1904, in Russian and in translation into most of the world’s theatre languages, a fixture of national and repertory theatres, taught as a founding text of modern drama, filmed and adapted. Its surface is tied to a moment, the estate after the Emancipation, a debt auction, dachas for the railway’s summer people, and it has outlived those conditions entirely: it is staged now for what they pressed upon. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown, and a century and a quarter is not the span of the oldest works on the desk, which this figure does not reach.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over 233 years. Form: whole. No part of the image is known to be lost or replaced, and the inscriptions and the empty wall, which carry the meaning, stand. Presence: charged. After about two years in the Convention’s hall the canvas was withdrawn and kept privately, through the painter’s imprisonment, exile and death, seen in Paris in 1846 and little otherwise, until the museum in Brussels took it in 1886; the studio replicas carried the image while it was hidden. Fabric: not examined here, and nothing is charged against it. It has outlived its purpose, its regime, its subject’s standing and its maker’s politics; the cult it was made for ended within a year. The long withdrawal holds it at the foot of its step, beside The Starry Night’s 9.1 at 137 years.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the 1854 score has been in print and in performance since 1854, 172 years, and nothing is lost or in doubt beyond performance practice, the traditional cuts, the second strophes, the cadenzas and the interpolated high notes. Presence has been continuous since the revision, and the brindisi and the preludes are known well beyond the opera house; that width earns one tenth above the usual step for the span, and no more is taken for it. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the demimonde of 1850 now reads as the work’s own world, not as a period to be excused. The one early cost, the failure of the first night, lasted fourteen months, until the revision was heard.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 374 years. The ensemble is whole and in place, still a chapel over the tomb it was made for. It outlived more than a century in which the Baroque was the byword for falsehood and excess, and returned to the centre. The surface is partly fixed to its moment: the theatre is the Counter-Reformation’s manner, and the Cornaro a family display of their decade. But the face and the vision have outlived both, and most at the balustrade now know neither. What holds it below the top is the light: the central device is daylight from a window no one can see, which comes as designed only at some hours. This image is made partly of light.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One hundred and sixty-five years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text survives whole, as published, in the serial and the volumes; the cancelled ending survives beside it, an addition to what is read, not a loss. The presence is as wide as a novel’s can be: in print without a break since 1861, a set text in schools across the English-speaking world for generations, translated widely, adapted for film, television and stage again and again, and Miss Havisham passed into the language as a type. It has outlived its conditions: transportation, the hulks, the Newgate of the 1820s and the gentleman’s allowance are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. Nothing in it has been lost or long neglected; at its age, survival can show no more.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: moat, wall, axis, Outer and Inner Court and the graded sequence are as legible as when finished, and the fires proved it, for each time a hall burned it was rebuilt to the plan and the rank of what was lost. The form had more authority than the timber, and it has outlived the empire that made it. The use changed and intensified: rule and residence, which survived five centuries and ended in 1924, then a museum for a century, its procession still walked from south to north by millions a year. Charged: the lost household; the fabric, largely Qing; the losses by fire; the occupation and looting of 1900; the removal of the court’s furnishings and collections; and repair and repainting whose fidelity is not judged here. The lost household and the renewed body hold it below the top.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the print survives, Bach’s corrected copy was recovered in 1974, and nothing is lost or in doubt beyond the Aria’s authorship. The cost is in presence. Known to players and to Forkel after 1750, and in the collected edition by the 1850s, the work was rarely performed in public before the twentieth century: a gap of hearing, not of loss. Since the 1930s it has been among the most performed and recorded keyboard works. The surface fixed to its moment is small, the dances and the overture now heard as characters, not fashion, and it has outlived its instrument.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and eighty-four years. Form: the story survives whole and legible, and nothing that makes it is lost. Presence is as wide as its span allows: read in Russian schools continuously, translated into most written languages, anthologised wherever the short story is taught, and filmed and animated again and again, by Kozintsev and Trauberg (1926), by Alberto Lattuada as Il cappotto (1952), by Aleksei Batalov (1959), and by Yuri Norstein, whose animated version has been in the making for decades. It stands at the widest presence its span can show, and no higher. Fabric carries no charge. The story has outlived the Table of Ranks it depicts, and is read now for what that order pressed on a man.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over five centuries. The image is wholly legible, no part that carried meaning is lost, and it has been in view, collected and discussed continuously since 1514, never needing rediscovery. Its fabric is spread across many impressions in many collections, which guards it against a single loss better than any panel. Against that, paper is sensitive to light, the sheets are seldom on show, impressions run from superb to weak, and the fate of the copper plate is not established. Weak sheets are not charged; the fine ones are the work’s survival. Its surface belongs to humoral theory and Ficinian astrology, and it has outlived both.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival of centuries. The form survives whole in both versions, with no loss; that there are two is no charge, since both are complete, printed and distinguished. Presence has been continuous since 1774: in print without a break, a fixture of German schooling and university study, translated into the major languages many times over, adapted for the opera stage and in film. The fabric gives nothing to charge. What holds the figure at the lower edge of what centuries allow is the kind of presence: a good share of the reading is of a document of its age, the Werther fever and the cult of sensibility, and the surface, the effusion, the exclamation and the Ossian it worships, is visibly of its moment. It remains a book the general reader opens in many languages, not only one the academy keeps; nothing here stands level with the texts of millennia.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival of nearly four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the two printings of 1636, with their variants, are a matter of editing, not loss, and charge nothing material. Presence: continuously read and staged in Spain, a set text of Spanish schooling, translated into the major European languages from the Romantic period on, and staged in English in new versions within living memory. The charges fall on presence, not text: an eclipse in the eighteenth century under neoclassical taste, and outside the Spanish-speaking world a presence held largely by the academy and by occasional productions rather than general reading. That sets it in the row for centuries, above a text read mainly in the academy, because in its own language it is not, and well below the survivals of millennia.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over just more than two centuries, at the foot of the step for centuries. The text survives whole: five odes were printed under Keats’s eye in 1820, and Indolence survives in Charles Brown’s transcript, its stanza order uncertain, a small charge on form. Presence has been continuous since the Victorian revival: the odes are among the most anthologised, taught and memorised poems in English, read in schools across the English-speaking world, and To Autumn is commonly named among the most nearly perfect short poems in the language. The charges fall on presence. A lyric of sound carries less across languages than a novel, so its life outside English is narrower than that of the widest classics, and the three decades after 1820 were thinly read.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: after 493 years the image is whole, every figure and object legible. The one charge falls where it hurts. The skull, the part that makes the work, was abraded and repainted over the centuries and reconstructed in a restoration of the 1990s, so what is seen there now is in some measure a modern reading of Holbein’s form, and how much is disputed. Its geometry, fixed by the projection, was never lost. Presence: private for more than three and a half centuries, then continuously on view in the National Gallery since 1890 and among its most visited pictures. Fabric: panel and paint stable. Whole in form after centuries, with a heavy repair at the decisive place.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival over two and a half centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole as published, its devices included; whatever the ninth volume is, it is what Sterne printed. Presence: continuously in print, translated into the principal European languages, with a particular life in German and Russian, taught as a founding text of the novel and of its self-consciousness, and filmed once, as a film about failing to film it (A Cock and Bull Story, 2005). Its surface carries period matter, the siege-craft of William’s and Marlborough’s wars, the obstetric controversies, the scholastic learning Walter cites, but as the matter of comedy, not as a topical satire. Charged: its presence is narrower than that of the widest survivors of its century, and it is more taught than read.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: plan, elevation, dome, lantern and spiral are Borromini’s and in place, legible as built, and the idea has outlived the papal university that produced it, a model drawn, engraved and answered for three and a half centuries. The use survives in part: the church is consecrated and used for worship, but the university left in the 1930s, the palace is an archive, and the church opens only for short hours, so the use it was made for, the chapel of a living university, is lost. The fabric is largely the seventeenth century’s, restored more than once, the altar painting finished by another hand. Wide presence earns a little: it is a fixed image of the Roman Baroque, though not among the widest. Centuries stood, the form whole and in use; charged, to the foot of that step, for the first use lost.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in many manuscripts, with variation among witnesses but no lacuna of consequence; nothing is charged. Presence: continuous in Iceland for some seven centuries, copied by hand into the nineteenth century and then printed, read in the schools and by the nation as its own, and translated into the major European languages. Abroad the presence is real but held mainly by the academy and by committed readers, which is grounds for a lower figure than the widest. Fabric: the surface fixed to its moment, the procedure of a court that no longer sits, has become a reason it is read. The span is centuries, the text whole and read without a break in its own language.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half centuries. Form: whole. The image is the one the painter left; whether he meant to work it further is a question of finish, not of loss, and is not charged. Presence: thin for most of its life, in a bishop’s palace in Moravia, outside the main traffic of attention for nearly three centuries; recovered in the twentieth century, and since then at the centre of every account of late Titian. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of a large old oil, lining and cleaning, and a dissolved surface is more vulnerable than a closed one. The long obscurity holds the axis at the foot of the range a whole form of this age commands.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 418 years. Form: whole. The composition, every figure, the architecture and the signature survive and are legible. Presence: in the place it was made for, on the wall of the Order’s oratory, for nearly the whole of its life, which few altarpieces of its age can claim. Fabric: the late technique, thin paint over a dark ground, is vulnerable, and the thin passages are the ones that carry the void; it is the smallest charge, but a real one. Nothing on the surface needs a note: a prison, an execution, a woman’s grief. Set at the foot of the row for centuries with form whole, and a tenth above it for presence in place.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed in the order form, presence, fabric. The form survives whole and legible: the plan of the Western Precinct, the profiles of the Kondō and the pagoda, the octagon of the Yumedono. The presence is continuous: a working temple without a break since the rebuilding, now head temple of the Shōtoku school. The fabric is old timber after thirteen centuries of earthquake and weather; the Kondō and pagoda are standardly described as the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world. The charges: the total loss of the first temple in 670; the burning of the Kondō murals in 1949, now carried by copies, the heaviest; the Edo props, which record the upper eaves sagging; and the full dismantling of 1934 to 1985, so that what stands is old timber reassembled. Few buildings anywhere have kept form, use and fabric together so long.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 365 years, with no age discount. The image is intact: no trimming, no fire, no attack, and a cleaning in 1994. It has outlived its conditions: both gates are gone, the boats are gone, the Republic is gone, and the painting is now the town’s image, so that Delft is known from the south because Vermeer painted it so. The surface is fixed to its moment only in the gates and the boats, and a town in weather needs no Holland to be read. It carried its maker’s name through two centuries in which almost no one knew it, prized as an object in 1696 and 1822 before he was prized as a painter. What costs is physical and small, in the darker passages, and it takes from the image, not the structure.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two hundred and eight years, at the low end of the step for centuries and on the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole, in two authorised versions and the edition of 1823, with the manuscript draft extant; two texts are a richness of record, not a loss, and no charge is taken on form. Presence: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities throughout the English-speaking world, translated into most written languages, and adapted in every decade of film and theatre. Fabric: no charge. What holds the figure at the foot of the step is that for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the novel was known more through its stage and screen descendants than read, and its high standing as a novel dates from the 1970s: the text’s presence is in part borrowed from the myth’s. A survival of two centuries does not stand with the millennia.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a hundred and eighty years. Form: the texts survive whole, in Poe’s printings and his revisions; nothing that made the work is lost, and nothing is charged. Presence: continuous since the 1840s and wider than almost any literary work of its century, in English and in translation, in schools as well as universities, and in film, illustration and popular culture without a break. Fabric: nothing to charge. The surface is fixed to a manner, the Gothic furniture of the 1830s and the magazine’s taste for sensation, and to an extent it dates; but the tales have long outlived that taste, and the presence is the proof. A survival of under two centuries is not scored with the millennia; the widest presence takes one tenth above the usual figure, and no more.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A text of two hundred and thirty five years, whole, never lost, continuously in print, read, taught and quoted. On form nothing is charged: the text survives as Boswell left it. Presence is wide, since the book is the source of most of the Johnson the common reader knows: “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”; “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. The figure takes the foot of the step for centuries and adds nothing for presence. The book is two centuries old, not millennia; its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the London of the 1770s, the quarrels with Hawkins and Piozzi, the politics of Wilkes and America; and its full reading has narrowed while its sayings travel without it.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and seventy-nine years, at the figure the desk gives that span for the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole, as published, with no question of recension. Presence: continuous and as wide as any English novel’s of its century; in print without a break since 1847, set in schools and universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, translated into most written languages, and adapted on the stage, in silent and sound film, in a long run of television serials, in Cary Fukunaga’s film of 2011, and in opera and musical. It has outlived its conditions: the governess, the charity school and the coverture that made Bertha her husband’s property are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. A survival of under two centuries stands below the texts of millennia.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over 244 years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, as published in 1782, with its apparatus; there is no question of the text. Presence: a scandalous success on publication, then a long century of disrepute, condemnation and clandestine reading, and full rehabilitation in the twentieth century. It is now read and taught as one of the summits of the French novel, printed in the Pléiade, translated into most written languages, and adapted for stage, screen, opera and dance. Its surface is fixed to its moment, the salons and convents of the ancien régime, and it has outlived those conditions entirely and is read for what they pressed upon. The nineteenth century’s disrepute is a charge on presence, and wide present presence offsets part of it.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two hundred and seventy-seven years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Fielding revised it, and there is nothing to charge. Presence: in print without a break since 1749, translated into the main European languages, a set text in English studies across the world, filmed by Tony Richardson to a screenplay by John Osborne (1963), which won the Academy Award for best picture, and serialised by the BBC (1997). Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the prefatory chapters’ quarrels with critics, the politics of 1745 and the dedication to Lyttelton are history now. The charge falls on presence. The book is read less widely outside the academy than its place in literary history implies, and less than the most read novels of the century after it. It has never been neglected, so the charge holds the figure down without taking it lower.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost seven centuries. The form is whole: the image is the image made in 1333, the figures, the words, the gold and the colour stand, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: centuries on its altar in Siena Cathedral, then in Florence and on public view in the Uffizi, among the best known paintings of its century; wide presence earns at most a tenth. The charges are of fabric and site, not of form: the panel has been taken from the altar it was made for, the cathedral’s programme of patron altars is broken up, the present frame is reported to be a later remaking, and the panel has known restoration. They hold it at the lower end of its band, below The Arnolfini Portrait (9.4) and Primavera (9.3).
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: four legs, three stages, the curve of the edges and the arches, legible as at the opening, though the summit now carries antennas that lengthen the figure by some thirty metres. It has outlived the conditions that produced it, an exhibition, a twenty-year permit and the scorn of 1887. The use, ascent and view, has been continuous since 1889, with radio added early in the twentieth century, and the tower is entered by millions each year. The fabric is largely the makers’ iron, kept by repainting. Charged: much of the first stage’s ornament removed, the upper stair taken down in 1983, lifts and first-stage pavilions renewed. This is presence of the widest kind, which earns its tenth, and the charges are light.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
No age discount is needed: 265 years. The form is whole: the second state survives in many impressions of the period, so no single loss threatens it. Presence has been continuous, in print rooms, in books and in the Romantic and modern literature that took the plates up, and so wide a presence earns its tenth. The fabric is paper and ink. Later and posthumous impressions from the same coppers, worn, weaken the image in circulation, and an impression of 1761 differs from one of the nineteenth century; the charge is small, since the form is fully legible in the many good impressions of the period. The Roman polemic of 1761 is dated, but the image is fixed to no fashion and has outlived it.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: plan, section, orientation, the hall on its island, the image under its canopy, the wings and the programme survive as made in 1053, and the form has outlived the eschatology and the regency that produced it. The use is continuous: a temple for nearly a thousand years and still a place of devotion, though now entered chiefly as a monument. The fabric carries the charge. The Amida is original, which is rare; but the paintings are worn faint, the phoenixes and some of the bodhisattvas are in the museum, the colour is renewed, the structure has been dismantled and reassembled, the pond is restored and the precinct is gone.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five hundred and forty years. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, every figure, hand and face legible, nothing of the meaning lost or repainted, and it has outlived its altar, its confraternity and its frame. Presence: in the French royal collection by the early seventeenth century, in the Louvre since the Revolution, among the most visited rooms of the museum; fame is presence and lifts the figure by a tenth at most. Fabric: the move from panel to canvas, as reported, is a heavy intervention, and a varnish now darkened and yellowed dims the light and the blue of the Virgin’s robe, on which the form depends; that is charged. The figure sits within the usual row for centuries of survival with the form whole, at its foot, and at the top of the row for heavy repair.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at a little over four centuries. Form: whole. The image that carries the meaning is the image the painter made; no figure, hand or face is lost. Presence: continuous, in the Chiesa Nuova from about 1604 to 1797, in Paris for about two decades, in the Vatican since, among the most visited altarpieces in Rome. The charge falls under form and presence together: the work was made for a chapel, an altar and a low viewpoint, and the slab’s projection over the altar table, which carries part of the meaning, now works by reconstruction in a museum, with a copy in its place. Fabric: cleaned and restored, with no known loss to the image. Held at the foot of its band by the displacement.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 355 to 360 years. Form: the image is whole, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost; whatever the canvas’s edges once were, the figures and the hands stand entire. Presence: in private hands until the Van der Hoop bequest of 1854, in public view in Amsterdam since then and in the Rijksmuseum since its opening in 1885, where it is among the pictures by which the museum is known. Fame lends a tenth at most and is not counted further. Fabric: the impasto has held, and varnish, lining and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age. The nineteenth century title is a misreading that has not obscured the image.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost five centuries. The form is whole: the image is the image painted, nothing that carries its meaning is lost, and the panel stands in the chapel it was made for, under the light it was made to answer, which few altarpieces of its age can claim. What is lost is context, the vault fresco and the chapel as first decorated, and that is charged lightly, since the unit is the panel. Presence has been continuous in place but thin in attention for much of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, when Pontormo stood in the shadow of Vasari’s account of a strange and failing master; that gap is the charge, and the figure sits at the foot of its band for it. The fabric has the usual history of an oil on panel of its age: varnish, consolidation and cleaning.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost five centuries. The form is whole and legible: every part that carries the meaning survives, the battle, the two rulers, the tablet, the curved world, the sun and the moon. Whether the panel was trimmed at its edges, above all at the top, is not settled here; if it was, a band of sky is lost, a modest charge to a work whose sky is half its argument. Presence: in the Wittelsbach collection from its making, carried to France by Napoleon’s forces in 1800 and returned after 1815, and now one of the central works of the Alte Pinakothek; a long ducal seclusion before the public collection weighs a little. The figure, 9.2, sits in the band for centuries with the form whole, held toward its lower end for the uncertainty at the edges and the centuries of limited view.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about 358 years: the top row of the table, centuries with the form whole. Every element that carries the meaning is legible: the curtain, the map with the painter’s signature on its lower border, the eagle, the wreath and trumpet, the begun canvas. The fabric is an oil on canvas in good order for its age, with abrasion and old retouching whose extent is not given here. Presence is the charge: nearly two centuries in obscurity and under another painter’s name, private keeping until 1940, then a dictator’s purchase and a salt mine before the museum. The image outlived all of it, which is itself evidence; but its presence was not continuous, and its centuries are fewer than the oldest works’, so it stands at the lower end of the top row.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Form, use and fabric are weighed together, without an age discount. The form is legible and whole where it governs: the axis from the river, the sequence of pylon, court, hall and sanctuary, the cross axis to Mut, the hall standing in all 134 columns, copied and answered in its own tradition for some fifteen centuries. Use is lost in kind: no rite has been held here for some sixteen centuries, though the precinct is still walked from the river inward, by very large numbers of visitors, and studied without break since 1828. The fabric is a ruin made legible by restoration: roofs and most colour gone, obelisks fallen or carried away, buildings reduced to block fields, eleven columns down in 1899 and rebuilt. The loss of use in kind, with that dependence on restoration, holds it from the top.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Span of centuries, and the text whole. Bunyan’s own enlarged text of 1679 survives entire and has been in print without a break since; there is no loss of form to charge. Presence has been unbroken for three and a half centuries, in households, churches and schools, and in translation across the world, and its places are in common speech: the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Delectable Mountains, Doubting Castle. What holds it within the centuries’ band: its general reading has thinned since the early twentieth century, and it is now read more by the devout and the student than by the general reader, though it is not neglected; and part of its surface is fixed to a doctrine and a dissenting moment that the book has nonetheless plainly outlived.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, at about 360 years. The form survives: oval, trapezoid, colonnades, corridors, statues, obelisk and fountains stand in place and legible as built, and the square has outlived the papal state and the Counter-Reformation that made it. The use is continuous and its own, perhaps more intense than ever, the square filled weekly and at every great event of the Church. The fabric is travertine, weathered and cleaned, the statues recut and repaired over time, a small charge. The charge that counts falls on the form’s experience: the Spina di Borgo was demolished, and a square meant to burst on the visitor from narrow streets and to stand as a room now opens down a long avenue to the river.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 227 years. Form: whole. The image is the image Goya etched and printed; good impressions of the first edition survive in many public collections, and the copper plate survives. Presence: withdrawn from sale soon after publication, given with the other plates to the Crown in 1803, known chiefly through later editions and collectors in the nineteenth century, and present without break since the Romantic reception; fame counts as presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: paper is kept in the dark and shown in rotation, and the later editions from the worn, steel-faced plate coarsen the aquatint, a charge on the presence of the true image more than on its form.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. On form the book is substantially whole, a hundred and thirteen poems in a recognisable order, but it is a text recovered after near-loss: nearly silent for some seven centuries, corrupt in many places, with lacunae in 61, 62, 64 and 68 among others, and the divisions of several poems disputed. That is charged on form at about three tenths off the usual figure for a text of millennia read without break. On presence, it was read and imitated in antiquity, and since the fourteenth century it has been continuously read, edited, taught and translated, in every European language, and set to music in Orff’s Catulli Carmina; the axis gives wide presence at most a tenth, which it receives. Fabric is not separately charged for a text. The figure stands below the oldest epics read without break and above any modern book.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: eleven books, with small lacunae and no lost part, which is rare for ancient fiction; Petronius beside it survives in fragments. But it survived by a thread, one manuscript line from Monte Cassino, so that in the early Middle Ages the work’s existence hung on very few copies. Presence: read in late antiquity, then long unread from about the sixth century to Boccaccio, save for the copying; continuous since the Renaissance, in print from 1469, in the major European languages from the sixteenth century, in scholarship and, through Psyche, in the visual arts; taught less widely than Virgil or Ovid, and long kept from schools for its obscenity. Eighteen centuries count heavily; the medieval silence and the single line of transmission are charged against them, and the text’s coming through complete is weighed first.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: octagon, ambulatory, gallery and westwork stand as built, the section legible from the door, the structure the makers’. Use has run for some twelve centuries, as palace chapel, coronation church, pilgrimage church and cathedral, with Mass said today; the palatine and coronation uses have ended, and the palace round it is gone. The losses are charged: the Carolingian choir, replaced by the Gothic; the first mosaic of the vault, which completed the building’s meaning, lost and renewed; the revetment of about 1900 to 1913; many columns taken in 1794 and some replaced; the roofs and the upper tower rebuilt. Centuries with the form whole and in use set the range, and the renewal of the surfaces that carried the programme holds the figure at its foot.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: whole. The block, the grid, the basilica, the dome, the courts and the axis stand as Herrera left them, legible from the door, and the governing idea has outlived the dynasty that made it and the order that served it. Use: largely continuous. The basilica has been in liturgical use since the sixteenth century, the crypt still receives the kings of Spain, and a community and a school still occupy the house; but the Hieronymites were expelled in 1837 and the house stood without its founding community until the Augustinians came in 1885, and the palace is now shown as a museum. Fabric: the granite is the makers’, the roofs and spires rebuilt after fire.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form survives whole and legible: the front, the spire, the nave, the east end. The use has never lapsed: a cathedral in worship for eight centuries, Protestant from 1529 to 1681 and Catholic again. The fabric carries charges of real size. Several hundred statues were removed or destroyed in 1793, and much of the façade sculpture is now copy, the originals in the museum; the roofs burned and the crossing tower was damaged in 1870 and rebuilt; bombing struck the building in 1944; and the north tower’s foundation, failing under its load, had to be remade from 1915 to the mid 1920s. The glass and the transept sculpture, the most fragile parts, survive in large measure. Form and use earn the upper band; the losses hold the axis at its floor.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about six centuries. Form: the brothers’ campaign survives whole, as far as is known; no miniature that carried the programme is lost, and the completions by later hands are part of the one book. Fabric: the vellum and the pigments, ultramarine and gold, are in famously fine condition, and ordinary handling, rebinding and conservation are the smallest charge. Presence is the charge. The book stood unfinished for some seventy years, then in Savoy, then largely out of view until the nineteenth century; since then it has been held at Chantilly under a bequest that keeps it from being lent, rarely shown, and known to almost everyone through reproduction. Four centuries of obscurity hold it at the foot of what form kept whole would earn.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed in the order form, use, fabric. The form is whole: the stones, the groups and the plan survive and are legible as their makers left them, so far as is known, and the governing idea has outlived the monastic conditions that made it. The use is continuous: the garden of a working Zen temple, seen daily from its veranda and raked by its monks, and visited by very many. The fabric: the stones survive; gravel and moss are renewed, as a living garden’s must be, which is care and not loss; the wall has been repaired and re-roofed. Charged: an uncertain date, the hall that frames the garden replaced after the fire of 1797, the planting beyond the wall changed, and a dependence on constant care.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, ovals, free arcade, Altar of Mercy, west front and towers stand as designed and completed, and have outlived the prince-bishops and the Rococo that produced them. The use is continuous and its own: a pilgrimage church, prayed in, the shrine still the pilgrims’ goal, two and a half centuries after consecration, on a site prayed at since the fifteenth century. The fabric carries the charge: a fire of 1835 is reported, not verified here, to have burned the roof and the tops of the towers, and the interior has been restored, how much of its painting original not established. A span just past two centuries puts the figure at the low end for a work whole and in use.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over 136 years. The form survives whole: the three towers, the suspended spans and the approaches are Fowler and Baker’s, unaltered in their governing figure, and the bridge has outlived the companies that built it, the steam age, nationalisation and privatisation. The use survives in its own purpose, the main line carried without a long break since 1890 under loads far heavier than the trains it was drawn for. The fabric is the original steel, kept by a repainting that became an idiom and, since 2011, by a coating meant to last decades; no repair has changed what the bridge is. Its presence, an emblem of Scotland and a World Heritage Site, earns the tenth above.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, as Carroll published it and corrected it in his lifetime; nothing is lost, and the manuscript of 1864 adds to the record without dividing the work. The presence has been continuous since 1865: in print without a break, read in every generation, translated very widely, taught, adapted for the stage and for film in nearly every decade since the medium began, and its phrases have passed into common speech in English and beyond. It is as wide a presence as a work of its span can have. The fabric is fixed to its moment in one respect: the verses it parodies are forgotten, and the joke of deviation is lost on most readers. But the parodies stand as poems in their own right, and the book has outlived its targets. A century and a half does not stand level with millennia.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Some three hundred and twenty years. The form is whole and legible: plan, three shells, front and dome stand as built, and the form has outlived the monarchy that made it and been taken over by every regime since as the figure of the French state. The use has been continuous in presence, but the first use has lapsed: a royal chapel became a Temple of Mars, then a mausoleum and a monument entered with a museum ticket, while the cult passed to Saint-Louis next door. That later life is the work’s own, so the change is charged lightly, not as loss. The fabric is largely the makers’; the Revolution stripped royal emblems and some decoration, and the gilding and much of the surface have been renewed.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over about 520 years, and what makes the work is whole: the storm over the town and the two figures on either side of the stream are legible without loss. Presence is continuous by record: in the house of Gabriele Vendramin about 1530, now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, and never out of the literature. Nothing of its moment stands between the picture and a viewer now; it is fixed to 1508 only in dress. What holds it at the floor of the centuries is twofold. The paint is thin, as Venetian paint of its date commonly is, and the condition of the surface and the history of its cleaning are not certified here. And its presence was private for most of its life: a picture for one house and its guests, not a public.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence, use and fabric. The form is whole: shell, cone, flanges and both bands stand, legible and complete, after about a thousand and twenty years in a region of earthquakes, and the design has not been remade. The presence is continuous: the tower has stood in view of the plain throughout, gave its name to the town, and has been visited and described across the centuries. The charge falls on use. As a tomb it is vacant, no burial being known, and its inside was always little used; as a monument, the mark of a name on a landscape, it has never lapsed, and that was much of its purpose. The fabric is largely its first fired brick, the smallest charge.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible after about five and a half centuries: courtyard, Torricini, apartments, studiolo, chapels and ramp stand, and the city as palace is plain from street, valley and court. The later storey is part of the one work, and restorations of the ramp and lower works make good what decay took. The use is lost: the court ended with the devolution of 1631, the library went to the Vatican in 1657, furnishings and paintings to Florence and Rome. It has been a museum since 1912, continuously entered. The fabric is largely original brick and stone; the figure is set for the lost use.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 538 years. Form: the page stands as painted, in its manuscript, with its text. Presence: the manuscript passed through royal libraries and came to Cairo, where it has been in a public institution for well over a century; but a bound manuscript is rarely seen, and its presence since the twentieth century is largely through reproduction, where it is among the most reproduced of all Persian paintings. Fabric: opaque watercolour on paper is fragile, and the condition of the page is not something the desk can attest. The figure takes the lowest point of the band for centuries with the form whole, for the rarity of its showing and the unattested fabric.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: enclosures, gopurams, halls, tank and sanctums stand as the Nayaka centuries left them, legible from any gate, and have outlived the Nayaka kingdom, ended in 1736, the wars of the Carnatic and British rule. The use is unbroken in its own purpose: a shrine sung in the seventh century, worshipped daily in the present complex for some four centuries, its festival year kept. The charges: the plunder of 1311 and the decades of the sultanate took the earlier work, so what stands is mostly a rebuilding; the stucco figures of the towers are renewed and repainted at each consecration, so much of the surface now seen is twentieth-century renewal on old cores; the murals of the tank are repainted; and the fire of 2018.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: frons, cavea, colonnade and, uniquely, the original perspective scenery stand four and a half centuries on, in the fragile materials of timber and stucco. The theatre has outlived the Academy’s world, the court stage and the whole Renaissance theory of the theatre it embodied, and remains its type’s one complete survivor. It is still a working theatre, entered and played in, though in a reduced and protected way: limited audiences, a regime of conservation, a season rather than a repertory. The stucco and timber have needed repair and the perspectives have been restored. The restricted use and the perishable fabric hold it where it is.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, core, corridors, porches, terraces and spire legible as built, the type outliving the Pagan kingdom, fallen in the late thirteenth century, and the city round it. The use has been continuous for about nine centuries: the temple is entered and worshipped in daily, with a festival each year, while most of Bagan’s more than two thousand monuments stand as ruins. The fabric carries the charge: the earthquakes of 1975 and 2016 cracked the vaults and brought down upper parts, and both were repaired; the spire has been regilded and the exterior whitewashed, changing the surface the builders left. The figure sits at the foot of the range for a form whole and in use.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and whole: the plan over the water, the binding corridors, the platform facing the gate and the gate on the axis are the Heian design as the rebuilding kept it, and they have outlived the Taira, who fell in 1185, and every condition that produced them. The use is continuous for some eight and a half centuries; the shrine is in worship now, its rites and court dance still performed on its stage. The fabric bears the heaviest charge: the Heian building burned twice and was rebuilt, the honden is of 1571, the gate has been replaced many times and the present one is of 1875, and the tidal site needs constant repair; typhoons have damaged the complex in modern times. Form whole and in use, with heavy rebuilding.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. Nothing of the image is known to be lost, overpainted by a later hand or replaced, and the open passages are open by the painter’s choice, not by damage. Presence: about 360 years, long in private hands, now on public view at Kenwood with loans to major exhibitions, and the standard image of late Rembrandt. It is not the widest presence: Kenwood draws fewer than the great national museums. Fabric: oil on canvas of the period, lined and varnished in the ordinary course. The surface is not fixed to its moment; cap, robe and tools need no note, and the circles were as mute when painted as now.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over some four centuries. Form: the image survives whole as far as is known; no part of the composition is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is charged. Presence is charged: the painter’s standing was recovered in the twentieth century, and a presence that had to be recovered was not continuous. It is now among the most reproduced paintings of the Baroque, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: oil on canvas of its period, with nothing specific to charge. A form whole across centuries places the axis high, and the interrupted presence holds it at the foot of that step.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives entire: the cavea and the orchestra are whole and legible, and the governing idea stands as it was set. The use was lost for well over a millennium with the abandonment of the sanctuary, and it has returned: the theatre is a working stage again, for the performance of the ancient plays, before full houses each summer, which few ancient buildings can claim. The fabric carries the charges. Burial preserved the cavea, which has since been re-set and repaired, with replacement stone in places; the gateways are re-erected; the stage building is lost above its foundations. Whole form and returned use are set against broken use and a principal part gone.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
About two hundred and seventy years, with form whole and in use. Plan, section, fresco and stucco survive as made in one campaign, without later additions of consequence, and the use survives: it is still a pilgrimage church, its figure on the high altar, entered every day. The charges are two. Its survival was at risk once, at the secularisation of 1803, when the church was marked for sale and demolition; and its fabric has needed heavy restoration, a long campaign in the late twentieth century on roof, vault and stucco. The form has outlived the conditions that made it: the abbey that built it was dissolved, the style it summed was rejected within a generation, and the building came back into esteem on its own evidence.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: no movement is lost, and the copies agree on the notes of all six suites in the great majority of bars. What is doubtful is the articulation, some readings and the instrument of the sixth suite, and no autograph survives. The cost is in presence. The set was never lost, but between about 1750 and 1900 it lived largely as study material, a long silence of concert life, not of transmission. Since Casals it has been continuously performed, recorded and taught, with as wide a presence as any work for strings alone. The doubt is in detail, not in form, and the axis stands where whole survival and a charged text meet.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the text survives in Bach’s own fair copy, with nothing lost and no doubtful movement in the set as dedicated. The charge is in presence. After 1721 there is no record that the concertos were played, and the manuscript lay unheard for well over a century; regular performance belongs to the twentieth. Since then presence is as wide as concert music has: in the repertory of every chamber orchestra and period band, recorded complete many times over, and sent into space on the Voyager record. The fabric carries a small charge: the gamba, the natural trumpet and the echo flute are partly obsolete, and every performance must answer for them.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: plan, section, dome, plinth, gateways and the garden’s geometry are the makers’, legible as one idea, and the idea outlived the dynasty that made it, copied and answered for two centuries. The use survives in its own kind: the dead lie where they were laid, and the building has been visited without a break, though the dynastic rites and their endowment ended and the tomb has been a monument, not a place of observance, for well over a century. The fabric is largely the makers’: the charge falls on the garden, its planting and water lost and remade, and on a twentieth-century roof since stripped and relaid. On this axis it is held below the Pantheon (9.3) and the Villa Rotonda (8.9), whose use is unbroken, and set above Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), which lost its focus.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: plan, elevation, vaults, chapter house, stair, eastern arm and towers stand as built, and nothing that defined the building is lost. The use is unbroken, some eight centuries as a cathedral, the choral office still sung daily. The charge falls on sculpture and glass, which here are part of the architecture: iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took perhaps a quarter of the west front’s figures and many heads and hands; its paint is gone; much medieval glass is lost, though the Jesse window survives in good part. The sinking of the central tower is charged here, and the scissor arches’ holding of it for nearly seven hundred years counts the other way.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across more than nine centuries. The form is whole and legible: the plan, arcades, banding, galleries and façade of the eleventh and twelfth centuries stand. The use is continuous: the cathedral of Pisa since 1118, never out of worship. The fabric carries real charges. The fire of 1595 took the roof, the façade doors and much of the interior furnishing; the ceiling is post-fire; the pulpit was taken down and put up again more than three centuries later; the dome has a later upper storey; the ground has moved under the building. These fall on roof and fittings, not on structure or governing form, and they hold the figure at the foot of its band. The fame of the Piazza adds nothing here: it belongs to the tower.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 490 years. Form: the image the painter left is whole. The unfinish is not loss but the work as made, and the panel declares itself unfinished on its own step, so nothing that carried its meaning has gone since. Presence: made for a chapel in Parma, and now in continuous public view in the Uffizi, one of the most visited galleries in Europe; its esteem fell over three centuries and rose again in the twentieth, and fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a panel of its age with the ordinary history of cleaning and consolidation, and no serious loss known. Centuries, form whole: the lower half of the row, for the unrealised right side.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: a Norman body with an octagonal centre and a Lady Chapel. The lost north-west transept takes the symmetry of the west front, a real but limited charge. The use has been Christian worship since the eleventh century, save its suspension under the Commonwealth, and the change from monastery to secular chapter in 1541 kept its purpose; but the shrine of Etheldreda, the reason the presbytery was built, was destroyed, and the eastern arm lost the use that made it. The stone is largely original. The Lady Chapel’s sculpture is mutilated and its glass lost; the lantern has been restored twice. Together they hold the figure where it stands.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across about a thousand years. The form survives: both churches stand whole in plan, section and governing idea, with their narthexes, galleries and crypt. Use survives: they are the churches of a living monastery with a small community, in liturgical use for their own purpose as well as visited. Fabric is charged. The katholikon’s dome fell in an earthquake and was rebuilt, and with it the dome’s mosaic, the head of the programme, was lost and replaced by painting; the Annunciation and other mosaics are lost; there have been further earthquakes, repairs and modern restoration. The rebuilding takes the head of the programme but not the form, and the figure stands high for that reason, though not at the top.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the governing idea, the banded basilica on the summit with its dome, facade and campanile, is whole and legible after more than seven centuries. Use: a cathedral in continuous use since it was built, the Virgin’s house still the city’s church, the Palio still dedicated to her. Fabric: the charge is moderate. The facade’s statues are copies, their originals indoors; the gable mosaics are of the nineteenth century; the floor is covered most of the year to protect it. The Duomo Nuovo is not charged as loss, since it was never built; the part taken down was judged unsafe in its own campaign, a structural failure by the first builders, small against the whole. Held toward the foot of its band for the replaced sculpture and the renewed surfaces.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: the vessel, the ring of buttresses and the tower stand as built, and the governing idea is legible at once. The use is unbroken: the cathedral of the diocese since its consecration in 1480, more than seven centuries since its foundation. The fabric is for the most part the original brick. The charges are each modest: the chapels altered by the inserted galleries; the nineteenth-century restoration that recrowned the exterior and changed the skyline, since in part reversed; the cut Judgment, of small weight here. The figure takes the lower part of the band for form whole and in use, because the restoration touched the very outline that carries the fortress idea.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 258 years. Form: whole. The image is the image Wright made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: known to its own decade through exhibition and the mezzotint, then out of esteem with Wright’s subject pieces through much of the nineteenth century, in the national collection in London and on public view there through the twentieth, and now among the most familiar British pictures of its century. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, with no serious loss known. Past two centuries with form whole, the canvas sits at the foot of the usual row, with The Swing.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about fourteen centuries. Form: whole. The head, the hands, the crown, the crossed leg, the stool and the footrest all survive, and what carries the meaning stands entire. Presence: charged. Where the figure stood between its making and modern times, and whether it was buried, hidden or in use, is unknown; no findspot is recorded, and its continuous view, in the national museum, is short. Fabric: the gilding is largely worn away, the smallest charge, since the form is entirely legible in the bronze and the wear has become part of how the figure is seen. Form whole over centuries to millennia runs from 9.2 to 9.7; the unknown presence holds the figure at the foot of that row, level with The Thinker.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: the octagon, the double ring, the nine levels, the tiers of eaves and the finial are the design of 1056, legible from the plain after some 970 years, recorded earthquakes and war; a timber tower has survived where its whole kind has gone. The use is reduced: the tower stands in its temple with its images in place, but chiefly as a protected monument, and the ascent it was built for has long been closed. The fabric has been repaired in many campaigns, and the frame is deformed in its lower storeys, with an open question whether it can be held. Form whole, use and soundness charged: the foot of the first band.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form is whole: the image the painter made stands, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost, though the band of Greek, which is part of the work, is damaged in part. Presence is charged: for some three centuries the picture was in private hands and out of sight, before it came to England and then to the National Gallery; since then it has been continuously on view and widely reproduced, and fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: a canvas of 1500 is rarer than a panel and more vulnerable, and its condition is not given here. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, held near the foot of that row for the long absence and the damaged text.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, elevation, cloister, chapter house, tower and spire stand as built, and the governing idea of church, spire and close on a green is legible and has outlived the clerical estate that produced it, read and copied as a model. The use is continuous: a cathedral since the 1220s, served daily through the Reformation’s change of rite, the close still lived in. The fabric carries the charge. The spire has stood only by repair, bracing and iron; the bell tower, the chantries, the screen and most of the medieval glass are lost, chiefly to Wyatt; the west front’s figures are modern; the chapter house sculpture is heavily restored; the Use of Sarum ended at the Reformation. Real losses to the furnished and coloured church, smaller to its form.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seventy years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the mono LP has been kept in print and reissued, its original sequence restored at the head of the expanded editions. Presence is wide for the singer, for several tracks, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Blue Moon” and “Money Honey”, and for the cover, one of the most reproduced images in the history of the record. Presence of the album heard whole is narrower: it is met more often in compilations, and the singles kept off it are more heard than most of what is on it, but the narrowing is of attention, not of the work, which remains whole and in print. The fabric is mono and dated, the Sun echo and the RCA rooms audible as years, but they are the medium of the form, and the recordings remain clear. Nothing of it has been lost.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible, the plan of 1462 unaltered in its governing idea, and Pius forbade by bull any alteration of the cathedral, new tombs, altars, chapels or painting on its white walls. The use has run for more than five and a half centuries, each building in its first purpose or near it, the square still the centre of the town, and its presence has widened since the inscription of 1996. The fabric carries the charge. The cathedral’s east end subsided from the first years, as Pius’s own account admits, and has cracked and been tied and consolidated again and again; it leans. That is a failure of the first structure, and it is weighed here. It has not taken the form, the use or the light of the interior, and it holds the figure at the foot of its band.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 394 years. Form: whole. The composition, the figures, the corpse, the light and the demonstration are the painter’s, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous, in the guild’s rooms in Amsterdam for nearly two centuries, then in the Mauritshuis since 1828, where it is one of the two or three pictures the museum is known by; fame is presence, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: charged. The surface has a long history of damage, overpaint and restoration, known in outline and not in its sequence, and the paper at centre left has been altered. These touch the surface, not the legible form. The figure stands at the foot of the row for centuries with form whole, for the repairs.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three centuries. Form: whole; nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: with the Académie from 1717, then in the national collection at the Louvre. It fell from esteem with Neoclassicism and has stood as the emblem of its period since the middle of the nineteenth century. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the painter’s handling, rapid, oily and reworked, is known for instability, and some darkening and wear are common in his canvases; this canvas’s condition is not known here beyond the ordinary history of lining, varnish and cleaning. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, toward its foot for that charge.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 225 years. Form: whole. The image stands as Goya left it, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in the royal collection, then the Prado, on view there through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and central to the museum’s Goya rooms; continuously present to attention, and the occasion of an argument that has never lapsed. Fame is presence and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: no loss is known that bears on the image, and the band is widened a little below for what is not known of its lining and cleaning. The dress and the dynasty are of their moment, and none of it stands between the picture and a viewer who knows nothing of the Bourbons. The figure for centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The figure stands complete, nothing lost, no later hand altering it; the enlarged figure has survived 122 years and its conception about 146. Presence: as wide as any sculpture of the modern era, in continuous view since 1904, the image carried redundantly by many casts in public places on several continents, so that a cast may be damaged without the work suffering, which is the strength of an edition. Wide presence earns the tenth the scale allows and no more; fame is not taken as proof. Fabric: bronze, the most durable of the modeller’s media; this cast has stood outdoors since 1906, its patina weathered and maintained, a small charge. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment: no costume, no event. The widest presence for its span, held there by the outdoor fabric.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about four and a half centuries. Form: the image is the one the painter made, its figure, cloud and stag legible, and no loss is known that takes from its meaning; the condition history is not known here in detail, and nothing is credited beyond what the canvas shows. Presence: in princely and imperial collections from the sixteenth century, and in a public museum in Vienna since that museum opened; known throughout through copies and prints. It is famous among painters and scholars more than with a wide public, which costs nothing and lends little. Fabric: lining and varnish, the ordinary history of an oil of its age. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three hundred and twenty years. Form: whole. The image is the image Kōrin made; no part that carries its meaning is lost or replaced, and the gold, the blues and the green read as they were meant to. Presence: a National Treasure in the Nezu Museum, shown for a few weeks a year. Presence is real and deep in Japan and intermittent by design, and the seasonal showing protects the fabric rather than marking a gap in survival. Fabric: paper, gold leaf and mineral pigment on a folding structure are fragile in their kind, and remounting is the ordinary history of a screen of this age. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the governing idea, a gilded stupa on the hill circled by its platform, has stood at least since Shin Sawbu’s enlargement in the fifteenth century, some five and a half centuries, and has been enlarged, never abandoned. The present upper part is the rebuilding that followed the earthquake of 1768, and that collapse is charged here as a failure of endurance. Use: the chief shrine of the country, never given up, through conquest, a foreign garrison on the platform from 1852 and the political violence of the twentieth century. Fabric: the gold renewed by gift, the finial replaced, the core unseen. Renewal is the work’s own mode of life, and is weighed lightly.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Some two and a half millennia, the text whole and read without a break. It was one of the three plays of Aeschylus, with Prometheus Bound and the Persians, chosen for the Byzantine school selection, which is why it survives in many manuscripts, the Medicean at their head, with a tradition of scholia; it was known in antiquity well enough to be quoted and parodied. Charged on form for the close, which most editors take as an addition, and for an uncertain stretch of lyric; the play stands without the trilogy that gave it its first frame, a further and smaller charge. Charged on presence: it is read and staged far less than the Oresteia or Prometheus, in modern times mainly in the academy and in occasional revivals.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nearly nine centuries, and longer for the portal. The form is whole and legible: the stave frame stands, the raised central room on its posts, the north wall with the reused carvings in place. It is the oldest of the stave churches that survive, a few of the many built. The use is charged: owned by a preservation society since 1881, the church lives chiefly as a monument, its services occasional; the use is reduced, not lost, for it is still a consecrated church, entered and used. The fabric is the smallest charge: weathered and repaired, the portal’s planks worn by centuries of rain, but in large part the timber of its builders and carvers, a survival in wood that very few buildings anywhere can show. Hōryū-ji and the Wooden Pagoda of Fogong Temple stand level with it here, in fuller use.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric: three centuries with form whole and in use. The form is whole: block, courts, colonnades, towers, skyline and bridge stand as designed and completed, and the composition reads today as it did in the 1720s. Use is continuous in its first purpose: the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, held by one family without a break, and a house of reception now open to the public. The fabric is largely the makers’; the limestone has been repaired and renewed, as any stone house must be, without change of design. What holds the figure at the floor of its band: the first formal gardens are gone; the bridge was made a different object by Brown’s lake, which drowned its lower parts; and the contents were in part sold in the 1880s. Fame adds nothing.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: the minaret stands to its full height with its lantern, and the hall keeps its plan and its vaults. The use is unbroken: for some eight and a half centuries the building has been the congregational mosque of Marrakesh, and the tower still carries the call. The form outlived the dynasty and became the model of its region. The charges fall on fabric and on parts of the programme: the minaret’s render and most of its glazed band are lost, so that the faces read as stone and relief rather than as finished; the minbar has gone to a museum. The first mosque, surviving as foundations, is the record of the making, not a loss to the work. The losses hold it at the foot of the band for centuries of use with form whole.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible, and the front stands as it was finished. The use is unbroken: the church of its order still, consecrated, entered daily by worshippers and visitors. The fabric of soapstone and plaster has needed care, and the church has been restored under the national heritage service since its listing in 1938; the extent of replacement is not established here, and no loss is known that touches the form. About two and a half centuries place it at the low end of the row for buildings standing whole and in use for centuries. It has outlived the gold economy and the colonial society that made it, and been read again by a new nation as its own.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 212 years. Form: whole. The image is the image Ingres made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced; no damage of consequence is recorded. Presence: shown at the Salon of 1819, now in the Louvre, continuously on view and among the museum’s most reproduced paintings. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary lining, varnish and cleaning of an oil of its age, none of it a charge. The surface is fixed to its moment in its Orientalist props, which now carry a dated fantasy, but the line does not depend on them. Just past two centuries, form whole, with the widest presence: the foot of the centuries row, the figure the row gives for the widest presence.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over about 463 years. The form is fully legible: platform, stair, terrace, double portico, octagon, dome and tile skin all stand. The use is unbroken: it is a working mosque in the middle of a working market, the shops beneath still let, so that even the economic arrangement survives in operation. The fabric is largely original, but the tiles, which the unit includes and which carry much of the work, have suffered losses and replacements over four and a half centuries, and some panels are of uneven quality. The building is smaller in presence than the imperial mosques, and it has outlived its conditions mainly by being kept, not by being answered.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and ninety years. Form: whole. All eight paintings survive together, where the Harlot’s paintings are lost; the plates were issued and reissued and survive in many impressions, so the work exists in both its forms. Presence: the prints have circulated continuously since 1735, and the paintings, after private ownership, have hung for over two centuries in the Soane Museum, on view in the picture room. Fabric: the ordinary history of oils of the period, with no loss known that touches the image. The satire’s surface is fixed to its moment in its topical details, court days, named persons, the Fleet, and the axis charges that; the structure has outlived them. The figure sits toward the lower part of what centuries with form whole earn.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is whole, its governing idea unaltered, legible at a glance from a mile away. The use is unbroken for a hundred and four years, open day and night, and enriched by a second use, assembly, which has outlived the conditions of the building’s making. The fabric is sound: the settlement of the filled site, the ceiling that failed to give its light, and the cleaning and repair of the marble are small charges, and the plaque for Alaska and Hawaii adds to the census rather than taking from it. Its presence is as wide as presence goes: on the cent for half a century and on the five dollar note.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: plan, frame, brackets, ceilings and roof are the structure of 857, legible from the stair as built, and the hall has outlived its dynasty, its court style and every palace in that style. A timber building of this size standing for more than eleven centuries, through earthquake, war, the risk of fire and neglect, is rare in itself: almost nothing of its kind and date stands anywhere. Use is charged: built for a working monastery, the hall is now chiefly kept as a protected monument. Fabric is charged lightly: later doors and windows and parts renewed in repair, with the main frame original. The whole form and the makers’ frame set it high.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 245 years. Form: whole. The image is the one the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost. Presence: continuous and wide. The canvas was famous from its first showing at the Royal Academy in 1782, carried through Europe by the print, never out of view as an image, and in a public collection in Detroit since the 1950s. Its fame as the emblem of the Gothic is presence and lifts the figure by a tenth at most. Fabric: lining and varnish, the ordinary history of an oil of its age, with no damage known that bears on the image. The span sits in the row for centuries with the form whole, at its lower end, since the span is two and a half centuries rather than many.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible, every campaign of its making still in place, and the front Tolsá finished in 1813 stands as he left it. The use is continuous: the cathedral of Mexico since its dedication in 1656, the seat of the archbishop and the church of the national square through independence, the Reform, the revolution and the Cristero years. The fabric is charged. The fire of 1967 took much of the coro and the Altar of Pardon, which were restored; centuries of subsidence cracked and tilted it until the underexcavation of the 1990s, a heavy intervention beneath the building rather than a rebuilding of it; earthquakes have required repair. The figure takes the floor of the band for form whole and in use.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: base, setbacks, shaft, cladding, lobby and mast are as built, the antenna an addition that changed the tip of the silhouette and not its figure. The use survives without a break since 1931: offices, and observatories open to the public for ninety-five years, the original purpose of both still served. The fabric has held, through the crash of 1945, which the frame took without collapse and from which the building reopened within days, and through restorations that made good rather than replaced. Presence is the widest any building of its age has, and that earns the tenth that lifts the figure to the top of its range. The lost function of the mast costs nothing: it never worked.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four centuries. Form: whole; the image is the image the painter made, with no part that carries meaning lost. Fabric: opaque watercolour and gold on paper, fragile and sensitive to light, which has kept its colour and its gold in a remounted album leaf. Presence: in the imperial collection, then in an album assembled in Iran, then in a museum since 1942, where light limits its display; continuous attention belongs to the last eighty years. Its surface is fixed to a court and a moment, named sitters, a Jacobean ruff, the ideology of one reign, and it has outlived that moment entirely and is read now for exactly what it fixed. Held at the foot of its band for the paper medium and the late presence.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: the building stands as Gibbs built it, its governing idea legible from every side after 277 years, and the one change to its outward form, the glazing of the lower arches, keeps the arcade’s rhythm. The use has run without a break, though not as the library it opened as: the science collections left in the 1860s, and it became a reading room of a larger library under a new name, a change within the purpose and not against it, and it is used more fully now than in its first century. The fabric carries the smallest charge: the Oxford limestone has decayed and much of the face has been renewed. Its presence as an image of Oxford is wide and adds little. It stands at the foot of the centuries.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as a composition, both figures, the wings and the vessel present, about 233 years after the marble was finished. Its fragile parts, the wing tips, the fingers and the pierced zones, are exactly those a marble loses, and the record of its repairs is not known well enough to credit more than the usual figure. Presence: continuous and wide, in the Louvre since the 1820s and in view throughout. Its esteem fell sharply in the age that disdained Canova and rose again, and the object stayed whole and seen through the eclipse. Fabric: marble, stable. Just past two centuries, the form whole, the widest presence for that span.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: nothing that made the building has been lost, and the later campaigns are the work’s own. The use is unbroken: the seat of the archbishops of Milan, consecrated in 1577, entered every day by worshippers and by very large numbers of visitors. The charge falls on the fabric. Candoglia marble weathers, and the Fabbrica has replaced stone continuously, so that much of the outer surface is renewed rather than original, and the piers of the crossing needed repair in the twentieth century. Centuries of whole form and use, held down by the renewed skin and the lateness of the last campaign.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nearly four centuries. Form: whole. The image is the one the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence is charged: Zurbarán fell from view after his death and returned with the nineteenth century, and the canvas’s history before the twentieth century cannot be traced here. It is now on view in the Prado and widely reproduced, and wide presence earns a tenth at most. Fabric: an oil on canvas of its age, with no particular damage claimed. Nothing on its surface is fixed to its moment but its iconography, which has outlived the devotional world that made it. It stands at the usual figure for centuries with the form whole, and not above it.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: block, front, cornice, vestibule, courtyard and garden loggia stand as the four hands left them, legible from the piazza and from the court. The use survives in kind if not in owner: a palace of representation for more than four centuries, the seat of a family, then the property of a royal house, then a foreign state’s embassy since 1874, entered daily and kept in repair. The fabric is the makers’. The charges: the antiquities the rooms and court were built to display went to Naples, and with them part of what the house was for; the embankment cut the garden from the river and closed the axis; and the building opens to the city only by visit.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across some eleven and a half centuries. The form is whole and legible as built: court, arcades, piers, ziyadas and enclosure are the plan of the 870s, and the building has outlived its city, its dynasty, the caliphate it defied and every Cairo since. The use is weighed as returned and is charged for its breaks: neglect before 1296, and later service as a hospice and for other uses until the restorations. The fabric, brick and stucco, is much repaired and in part renewed in three campaigns; the first fountain was lost in 986, the first minaret at least in large part, and the palace and the city with them. These charges hold it at the foot of the band for a form whole and in use.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form: whole. The face, the crown, the lower band and the inlay stand; nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced, beyond the wear and small losses of an ivory of its age. Presence: continuous in the palace for over three centuries as a working royal object; then broken by the sack of 1897, which took it from its court, its use and its people, and later public view in New York. For a worn object the use was part of its life, and that rupture is charged; but the image was never lost, and the rupture has itself become part of its standing. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: ivory darkened and worn by handling, the ordinary history of the material.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about 361 years. The form is whole and legible: the turn, the face, the turban, the collar and the earring stand as painted. One part is changed: the ground, now near black, is not what was painted, and technical study reports that it was once a green curtain in a glaze that has degraded. The loss takes a setting and a fold of space behind her, and by accident gives the void the picture is now known by; it is charged as the moderate loss of a part, not of the defining form. Presence was thin for two centuries, then continuous and as wide as any painting’s, and earns at most a tenth. The fabric shows cracking and repeated restoration, and is weighed lightly.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: about a thousand years read without break, copied in the medieval period, named by Kenkō, commented on in the Edo period, taught in schools now and translated widely in the last century. That puts it at the top of the step for centuries and at the threshold of millennia. Form is charged: no autograph; four lines that differ in content and in order; the best Sankanbon manuscripts lacking the opening part; supplementary sections whose place in the work is uncertain. The defining form, lists, reflections and scenes in one voice, is legible in every line, so the charge is moderate, about three tenths. Presence is wide in Japan and narrower abroad, where it is read chiefly by students and admirers; that holds it off the top of the band.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is wholly legible: the sequence of courts, gates and halls of 1636 stands as built, 390 years on. The use is continuous, a shrine to Ieyasu for four centuries with its worship and festivals unbroken, though the separation of Shinto and Buddhism ordered from 1868 altered it materially, splitting Buddhist rites and fabric away from a precinct designed as one syncretic whole. The fabric carries the smallest charge, since timber and lacquer renewed is maintenance in Japanese practice, not loss; but the pagoda is a rebuilding of 1818, the Honjidō a rebuilding after the fire of 1961, and the colour now seen is largely recent work.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible 247 years after the ribs were raised; nothing that made the work is lost. The use is entered and crossed daily, but as a footbridge only since 1934: its first use, carrying carts and road traffic across the gorge, has been gone for nearly a century, and that is a real charge. The fabric is substantially the original castings, cracked and stitched, with parts of the approaches remade as the ground moved. The movement of the abutments was a failure of the first builders’ reckoning of the site and is charged here. The strut under the river and the later repairs have kept the bridge standing rather than renewed it.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form stands whole in both buildings, complete on their first sites, and has outlived its occasion, a retired shogun’s villa, to be copied and answered for five centuries. The use changed at Yoshimasa’s death in 1490, by his own wish, when the estate became a temple; religious use has been continuous since, Kannon in the pavilion, Amida in the hall, and the early change is a small charge. The fabric is that of the 1480s, repeatedly repaired, roofing and members renewed, last in 2007 to 2010, the original lacquer surface lost or nearly so. In a city of wars and fires, which took Kinkaku in 1950, two timber buildings in their first fabric after some 540 years are rare.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three centuries. Form: the image is the one the painter made, and no loss to any part that carries its meaning is known to the desk. Presence: received by the Académie royale in 1728 and kept in its collection, now in the Louvre and in view; its esteem has not fallen far, since the nineteenth century’s recovery of Chardin and the modern painters kept it before the eye. Fame lifts the figure a little at most. Fabric: lining, cleaning and varnish are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and the canvas’s own condition record is not known here, so it is credited no further than the usual. The figure is the usual one for centuries with the form whole, at the foot of that row.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two and a half centuries. Form: whole. The image is the one Stubbs made and his patron kept, horse and ground as they were; nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced, and the plain ground, whatever was once intended, is original to the work. Presence: for most of its life in private hands and known to a narrow circle, now in the National Gallery in London and widely reproduced. The long private span is a modest charge on presence, which the wide public presence since partly redeems; fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the ordinary history of lining, varnish and cleaning of an oil of its age. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible in all five temples: plans, domes, the ring of cells and the carving stand. Use has been continuous, worship in its own rite since 1031 in the oldest temple, a living place of pilgrimage now, with the images in place and photography forbidden inside. The fabric carries the charge: the great temples were damaged in the early fourteenth century during the Khalji campaigns and repaired by about 1322, and images and parts of the carving are of that repair. The marble has held its surface for nine centuries on a mountain. Centuries to millennia, form whole and in use, place it in the high band; the damage and repair keep it at the foot of that band. The highest of the twelve.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: some twenty-seven to thirty thousand years, the longest on the scale. Form: whole. The figure carries everything that makes it, every volume, the head, the arms, the bracelets, the vulva and the navel; the feet are not lost, since they were never carved. Presence: charged. The figure was buried, out of all attention, for nearly the whole of its existence, and has been present only since 1908, in a museum case; fame since then adds at most a tenth. Fabric: the red ochre that once coloured it, in whole or in part, survives only in traces, a real loss of part of the surface, smaller than a loss of form. The usual figure for millennia with form whole is 9.2 to 9.7; the long absence and the lost colour set it at the foot of that band.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 3,300 years. Form: whole for what makes the work. The judgment and the Opening of the Mouth are legible end to end, and nothing that carries their meaning is lost. Presence: none for about three thousand years, by design, since the roll was made for the tomb; in public view since the middle of the nineteenth century and among the most reproduced Egyptian objects, which earns at most a tenth. The long absence is the condition of the survival, not a charge against form. Fabric: papyrus is the frailest of the ancient supports, and the roll has been cut into sheets and mounted, a roll that can no longer be rolled. That holds it low in the band for millennia with form whole. The strongest of the twelve.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 368 years. Form is whole: the image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: obscure, as all of Vermeer was, through the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, and now in a public collection, the Rijksmuseum, and the type of the quiet Dutch street. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining, cleaning and varnish are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, weighed as facts of survival and not charged to the painter. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, held at the foot of its row for the long eclipse.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 499 years. Form: the image reads as Holbein made it, nothing that carries its meaning known to be lost; its condition record is not detailed here, so wholeness is credited, not certified. Presence: in private hands for most of its life, and so seen by few until the twentieth century, which is charged; on public view in New York since 1935, and its image continuously present through the copies, the history and the saint’s cult. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a panel of its age carries the ordinary history of cleaning and consolidation, charged lightly. The household painting it accompanied is lost, which shows what this panel escaped. Centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: front, curve, order, entablature and parapet stand as designed, and the idea has outlived the season of a spa’s polite society that made it, answered as a model for a century and still seen as it was meant to be seen. The use continues in its own purpose, dwelling, after more than 250 years, though much of the terrace is now divided into flats and some houses serve other ends, so that the single household the front was made to unify is no longer its common unit. The fabric is the makers’ Bath stone, cleaned and repaired, its sashes and glazing changed and partly restored, the front held under Grade I protection. Whole form over centuries sets the figure high; the divided household sets it at the foot of that range.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, and the highest of the twelve. The form is whole and legible: the plan, the domes, the six minarets, the forecourt and the setting against Hagia Sophia stand as built. The use is continuous: a congregational mosque for about four centuries, its own purpose, never converted, closed or ruined, and its form copied as a model. The fabric carries a real charge, small against form and use: the building has been restored repeatedly, most recently in a campaign of about six years ending in 2023, and how much of its painting, glass and tile is the first campaign’s is not settled. Four centuries whole and in use is a long survival, not the longest on the desk, and the fabric charge holds the figure at the foot of what such survival earns.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: whole and legible as built in 1633, the hall, the wings, the stage and the substructure all standing in their arrangement, and the form itself older than the fabric. Use: continuous for nearly four centuries in its first purpose, a working temple and place of pilgrimage, entered daily by great numbers. Fabric: the bark roof and the stage floor are renewable surfaces and have been renewed in campaigns, most recently about 2020, which is maintenance of the kind the form presumes rather than loss. It sits at 9.2 because its span is under four centuries, and because timber renewal, though the method of the tradition, replaces more fabric than masonry does.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five hundred and twenty years. Form: nothing that carries the image’s meaning is known to be lost or overpainted; the image is the one Dürer made. Presence: valued and copied from its own century, in the Albertina for about two centuries, and as an image among the most widely reproduced works of its period. Fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: watercolour on paper is the most fragile of the forms the desk scores, and its sensitivity to light is a real charge, since light is what keeps such a sheet from being shown at will. The usual figure for centuries with form whole runs from 9.2 to 9.7; the fabric charge keeps it at the foot of that band.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two and a half centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made; nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in private hands for about a century, in the Hertford collection from the middle of the nineteenth, bequeathed to the nation with the Wallace Collection in 1897 and on public view in London since 1900. It fell from esteem with the Rococo after the Revolution and has stood at the centre of its period’s image since the later nineteenth century. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age. The usual figure for centuries with form whole, at the foot of that row.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Survival of the image at about two hundred and fifty years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole. Nothing that carries the work is lost; the portrait beneath is the painter’s own and belongs to the making. Presence: continuous, first in the Grosvenor collection, where it was shown and copied, then on public view at San Marino; its fame is not proof of permanence and is not counted as such. Fabric: charged lightly. The canvas is reported lined and conserved, its paint stabilised and its varnish cleaned rather than rebuilt; the extent is not settled here, and none of it reaches the legibility of the image. A span of centuries with the form whole and the fabric repaired sits at the foot of its row.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated for a century. The book has been in print and in translation since 1922 and outlived bans that could have ended it. But few surfaces are fixed as hard to their moment. It is one Dublin date, 16 June 1904, and it is made of that date: the Gold Cup and Throwaway, the General Slocum fire, Dignam’s insurance policy, Plumtree’s Potted Meat, Parnell’s ghost, tram routes, shop names and the ad copy of a vanished city. Whole pages need annotation to be read. The book has outlived the colonial city it mapped, which clears the gate with room. But a hundred years is not seven hundred, and the topical load still costs something.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is a hundred and one years. Presence is among the widest of any novel of its century: in print since 1925, translated into most written languages, taught in schools and universities across the world, filmed, staged and set, and present in ordinary speech through the word it gave. The text is whole as Kafka left it, and its surface is not fixed to a moment: no technology or topical occasion dates it. One charge is on form: the book survives as an unfinished work in an editor’s order, in two textual traditions, and the shape a reader meets is partly Brod’s. That is not loss, but it keeps the figure a tenth below the widest step a century can show. A century does not outscore millennia.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 594 years and through much: iconoclasm in 1566, survived by hiding in the tower; the central panels in Paris from 1794 to 1815; the wings sold, dispersed to Berlin and sawn through to part their faces; theft in 1934; seizure and a salt mine in 1942–1945; centuries of overpaint. The surface is little fixed to its moment: Burgundian dress reads as the furniture of paradise. What holds the axis is that the work did not survive whole. The Just Judges, a whole group of the procession, is lost, and another hand holds its place. Survival with a twentieth of the faces gone is still survival; the loss is permanent.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-three years since the premiere, with no discount for age and no credit for time not yet elapsed. What makes the work survives whole, in two authorial texts, and it has not left the repertory in any decade. It has outlived the conditions that produced it: the postwar ruin, the vogue for existentialism and the Absurd as a movement have passed, and the play is staged as if none of them had been needed. The surface is almost bare of its moment: the Eiffel Tower “in the nineties” (I), a fair where a man may be sold, and Lucky’s mock-academics are the whole of it. Held below the oldest works for one reason only: the demonstration is a fraction as long.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and four years. Form: the poem survives whole, as published, with its notes, and the publication of the drafts in 1971 added to what is known without taking anything from the text. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, taught wherever modern poetry in English is taught, translated into many languages, and marked by a centenary in 2022 that brought new editions and studies. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show, because its standing has been contested since the 1950s, by the American line that ran from Williams and in the reckoning with its author’s opinions, and because its presence outside the study of poetry is narrower than a novel’s. Fabric carries no charge: the variants between early editions are minor.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Ninety years, and the survival shown is steady. The text is whole, in print since 1936, and has its place in the Library of America. Its presence is continuous in university teaching and in a steady critical literature, and it has been translated into the principal European languages. It has outlived its conditions: the romance of the Lost Cause that it answered is history, and the book is read for what it saw in that romance. That wide and steady presence is credited. Two things keep it from the widest survival: its difficulty keeps its general readership narrower than its name, and its racial vocabulary and the opacity of its Black characters make it a contested text in some classrooms. Ninety years is a long test, and still short of the centuries behind the summit.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: the orientation, the Avenue, the three great complexes and the quadripartite plan are legible on the ground; it outlived the state by nearly fifteen centuries, and its profile was copied from Tikal to Tenochtitlan. The use is lost in kind: the temples burned around 550, the compounds emptied, and the dwelling has not returned; use was regained twice, as a sacred site of the Aztecs and, since 1910, as a national monument. The fabric is the heaviest charge: the city quarried and mostly buried, plaster and paint gone from every exterior, the Avenue’s platforms reconstructions of 1917 to 1994 on original cores, and the Sun stripped and re-faced by Batres in 1905–1910, its stepped outline in part his. What makes the work is its plan, and the plan survives entire; the lost dwelling, the buried city and the Sun’s altered skin hold it below the top.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated, and of a particular kind. The work survived as print, in several copies, not as one autograph; it survived with no performance tradition at all, from 1610 to the 1930s, about three hundred and twenty years; and when it was recovered it entered the repertoire within a generation and has not left it. It is performed on every continent, in churches of its confession and others, in halls that belong to none, by choirs of two hundred and by ten singers. The surface fixed to its moment is small: Latin liturgy, chant, and an ornamental idiom that reads as style. It has outlived the Gonzaga court, the Marian devotion that framed it and the liturgy that might have held it. The cost is the silence, the longest of any concert work on this desk, and a performing form that must be made anew each time.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over a century and a half. The form is whole: the text survives entire, revised by its author for the edition of 1874, with nothing lost and no question of transmission. Presence is continuous: in print since 1872, taught in schools and universities throughout the English-speaking world, translated into the major European languages and beyond, and adapted for BBC television in 1968 and again in Andrew Davies’s serial of 1994. Its surfaces, the Reform Bill and the medical politics of 1830, were history already when it was written, and they do not date it. It falls short of the widest presence because its reading outside English is narrower than that of the Russian and French novels of its decades: it is read most where English is read.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is weighed over ninety-nine years. Form: the text survives whole, as published in 1927, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: the book is taught in English literature syllabuses across the world and has been argued over in every decade of its criticism. Its surface is fixed to a world of summer houses and servants that has gone, and it is read for what that world pressed on, not as period. Held below the widest presence because its readership, very wide in teaching and criticism, is narrower among general readers than that of the most read novels of its century, its difficulty a real limit. A survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia, and the axis stands where that span places it.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as Tolstoy published it in 1886, with nothing lost, recovered or reassembled. Its presence is continuous: in print throughout, translated into the major languages, taught across the world, and read outside literature, in medicine, philosophy and hospice care. The surface is fixed to its moment in its particulars, the reformed courts of the 1860s, ranks and salaries, the furnishings of a Petersburg apartment, but none is needed to follow the dying, and the satire has outlived its society. A hundred and forty years with wide presence. Held a step short of the top because that presence, though deep, is a short book’s, not that of the most widely read novels of its century.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over eighty-two years, and seventy for the stories added in 1956. Form: the text survives whole; Borges’s later revisions and the additions of 1956 are part of the work’s life as that work, and nothing that made it is lost. Presence is wide and continuous: in print in Spanish throughout, taught across the Spanish-speaking world and in departments of literature beyond it, translated into most written languages, and its titles passed into common speech, the forking paths, the Library of Babel, Tlön. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show, because the book is read more by writers and students of literature than across the general culture, and its standing in English rests partly on selections, Labyrinths among them, rather than on the collection read entire. Fabric carries no charge.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The charge is that the text was first printed altered by another hand and its full form had to be recovered, and that outside Russia it is read mainly in the academy. Weighed on form, presence and fabric across nearly two centuries from composition. Form: the poem survives whole in Pushkin’s manuscripts and the standard text is his; the printing of 1837 is a matter of transmission now repaired, a small charge. Presence: in Russia as wide as any poem’s; the Introduction is learned in school and quoted in public life, the statue is called by the poem’s name, and the poem has been in print, read and taught without a break since 1837. Fabric: the flood of 1824 and a clerk’s rank are of their moment and need no gloss to be felt. Held short of the widest figure by its narrower presence abroad, translated into the major languages but read mostly in courses, and by the repaired text.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
One hundred and seventy-three years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text survives whole, as Dickens issued it, in print without a break since 1853, with no problem of recension. The presence is wide and continuous: taught as a central Victorian novel, translated widely, adapted for television again and again, most widely in the BBC serial of 2005 written by Andrew Davies, and two of its names, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” and “telescopic philanthropy”, still in use for an endless lawsuit and a distant charity. It has outlived its conditions: the Judicature Acts of the 1870s ended the court it drew, and the book is read for what it disclosed through that court. Held a step down because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of Great Expectations in the schools and in common reading.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed in the order form, presence, fabric, with no discount for age. The fabric is not the work. The work is the form and the rite that renews it, and the replacement of its timber every twenty years is its own mode of survival: it carries no charge as loss, and earns no credit. The form is legible and whole, renewed sixty-two times by the shrine’s count. The presence: in use for some thirteen centuries, served daily, withheld from the eye by design, which is not loss. What is charged is the failure of the mode and its risk: a lapse of more than a century at both shrines in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; a drift of detail across the rebuildings whose extent cannot be known; and a survival that rests on a living institution, its forest, funds and craft.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: score and poem survive complete, are performed uncut as standard, and have no rival versions. The presence is 144 years: since 1914 in the repertory of the major German and international houses, with an Easter tradition in German-speaking theatres, a recorded tradition from the 1920s, and Hans Knappertsbusch’s Bayreuth recordings of 1951 and 1962 as fixed points. It was held to one theatre for its first thirty years by the Bayreuth reservation, and its scale and casting ration it still. The surface fixed to its moment is its doctrine and its reception: the Schopenhauerian chastity, and the ideological charge attached in the 1880s and after. Neither has stopped performance, and both are argued in every production.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is weighed over a hundred and one years. Form: the text survives whole, as published in 1925, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: continuous for a century. The book has been in print throughout, is taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, is translated into most written languages, and has been filmed, by Marleen Gorris in 1997 with Vanessa Redgrave, and rewritten, as The Hours. Its standing rose after Woolf’s death and again from the 1970s. Its surface is fixed to one class, one year and one city, the party and the Prime Minister’s car, but the war’s aftermath and the coercions of psychiatry it describes have outlived those conditions and are read for themselves. Held below the widest presence, which belongs to the few books of its century read without exception, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Written in 1922 and published in 1926, the book has a century of survival. The form survives whole as Kafka left it: the manuscript is extant, and the critical edition of 1982 has undone Brod’s editorial changes. The book is unfinished, but that was its state at making, not a loss in transmission, and nothing Kafka wrote of it is lost. The presence is wide: in print and read since 1926, translated into most written languages, taught wherever the modern novel is taught, and filmed. The fabric bears no charge. It stands a tenth below the widest step a century can show, because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of Die Verwandlung and Der Process. A century does not outscore millennia.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival over about a hundred and fifty years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1873. The confession chapter survives too, printed in most modern editions as an appendix; its withdrawal belongs to the history of the work, not to its loss. Presence is wide and continuous in the West: translated into the major languages, taught, staged by Camus in 1959, filmed by Wajda as Les Possédés in 1988, and reread at every political crisis. What holds it off the widest figure is its presence in its own language, which is reported, though not verified here, to have been interrupted for much of the Soviet century. Fabric: the surfaces, Turgenev parodied and the student circles of 1869, are period, but the book is read for what they pressed upon.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published and has been read without break since 1864. A passage of the tenth chapter of the first part is reported to have been struck by the censor and never restored; the report is not verified here, and the text is judged as published. Presence: continuous since the turn of the twentieth century, translated into the major languages, taught in literature and in philosophy, staged and adapted, cited wherever the anti-hero or the critique of rational progress is discussed. Fabric: the surface fixed to its moment, the polemic with Chernyshevsky and the radical journals of the 1860s, has dated, but the book is read for what the polemic exposed and has outlived it; Chernyshevsky is now read largely because of it. What holds the axis a step from the top is its thinner first decades, before that presence was won.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole and legible, with no loss to the figure, the servant, the cat or the room. Presence: some twenty-five years unsold, then continuously public since 1890 in the nation’s principal museums, and among the most reproduced paintings of its century. Fabric: sound, cleaned and cared for; the darks at the right are hard to read, and whether they have deepened cannot be verified, so they weigh only by a hair. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and trade, the demimonde of the Second Empire, the bracelet and the mule, and none of it stands between the picture and a viewer who knows nothing of Paris in 1865: the look is not of its year. It has outlived its scandal, the Salon and the genre it answered. What holds it below the top is the span, 163 years, and a presence wide but not the widest.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form first. The text survives whole and fixed, in print without a break since 1902, in the Blackwood volume, the Dent collected editions and every later edition of note; nothing that carried meaning is lost. On presence, it has been read and taught for a hundred and twenty-seven years since the serial, among the most taught works of fiction in English, translated into most written languages, adapted and argued over, and the controversy since 1975 has increased its presence rather than reduced it. What holds it here is the rubric’s charge on a surface fixed to its moment: much of its reading is now of its racial vocabulary and its picture of Africans, read against the book as much as with it, and part of its teaching survives as the case for the prosecution. A survival of a century and more, it stands below the works that have lasted for many centuries.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over seventy-seven years from 1949 and seventy-four from the edition of 1952. Form: the text survives whole as Borges fixed it, with nothing lost, and the two editions are both known and differ little. Presence is continuous and wide: in print in Spanish since publication, taught across the Spanish-speaking world and in departments of literature everywhere, translated into most written languages, with at least three English versions of the whole or of part. Fabric: the literary vanities of Buenos Aires in the 1940s are a frame the book mocks, and nothing depends on them. Held short of the widest presence its span could show because much of the widest presence of Borges’s fiction runs through Ficciones, and this book is read entire somewhat less often than its title story is read alone.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
One hundred and eighty-four years. The text survives whole, the volume of 1842. Presence is continuous, and in Russia it is the widest a book can have: taught in every school, its landowners proverbial, adapted for stage and screen. Outside Russia it is read and taught in many translations, but less widely than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and that holds the axis a step below the widest presence. The surface fixed to its moment, serfdom and the census, has outlived its conditions: serfdom ended in 1861, and the book is read for the bureaucracy of persons that remains. The loss of the second volume is not a loss of this one, which its author published and let stand for ten years.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then on presence. The span runs from composition, 1850 to 1886, and printing, from 1890: seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. Presence is the widest for any American poet: taught in schools and universities without a break, memorised, anthologised in every survey of poetry in English, set by composers, adapted for stage and screen. The manuscripts survive, at Amherst College and at Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the body is legible whole. Charged a tenth on form for the history of the text: sixty-five years in print chiefly in regularised versions, the fascicle order lost until 1981, the body split between rival families’ holdings, the variants still unsettled, so that what survives is in part an editorial construction. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-four years. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has a corrected edition. Presence: continuous and wide, in print since 1932, through the Modern Library and Vintage; taught at universities in the United States and abroad as one of Faulkner’s three or four central novels; widely translated; and read outside the academy more than Absalom, Absalom!. It has outlived its conditions: Jim Crow and the lynching are history, and the book is read for what they were. Held a tenth under the widest figure because its presence, though wide, is narrower than the widest, and is in good part the presence of a book read in the academy and as one of a body.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on the text, then on presence. The text survives whole, as Tolkien finished it, in his own revised second edition, with later corrections that restore rather than change. It has been in print without a break for seventy-one years and translated into dozens of languages, and it was read across the world for nearly half a century before the films. It is taught, though more in the study of fantasy and of medieval reception than at the centre of the literature curriculum. Its surface has not dated, because it was archaic by choice in 1955. Its presence is among the widest of any modern book, but much of it is popularity and much now passes through the films; and seventy years do not stand level with millennia.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 137 years, and what makes the work, the image in this paint, is whole. It has outlived its maker’s verdict, a study and a failure, and his brother’s doubt; about fifty years in private hands while his other work made his name; eighty-five years on a crowded wall in New York, lent and travelled; and its own reproduction, which is named honestly. Few images in painting have been copied more, and ubiquity wears an image smooth. The test is whether the object outlasts its copies, and so far it does: the crowd stands at the canvas, not the poster, for the impasto no reproduction carries. The surface is fixed to its moment in nothing. What holds it below the top is the shorter test, 137 years against the centuries of the frescoes, and the open question of the pigments, which is not charged.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at seventy-one years. The text survives whole as published and has been in print without a break since 1955; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide: it is taught in Mexican schools and across the Spanish-speaking world, translated widely, put into English three times, by Lysander Kemp (1959), Margaret Sayers Peden (1994) and Douglas J. Weatherford (2023), filmed by Carlos Velo in 1967 and by Rodrigo Prieto in 2024, and named among the necessary novels of its century by writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: it was written about a world already gone, and has outlived the Mexico it depicts. Held a tenth below the widest presence because outside Spanish it has been read more by writers than by general readers.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in an edition its author corrected and saw printed; nothing is lost, and drafts of three of its sections survive besides. Presence runs to about a hundred and fifty years, and since 1886 it has been continuous and wide: in print in France throughout, taught in French schools and universities, translated many times into English, by Varèse, Fowlie, Schmidt, Bernard and Mason among others, and into most literary languages, and in use by poets and musicians. Charged against it are the first thirteen years, when the edition lay in a Brussels printer’s stock and the book was close to unread, and the share of its presence that belongs to the legend of its author rather than to reading of the text. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the colonial and Communard allusions are history, and the book is read for what pressed through them. A century and a half is not the survival of millennia.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Some eighty-five years since its writing, eighty-five since its first performance and seventy-seven since the Berlin text. The text survives whole and authorised, and its presence is continuous and wide: one of the most performed German plays of its century, in the repertoire of theatres across Europe and beyond, taught in schools and universities, and translated many times into English alone. It has outlived the conditions that made it, exile and the anti-fascist emergency of 1939, and is staged now for every war. Charged slightly, below the widest presence its span allows: its reception remains tied to its method and to a period of political theatre whose authority has faded, and in some countries it lives more in the classroom than on the stage.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole: the 1845 edition rests on the poet’s own corrections and order, and the textual questions, a few readings, the order of the last poems and the fragments, touch no poem’s form. Form takes no charge. The span is about one hundred and eighty years from the edition and a little more from the poems. Presence in Italy is as wide as any lyric’s after Petrarch: L’infinito and A Silvia are learned in every school, and the book has been in print without a break. Outside Italy it is steady and narrower, kept by poets, scholars and translators more than by a general readership. Nothing in the surface has dated but the civic canzoni’s address to an Italy not yet one, which is history the poems survive. Charged a tenth for the narrower presence abroad.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eighty-four years. Form: the text is whole and in print without break, fixed in the Library of America text; the only charge is the first title page’s “and Other Stories”, which misled readers for a time and is long gone. Presence: continuous, in American literature courses, with “The Bear” widely anthologised, and translated into the main languages. Its surface, the dialect and the language of a 1940s Mississippi sheriff’s office, is fixed to its moment by intention, and is part of what the book shows. Held a tenth under the widest figure because the book as a whole is read below Faulkner’s best-known novels, and much of its presence is “The Bear” alone.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival of the text, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, in Pushkin’s own editions of 1833 and 1837, with authorial gaps that are part of the work; the burned tenth chapter was never in it, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: in its own language as wide as any book’s, taught in every Russian school through every regime, quoted as proverb, its stanzas held by heart by readers who have read nothing else in verse; translated into most written languages and many times into English; alive also on the stage through Tchaikovsky. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, the fashions, the restaurants, the theatre of the 1820s, and has outlived it; the details are read now as the life of the book, not its datedness. What holds it here: nearly two centuries with presence total in its language earns the figure, and no more, because abroad it is read chiefly in the academy and in translations that by common consent lose the poem, a narrower presence than that of the great Russian novels.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a century. The text survives whole, as Rilke completed it and saw it through the press in 1923, and nothing in it is lost or in doubt. It has been in print without a break since, read in German and taught in schools and universities, and read in English since Leishman and Spender’s version of 1939, with Mitchell’s (1982) and Snow’s (2000) among those that followed. Its opening lines are among the most quoted in modern poetry, and it is used outside poetry, in philosophy, in film and in the popular reading of Rilke as a counsellor, which is presence and not proof. Nothing is charged on its fabric. Held where it stands because a century is not millennia, and because much of its readership reaches it through quotation rather than through the elegies whole.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 110 years. Form: the text survives whole, as Joyce finished it; printers’ errors and the cuts made in the serial have been repaired in corrected editions, a small charge on the fabric only. Presence: continuous since 1916, in print throughout, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, translated widely, filmed by Joseph Strick in 1977, and its phrases, “the uncreated conscience of my race” and “silence, exile, and cunning”, in common use. It has outlived its conditions: the Jesuit schools, the Parnell split and the Irish revival are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon a mind. Held below the widest presence because that presence is heavily that of a set text, and because much of the book’s standing is held as the prelude to Ulysses.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated, in a multiple’s way. The image has outlived everything that made it: the Edo print market, the cargo run it shows, the Fuji cult that bought the series, the Meiji contempt for the print that sent sheets abroad, the earthquake of 1923, the fires of 1945 and the fading of its own pigments. It has done so by redundancy: no one sheet carries it. The boats and dress are period, and no one sees them as such. The cost is proportionate. The design survives whole in every impression; the colour programme survives only in the early ones, the pink sky and the fine crest gone from most sheets, and the picture most people know is a photograph of a few museum impressions, which rest in the dark between showings. The witnesses are many; the good witnesses are few and fragile.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ninety-six years. Form: the text survives whole; the compositors’ errors of the first edition were mended in Noel Polk’s corrected text, a small charge that touches no part of the work. Presence: continuous since 1930, and wide. It is one of the most taught American novels in schools and universities, and it has been filmed, by James Franco in 2013. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the flood, the mules and the drugstore are period furniture, not the argument. Held where it stands, and not higher, because a good share of its presence is in the classroom, where it is often read as Faulkner’s accessible book rather than for itself, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival over ninety-eight years, in the span from seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. The text survives whole, revised by its author and in print without break; there is nothing in its form or fabric to charge. Presence is continuous and wide: “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Leda and the Swan” and “Among School Children” are among the most anthologised and taught poems in English, and the first has given the language a common phrase. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the Irish wars of 1919 to 1923 and the occult system behind the poems, but the book is read for what those pressed on. What keeps it off 9.2 is the unit: the poems live everywhere, while the volume as a volume lives mainly in the academy and in collected editions, and few readers meet it in the order Yeats gave it.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over two centuries less a year from the first edition, and 184 years from the text scored. The form is whole: the revised text survives as Manzoni corrected it, with nothing lost, and the existence of three states, the draft, the edition of 1825 to 1827 and the revision, is a richness and not a charge. Presence is continuous: in print without a break, a set book in every Italian school for generations, filmed by Camerini (1941), made an opera by Ponchielli, serialised on RAI television (1967), parodied, and quoted as common speech, “Carneade! Chi era costui?” (ch. 8). It has been translated into the major languages from the 1830s. Held off the widest figure because outside Italy its presence is chiefly academic, and inside it partly compelled by the school syllabus, which is presence and not proof.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over eighty-three years from the collected publication of 1943 and ninety from Burnt Norton. Form: the text is whole and stable, with nothing lost and no contested version. Presence: continuous since publication, taught, anthologised and recited, read at funerals and in churches, translated into the main European languages, and quoted in public life more than almost any poem of its decades. Its surface is tied to a moment only in the war of Little Gidding, a setting the poem turns into history rather than a dependence. It stops short of the widest presence its span could show: its audience, large as it is, is a literary and devotional one, and its standing among poets and critics fell for a time after the 1960s.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the score survives complete in the composer’s revision, with no doubtful text and no lost part. Presence has been continuous since 1930. The work entered the repertory at once, has been recorded from 1931 to the present, and is among the most performed choral and orchestral works of the twentieth century, in concert halls and in churches. Nothing in the fabric is lost, and the instruments are standard. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the neoclassical manner dates it to a period but reads now as its idiom, not as fashion. Ninety-six years on, its presence is wide, though a work for large forces, heard in concert and church, is not present in the widest way.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on its span, one hundred and fifty-seven years, and on the presence that span allows. The text survives whole, in the form Flaubert published, with his manuscripts and drafts extant; nothing is lost and nothing is charged. It has been continuously in print in French, is set for the agrégation and taught in French schools and universities, and has been translated many times into English and into the major languages. It has outlived its conditions: the July Monarchy and 1848 are history, and the book is read for what they meant to a life. Charged against the widest figure for that span: its presence beyond France is narrower than that of Madame Bovary, and in English it is read more in the academy than by the general reader.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over a hundred and one years. The form is whole: the text survives as published, and the galley version and the first edition’s slips touch nothing that makes the work. The presence, since the revival of the 1940s, is as wide as any American novel’s: the Armed Services Edition of 1945 put it in servicemen’s hands; it has been taught in American schools for generations, translated into most written languages, filmed in 1949, 1974 and 2013, and staged whole as Gatz; it entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2021. Charged: the presence was not continuous, for the book was little read in the two decades after 1925 and all but forgotten at Fitzgerald’s death in 1940; and fame is presence, not proof. The Jazz Age surface has not fixed it to its moment: Prohibition and the bond business are history, and the book is read for what they carried.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as published; the recovery of the first half of the manuscript in 1990 added variants, not losses. The presence has been continuous since 1885: taught in American schools and universities for most of a century, translated into many languages, filmed often, with Mickey Rooney (1939) and with Elijah Wood (1993), and made a Broadway musical, Big River (1985). It is among the widest presences of its span, and it is charged: for decades the book has been challenged and removed from school reading for its racial epithets, and a bowdlerised edition replaced the word in 2011. That contest is part of its life in the culture and does not touch the text, but it is presence under dispute, and the figure is held for it. The fabric fixed to its moment, the dialects and the river trade, has become the book’s matter.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over some one hundred and forty years. The text is whole: Nietzsche saw all four parts through the press himself, and the later tampering of his sister fell on his notebooks, not on this book. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any German book of its century: in print without a break, translated into most written languages, and read far outside the academy by every generation since the 1890s. It stands at the top of the usual step for its span. Not higher: the Lutheran pastiche has dated as a surface, readers now come to it as much for its slogans as for the book, and its reception carries the charge of appropriation, which fame does not offset. A survival of a century and a half does not stand level with the millennia.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole; nothing has been lost from the composition, and the passages that look unfinished are the painter’s state, not damage. Presence: kept from public view for its first nine years and rolled or stored for some of the eight after, then from 1924 in Doucet’s house; on view in New York since 1939, rarely lent, one of the most visited canvases in its museum. Fabric: oil on canvas, lined and conserved more than once; the thin, rapid paint of the right side and the exposed ground are more vulnerable than a worked surface, and no loss to the image is recorded. Over 119 years the image has outlived the shock that was its first content. A presence absent through its first decades and a fragile right side hold it at 9.1.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
About one hundred and fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, in the serial and in the book edition. Presence has been continuous and wide: in print in Russia since 1874, through the Soviet years when Dostoevsky was officially suspect; translated into most written languages and retranslated into English several times; taught widely; filmed in Russia, Japan and elsewhere. Its surfaces most fixed to their moment, the nihilists of the Burdovsky affair, the talk of railways, Myshkin’s tirade against Catholicism, have dated and are read as period; the core has outlived them. Its presence is a step narrower than that of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, the Dostoevsky novels most read.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is a hundred and seven years since publication and a hundred and twelve since writing. The form survives whole, in the book Kafka himself published in 1919, with no editorial reconstruction of the kind the posthumous novels required; nothing of the form is lost. The presence is continuous since Kafka’s reception after the war: translated into most written languages, taught in schools and universities, staged and set to music. The surface is not fixed to its moment, since the colony has no place and no date, and its machinery has, if anything, become more legible. It stands at the second step a century can show, its presence wide but behind that of Die Verwandlung, and a century does not outscore the survivals of millennia.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over about one hundred and ninety years, in the band for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in Balzac’s revised version, with the serial and first editions known; nothing is lost, and nothing is charged on form. It has been in print without break since 1835, is the most read of Balzac’s novels in France and abroad, has been set in French schools and universities for generations, translated into the major languages more than once, and filmed and staged repeatedly; its names are in the language: a Rastignac, a Vautrin, a Maison Vauquer. Its surface is fixed to its moment, Restoration Paris, the dowry, the price of a dinner in francs, and it has outlived those conditions. Held just below the widest figure because its presence outside France is narrower than that of the most read European novels of its century, and much of it is in the academy.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated. Form first: the text survives whole, printed in the author’s lifetime under his oversight, with nothing lost and nothing disputed. Presence: 164 years in print without a break, translated in its first year and since into most written languages, read in schools in France and widely elsewhere, and adapted for stage and screen in nearly every decade. Few novels of any century are more widely present. Charged: much of that presence is not the text but the story, carried by the musical, the films and the abridgements that cut the digressions, and fame is not proof of permanence. The surfaces of 1817 and of Louis-Philippe have dated, but they were history when Hugo wrote them, and the book is read for what they pressed on.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and five years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the author’s own definitive revision; nothing is lost, and its two states are an author’s revision, not a corruption. Presence is continuous and wide: in the Italian repertory without break, translated into the major languages from the 1920s, staged across the world in every decade since, and studied wherever modern drama is taught. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the touring company with its prompter and its Capocomico, but the play has outlived that theatre and is played for what it pressed upon. Held at the usual figure rather than the widest because its presence outside the theatre and the classroom is narrower than that of the most widely read books of its century.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and seventy-three years. Form: the text survives whole in both its first printings, with no loss and no dispute of substance; nothing is charged. Presence is now about as wide as an American story’s can be: in every survey of American literature, widely translated, the formula current in speech, in philosophy and in protest. The charge falls on the early presence: from the 1850s to the Melville revival of the 1920s the story was barely read, and those seventy years keep it off the widest figure. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment that has ended, a Chancery office and copyists working by hand in the Wall Street of the 1840s, and the story has outlived it untouched. Copying by hand is gone, and the condition remains.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, and the span is a hundred and six years. The form survives whole, as Kafka authorised it: this is one of the few books he saw through the press himself, and none of the editorial questions that hang over the posthumous novels touches it; there is nothing to charge. The presence is continuous and wide for the pieces: Vor dem Gesetz, Eine kaiserliche Botschaft, the title story and the report are taught, anthologised and translated everywhere. The charge falls on the book as a book, which is mostly read dissolved into the collected stories rather than as the fourteen in Kafka’s order, so the widest figure goes to the pieces and not to the volume. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment; a country doctor’s sleigh and an emperor’s palace were period furniture even in 1920.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated. The score survives whole and is performed as written; no part is lost or doubtful. Its presence has been continuous since 1912, broken in Germany while the Nazi state banned Schoenberg’s music, from 1933 to 1945. It is widely recorded, in the core repertory of every new-music ensemble, taught in conservatories, and it gave its name to a whole formation of players. Its presence is the widest of any atonal work of its decade, but in a narrower field than the song cycle’s or the symphony’s: it is not heard as Winterreise is heard. The surface fixed to its moment is the text. Hartleben’s decadent verse belongs to the 1890s, and it has dated where the music has not.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Stendhal published it; nothing is lost and nothing is charged. Presence: about one hundred and ninety-six years, continuously in print since its revival in the 1850s and 1860s, taught in French schools and universities as a central classic, translated into the major languages several times over (Scott Moncrieff, Shaw, Adams, Gard and Raffel in English alone), and filmed, by Claude Autant-Lara with Gérard Philipe (1954) among others. Fabric: its surface is fixed to a moment, the last years of the Restoration, the Congrégation and the ultras, and the political chapters are read with notes; the hero and the loves are not. On the step for seventy years to two centuries, its presence is wide but not the widest.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A span of six centuries, and the text whole. On form: the poem survives entire, in manuscript and in print from Caxton’s edition (c. 1483); its five books, proems and ending are not in doubt, though the textual tradition carries variants, authorial or scribal, that editors still weigh. On presence: read without break from the 1380s through the sixteenth century, put into Latin by Sir Francis Kynaston (1635), adapted by Dryden, and edited and taught continuously since the nineteenth century. The charge is to presence. The Middle English stands between the poem and the general reader, and for three centuries it has been read mainly in the academy and by poets, with a thinner common readership than its rank implies; its wide and unbroken early life keeps it at the top of that band.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the novel was published complete by its author in 1942 and has been printed without break and without textual question since; nothing is lost or disputed. Presence is eighty-four years of continuous reading, teaching and translation, into dozens of languages, at school and university on several continents: as wide as any novel of its age has, though fame and sales are presence and not proof. The fabric carries no charge. The book has outlived the colonial Algeria that produced it and is now read partly against that order, which is evidence of survival rather than of a surface fixed to its moment. Eighty-four years of the widest presence are weighed as eighty-four years, and do not stand level with the survival of works that have lasted for centuries.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, across a millennium or more. The form survives whole, beginning, middle and end, but in a single witness, scorched in the Cotton fire of 1731, with letters lost at the edges throughout; one leaf of the dragon section was freshened by a later hand and its readings are largely editorial, and the Geatish woman’s lament at the pyre is reconstructed by conjecture. The losses touch passages that matter; the defining form is legible. The heavier charge is presence: nothing shows the poem read between the eleventh century and the eighteenth, and its continuous presence dates from 1815. Today its presence is the widest of any medieval English poem, taught throughout the English-speaking world and translated into many languages.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, tower, bridges and court are the makers’ own, legible as cut, and they have outlived the dynasty and the kingdom that produced them. Nothing has been rebuilt, because nothing could be. The use carries the largest charge: the work is present as a protected monument and a place of visit, never lost and continuously known, while its life as a temple in regular worship is not established and is weighed as lost. The fabric is the original rock with its surface lost: nearly all the paint gone, many figures mutilated, the elephants broken, parts of the periphery fallen and the basalt weathered. A form so wholly the makers’, with nothing replaced, holds the figure high against those charges.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over a span of 172 years. The form is whole: the text survives entire and authorial, with no question of transmission. Presence is wide: the book is among the most taught and translated American books. Its first decades were thin, a slow first sale and a reputation for eccentricity, and its wide presence gathered only from the 1890s, fully established by the middle of the twentieth century; its presence outside the United States, though real, is narrower than the widest. So it takes the upper end of the usual figure for its span, short of the widest. The surface fixed to its moment, the Fitchburg railroad, the ice trade, the price of boards, has become the book’s documentary value rather than its cost.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival over ninety-three years, in the span from seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and the widest presence earns 9.2. The text survives whole, printed without break and carried into every Collected Poems since 1933, with minor revisions only; nothing in its form or fabric is charged. Presence is wide: “Byzantium”, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”, “Swift’s Epitaph” and the Gore-Booth elegy are taught and anthologised wherever English poetry is, and lines from the book pass into common use. What keeps it off 9.2 is the unit and the surface: as a volume it is read mostly inside the Collected Poems, and less often as a book than The Tower, and some of its private system and its Anglo-Irish politics date.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A survival of 114 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole, as Mann published it, with nothing lost and no question of version; nothing is charged. Presence: continuous and very wide, read and taught in German and in many translations without a lapse, and kept present by the film, the opera and the association with Mahler that the film fixed. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, Europe in the spring of an unnamed year before the war and a Lido hotel of the Belle Epoque, but as setting, not as a production era, and the book has outlived it. Held off the top of its step because its presence, though wide, is not of the widest kind, which belongs to the most read novels of the period.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over a span of centuries. The form is legible and whole in its governing idea: the pyramid, the summit church and the stacked Merveille stand, and the design has outlived every condition that made it, the cult of relics, the Benedictine economy, the war. Use: pilgrimage by tradition since the eighth century, but monastic life broken for nearly two centuries, the halls a prison for some seventy years, the community restored small; the building lives chiefly as monument. Two failures of the first builders, the nave wall early in the twelfth century and the Romanesque choir in 1421, are charged here, each rebuilt. Fabric: the nave three bays short, much of the exterior and the spire of the nineteenth century, the restoration heavy.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on about a century and a half, and on the presence that span allows. The text survives whole, as published, with Flaubert’s own proofs; nothing in its fabric is charged. Presence is continuous: it is set in French schools and universities, translated into many languages and kept in print in English in several versions, and “Un cœur simple” is among the most anthologised and taught stories in French. Its surfaces, Normandy under the July Monarchy, the medieval legend, Roman Judaea, were period settings when it was written and have not dated the book. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and the book’s widest presence is carried by one story of three: “Hérodias” is read far less than the first tale.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across nearly fourteen and a half centuries. The form survives whole: core, exedrae, ambulatory, gallery, presbytery and apse are the sixth century’s and legible from the door as built, and the programme of presbytery and apse survives in place, its focus intact, unlike Sainte-Chapelle’s empty tribune. The idea outlived the empire, the exarchate and the city’s importance, copied through Aachen. Use is charged in part: still a consecrated church, it is now chiefly a ticketed monument, its worship occasional. Fabric is charged: the first decoration of the dome is lost and replaced, the atrium is gone, much of the revetment is renewed, the floor has been raised against subsidence, and the mosaics are consolidated and in places restored. The survival of form and programme in place holds it high against those charges.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three and a half centuries. Form: legible and whole in what carries the meaning, both rooms, both spinners, the alcove, the Pallas group, the Titian. But the canvas was enlarged after the painter’s death, most at the top, where a later hand painted an arch and an oculus over the scene. The addition changes the proportion and puts a vault over a room the painter left open; it adds rather than removes, and the core is intact. Presence: royal, then public in the Prado since the nineteenth century, continuously studied, less famous than its sister picture, which matters little. Fabric: the ordinary history of an old oil, with damage and repair charged. The alteration holds it below the band’s top.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is about a hundred and forty years from publication. Form: the pieces survive in fair copies and are legible whole. The charge falls on the form of the book, whose order and boundaries are editorial, and on a few pieces whose fair copies, in the hand of Germain Nouveau, have had their attribution questioned, though the authorship of the pieces has held. Presence: continuous since 1886, taught wherever French poetry is taught, translated again and again into every major language, set to music and quoted. The surface is not fixed to its moment; the visions have outlived Symbolism. Fabric: nothing to charge. Presence would argue a tenth more; the editorial form of the book takes it back.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in Berlioz’s revised score, with no lost or doubtful part; the revisions are his own. Presence over about 196 years is wide: for a century the work has been among the most often performed and recorded symphonies, in every orchestral culture, a standard of the repertory. Its first decades were uneven, more scandal and Liszt’s piano than the concert hall, and that holds it from the widest figure. The fabric carries a small charge: the ophicleide is obsolete, and its parts are played on tubas. What dates is the surface fixed to its moment, the programme’s opium and its Romantic pose, which have aged more than the music.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole, in two authorised states, 1905 and 1909, whose difference is small and argued; the fanfares are a variant, not a loss. Presence: about 120 years, continuous in the central repertory since well before its fiftieth year, among the most recorded orchestral works of its century, and played by orchestras on every continent. Fabric: nothing is charged. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the Japanism of the cover and the impressionist label have fallen away, and the work is heard as itself. Its presence is wide but not the very widest of its span, which holds the axis a tenth below the top of its step.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: published by Universal Edition in 1937, with no doubtful text and no lost part. The presence is wide and continuous: the work is a fixed part of the orchestral repertory and of conducting study, and its Adagio has a second life in film, which is presence, not proof. Ninety years of that life is survival demonstrated, though over a shorter span than the oldest works on the desk. The surface fixed to its moment is small: no programme, no text, no instrument now obsolete. What holds it below the widest figure is that its presence, though secure, is not the widest a concert work of its span has had.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: published by Simrock in 1886 and played as published, with nothing lost or in doubt. Presence has been continuous since 1885, from Meiningen and the tour that followed into the core repertoire of every orchestra, recorded from the early electrical era to the present, among the most performed symphonies of its century. That earns a tenth above the usual mark for its span. It is not given the widest presence: Beethoven’s and Tchaikovsky’s late symphonies are heard more, and the work has no life outside the concert hall. The surface fixed to its moment is almost nil: no text, no programme, no obsolete instrument.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
About five hundred years, and the image survives whole on its page. Presence is charged. In 1568 the folio passed with its book from the Safavid library to the Ottoman palace and was little seen for some three and a half centuries; in the twentieth century the manuscript was taken apart, so that the page no longer stands where it was made to stand, after the prologues and before the reign of Hushang. As a work on paper it is shown rarely and briefly, for its own protection. The figure records both facts: centuries with the form whole, which reaches the upper rows of the axis, and a presence interrupted and a book broken, which hold it below the top of them. What survives is the painting entire; what is lost is its place.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Form first: whole and legible after 133 years, nothing lost that carried meaning. Presence second: continuous and as wide as any painting’s, in a national collection since 1910 and in view for over a century; fame is not proof of permanence, and presence lifts the figure only to the top of the usual band for a work of this age. Fabric last: cardboard, thin tempera and crayon, among the most vulnerable materials a painting can be made of, and sensitive to light; drips mark the lower surface, and the board was stolen in February 1994 and recovered that May. The image came through. That charge is the smallest, and it is the one that keeps the figure from the top. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 176 years. Form: the text survives whole as published; the first and second editions differ only by the new preface, and nothing is lost or contested. Presence: in print without a break since 1850, and taught for more than a century in American schools and universities, where it has long been among the most assigned of all novels; filmed by Victor Sjöström with Lillian Gish (1926), by Wim Wenders (1973) and by Roland Joffé (1995); its title a phrase in the language. It has outlived its conditions: Puritan discipline and the Salem quarrel over patronage are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. Held short of the widest presence because its reach outside the English-speaking world is narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its century, and much of its presence rests on the classroom.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A hundred and eighty-three years. The text survives whole, as Kierkegaard printed it, and the Danish critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, secures it. Its presence is now very wide: translated into the major languages, taught in nearly every course in the philosophy of religion and in existentialism, and with Either/Or the most read of the pseudonymous books. That would claim the widest figure for its span; it is held back a tenth because presence was not continuous. For some sixty years after 1843 the book was barely read outside Denmark; Georg Brandes lectured on Kierkegaard in 1877, German translations followed from the 1880s, and Walter Lowrie’s English came in 1941. A surface fixed to its moment, the Preface’s satire on Danish Hegelianism and the commerce of ideas, has outlived its occasion, and that tells for the book.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: bronze, intact, the full plaster and the studies kept in the Musée Rodin, and the same form held in authorised casts in Europe, the United States and Asia, so that no single loss can take the work. Presence has been continuous since 1889 and, through the casts, is as wide as for any modern sculpture; fame is presence and earns a tenth at most. The surface is not fixed to its moment: no costume of the 1880s, no allegory of its republic, only men in shirts, which is why it has outlived the commemorative tradition it rejected. The charge: the first cast is reported to have stood for decades in a setting that undid part of its form, and the casts made after Rodin’s death, though authorised, are editions he did not see.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and forty years. Form first: the text is whole and has been in print without a break since 1885. Presence: it is read in French schools as the Zola novel, translated many times into English and into most written languages, and filmed in three eras. It has outlived its conditions. The Second Empire, the coal pits of the Nord (the last closed in 1990) and the science of heredity are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon. Charged: it is less read outside France than Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, so it is not the widest presence of its span, and its surface is partly fixed to a science that has dated. At the top of the usual figure for its age, not above it.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across 151 years, and presence is of the widest: continuous performance since 1875 in the houses of the world, and tunes that are common property far beyond the opera house. The charge is the text. For about eighty years the work survived chiefly in a form it was not written in, Guiraud’s recitatives in place of the dialogue and of the balance of speech and song that Bizet left. The spoken version returned to general use only in the second half of the twentieth century, and the editing since Oeser’s edition of 1964 has been disputed. Every number survived, so the charge is small. A smaller one: each production must now answer how to stage the Roma.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over about a hundred and thirty-five years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in versions Hardy himself made and dated, from 1891 to 1912; nothing is lost, and the plurality of texts is a matter for editors, not a charge on the work. Presence: in print continuously since 1891, among the most widely read and taught English novels in schools and universities, translated widely, and adapted repeatedly, by Hardy himself for the stage and by Roman Polanski on film (1979), among others. Fabric: the tied cottage, the Lady Day hirings and the steam threshing machine are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on a woman. Held off the widest figure because its presence beyond the English-speaking world is narrower than that of the very few novels of its century read everywhere.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival of the text, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole in what Byron completed; the sixteen cantos were published in his lifetime under his own revision, and nothing that made the work is lost; what is missing was never written. Presence: read, taught and edited without break since 1819, translated widely, and its phrases in common use, “Stranger than fiction” (XIV.101) and “a thing apart” among them. Fabric: the satire on the England of the 1820s needs annotation, and in the last century its reading has drawn more and more on the academy. Some two centuries of unbroken presence with the text whole earn the figure, the highest of the twelve; the surface fixed to its moment and the academic cast of its present readership check it, and it does not stand level with works of millennia.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The text survives whole: published in Goethe’s lifetime, in editions he oversaw, with no question of version or assembly. It has stood for 217 years. In German it has been continuously read, taught and edited as one of the central works of its literature. In English it is read mainly in the academy and by readers of Goethe, far less than Werther or Faust: translated and in print, but not common reading. The form is whole and the fabric is not at issue. The charge is for presence outside its language and outside the academy, and it sets the novel at the top of the band for a text of centuries read mainly by scholars, not in the band above it.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A hundred and twenty-five years since the premiere. The text survives whole, revised by its author after the first staging, and nothing is charged on form or fabric. Presence is continuous and wide: one of the most performed plays of the modern repertory in Russia, Britain, Germany and America, translated into the major languages, constantly retranslated into English, and taught. The surface is fixed to a moment, a garrison town under the late empire, a brigade’s posting, a provincial gentry’s French and Italian, and the play has outlived that moment entirely; its subject is time and hope, which do not date. Held at 9.1 rather than higher because its presence, though wide, is chiefly theatrical and academic rather than the general reading presence of the most read novels.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over about 118 years. The text is whole and stable, published by Rilke himself in 1907 and 1908 and never in doubt. Presence has been continuous: in print in German since 1907, standard in anthologies and in schools, translated many times into English alone, whole by Edward Snow and by Stephen Cohn and poem by poem by many others, and into the major languages. Nothing in the book’s fabric is lost, and nothing in its reception has lapsed. Held at 9.1 and not higher because the book does not have the widest presence: among Rilke’s books that belongs to the Duino Elegies, and beyond them to a few lyric books of the world.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a century. The form is whole and authorial: the story was published in Kafka’s lifetime, he corrected the proofs of its book himself, and it is one of the works he named, in his instructions to Max Brod, as standing; it carries none of the editorial question laid on the novels Brod assembled. The presence is continuous, in German and in every major language, through school and university syllabi, anthologies and a critical literature that has not paused. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment: the fairground hunger artist was already a vanishing trade when Kafka wrote, and the story is built on that vanishing, so the obsolescence of its subject is its matter rather than its cost. Held a tenth under The Metamorphosis, which has the widest presence of Kafka’s works.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over about a century. The text survives whole, as Rilke published it in 1923, with no question of recension or loss, and the form is entirely legible. Its presence has been continuous: never out of print, read in German schools and universities, translated many times into English alone and into most literary languages, and quoted far outside poetry, the last tercet of II.29 above all. Nothing in it is fixed to its moment except the machine sonnets, and those have aged into prophecy rather than period. Held where it stands because a century is not millennia, and because its presence, though wide, is a step below the widest of the century.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: one score, published within a year of the premiere, with no lost or doubtful text and no rival version. Presence over 133 years has been continuous and among the widest in the symphonic repertory, in the core of every major orchestra, recorded from the age of 78s through Furtwängler, Mravinsky and Karajan to the present. What holds the axis a tenth from the widest figure is a surface fixed to biography: the work long served as a death pageant for its composer, swan song and suicide note, and it has had to outlive that use in performance, which it has largely, not wholly, done.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
A span of a hundred and forty years. The text survives whole: published in the author’s lifetime under his own eye, and untouched by the editorial assembly that charges Der Wille zur Macht. Presence is continuous and wide: in print in German and in many translations since the 1890s, taught in every course on modern thought, read far outside the academy, and quoted daily, §146 above all. The figure is not the widest because much of the presence is in the academy and in anthologies of sayings rather than in the whole book read in order, and because its reputation passed through the years from 1933 to 1945, when it was read for what it was not.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about four centuries. Form: the poems survive whole, but they were never fixed by their author. The text is an editorial reconstruction from posthumous prints and a large, varying manuscript tradition; a few poems are of doubtful attribution, readings differ, and the order is not Donne’s. That is a small charge: the defining form of each poem is legible and the core is secure. Presence carries the larger charge. Read and imitated through the seventeenth century, the poems were long neglected from about 1700, cited more as a warning than read, until the nineteenth century and above all the revival of 1912 to 1921. Since then their presence has been wide, in schools, anthologies and criticism. This is a text of centuries charged for long neglect; the neglect ended a century ago and the presence since is wide, so it stands at 9.1, the top of that band, below an unbroken survival of centuries.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Form first: the image is whole. No figure has lost a head or a gesture, and the composition is legible to its edges. Presence has been continuous since 1538: wanted urgently by its first owner, seen by Vasari at Urbino, carried to Florence in 1631, attacked as indecent in the nineteenth century and taken up by the painters who overturned its tradition. Only the furnishings fix it to a moment, and they read as a house, not a date; its question has outlived the court that commissioned it. The charges are two: oil on canvas is more vulnerable than marble or a text, and what survives so completely is a smaller work, one figure in one room, than those the axis ranks highest.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: towers, anchorages, the four cables and their web, the curve of the span and the promenade on its axis are as they were opened, and they have outlived the conditions that produced them, two separate cities, horse traffic and cable cars, and one decade’s faith in iron and steam. The use has been continuous for 143 years in its own purpose, carrying loads its makers did not foresee. The towers and the cables are the makers’ fabric. Charged: the deck and its trusses rebuilt from 1948 to 1954, the rail use lost, the roadways given to cars, the promenade crowded. Presence of the widest kind would earn a tenth more, and the rebuilt deck takes it back.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
About a hundred and twenty-nine years since publication, weighed in the step for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, as Chekhov published it, with nothing lost and no assembly to charge. Presence is continuous and wide: in the repertory of the Russian stage since 1899, and of the English, American, German, French and Japanese stages for most of a century; translated and adapted again and again; filmed by Konchalovsky (1970) and by Malle; and made the spine of a film that won an Academy Award in 2022. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the provincial estate and the professor’s pension are history, and the play is staged for what they pressed upon. Held a step below the widest figure because its presence is mainly the theatre’s and the school’s.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The text survives whole, as Ibsen published it, with no question of transmission. Its span is 136 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries, and it stands at the top of that step’s usual band. Presence is continuous and very wide: staged without break since 1891 wherever Western theatre is played, among the most performed plays of the European repertory, translated into the world’s major languages, filmed and televised repeatedly, and taught in schools and universities. It has outlived its conditions: the professorship, the widow’s villa and the scandal of a lady at a bachelor party are history, and the play is staged for what they pressed upon. Not higher, because that presence is mainly theatrical and academic.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 676 years. Form: the fire of 1650 took the opening and divided the scroll, but what was lost was a beginning, not the central range or the close, and the river journey, its alternation of mass and water and the brush in every passage are legible in both pieces. The charge is real and proportionate. Presence: owned, inscribed and copied by every later generation, held in the imperial collection, and since 2011 shown reunited; the emperor’s error, which set a copy in its place for some two centuries, is a charge on presence, not on survival. Fabric: the scorch at the joins and the old paper are the smallest charge. The loss is modest and the presence wide, and the figure sits at the top of the band for a work of centuries with part of its form lost.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order, and the form leads. The governing form is legible and whole after some twenty-two centuries: the dome, both railings, the stair and all four gateways stand, the carving is legible on all four gates, and the brick core attributed to Ashoka survives inside, unseen. The repairs are weighed here and nowhere else: the dome was breached in 1822 and stands whole; the south and west gateways had fallen and were re-erected in the 1880s; John Marshall’s campaign of 1912 to 1919 repaired the fabric. What holds the axis is presence: the site passed out of use long before it was found in 1818, as the Pantheon never did, though worship has returned, with pilgrims at the site since the mid-twentieth century. The sandstone has weathered and some panels are worn.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries. Form: the image is the image the painter made, and no loss that touches its meaning is claimed. Presence: the charge falls here. The canvas passed a long stretch in obscurity while its painter’s name lapsed; it hangs now in Hamburg, and since the rediscovery it has become among the most reproduced of Romantic images; an image retrieved after long neglect and kept at the centre since is itself evidence. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage to the image is claimed. The long obscurity is weighed against the widest presence since.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole and authoritative, in print since 1854, with the autograph extant; the loud close reported in it, struck out, is a document of making, not a doubt about the text. Presence: performed in public from 1857 and, since the early twentieth century, central to the repertory of every major pianist and much recorded. Fabric: it asks for the concert grand’s ancestor and has needed no retouching. At 172 years it takes the upper usual figure for its span, not the widest, because its presence is wide but specialist, a pianist’s summit more than a public’s, and its first decades were contested and thinly performed.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 184 years. The form reads as Turner left it: the hull, the mast, the signal, the vortex and the light are legible, and nothing that carries the meaning is known to be lost. The presence is long and wide: in the painter’s possession until his death in 1851, then in the national collection from the bequest, on view in London for most of the time since, at the National Gallery and then at the Tate, and among the most reproduced of his images; fame adds only a little to the figure. Turner’s late materials are known to be unstable in many works, but no particular loss on this canvas is known, and none is charged. The picture has already outlived the hostile first reception that Ruskin reported.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, the girl, the counter, the still life and the mirror all legible. Presence: in public view in London for most of the last century, and among the most reproduced paintings of its century, which earns a little and proves nothing by itself. The span is 144 years. The surface is fixed to its moment in every particular, the Bass label, the bustle, the globes of light, the café-concert, and none of it stands between the picture and a viewer who knows nothing of 1882: a person at work being looked at across a counter is not dated. It has outlived the Salon it was sent to, the hall it shows in its first form, and its painter. What holds it below the top is the span, the shorter test in its band, and that no catastrophe has been survived.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about thirteen centuries. Form: whole. The composition, the cleft and nearly every figure are legible, and no part that carries the meaning is lost. Water is reported to have been let down the cleft once from above, which would have made the image of descent a descent; that is not certain, and if it ran it is a small loss of form, since the cleft still carries the river. Presence: the relief has stood in the open in the same place since it was cut, known to the pilgrims and the fishermen of the coast and later to scholarship, and it is among the most visited monuments in South India. Fabric: salt wind and monsoon have softened the granite and blunted faces and edges, the lower face most; the smallest charge.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 461 years. The form is wholly legible: nothing the panel needs is lost. Its presence has been continuous, from the merchant’s house to the city of Antwerp, which gave the series to the Habsburgs in the 1590s, and in the imperial collection ever since, now shown publicly in Vienna. The surface is fixed to its moment only in its clothes: the costumes are of the 1560s, the weather is every winter’s, and a viewer who knows nothing of calendars or Brabant reads it at once. The charges are small. A panel is a fragile object; the series it was made to stand in is broken, so it hangs as an image rather than a season of a year; and for two centuries its presence was private, then courtly.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival of ninety-eight years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Lorca published it in 1928, with nothing lost or disputed, and nothing is charged. Presence: continuous since publication, in print through the decades in Spain and abroad, taught in schools across the Spanish-speaking world, translated widely and repeatedly, sung and recited. The early Franco years narrowed his presence in Spain for a time, but the book never left print or memory, and abroad his murder made him more read, not less. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a region and a folklore, but as material, not as a dated manner. Set at the top of the usual band for a span of seventy years to two centuries, and not at the figure kept for books of world reading on the scale of the great novels.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible. The figure of Christ, the face, the sleepers, the tomb and the landscape all stand, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: about 560 years in the building it was painted for, and the emblem of the town throughout; but outside Sansepolcro it was hardly regarded until the nineteenth century, and it has never been in a great collection. Fabric: there are losses and old repairs; whether it was moved from another wall early in its life is debated; it came through the war of 1944, and it was cleaned and consolidated in a campaign completed in 2018. Charged for the fabric and for a long, quiet presence, lifted by a form that stands whole.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over three and a half centuries. The text survives whole, printed in Milton’s lifetime, with only the small matter of the Omissa, which every edition restores; nothing of the work is lost, and form and fabric carry no charge. Presence has been continuous since 1671, in every collected Milton and in the teaching of English literature, and kept in wider view by Handel’s oratorio, by the phrase “Eyeless in Gaza” in common use, and by the argument after 2001. The charge is the academy’s: it is not a book read widely outside the study of literature, and its presence has always stood in the shadow of Paradise Lost. The charge is applied lightly, and the play keeps the highest figure of the twelve.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across 152 years. What makes the work survives complete: the score is whole, in print with Ricordi since 1874, its revised form fixed by its maker in 1875, with no lost or doubtful text. Presence is continuous and wide. It was taken across Europe within a year, to Paris in June 1874 and London in May 1875; it has been a central choral and orchestral work in every decade since; it is recorded by every major conductor, from Toscanini’s broadcast of 1951 onward. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the ophicleide, now played on the tuba, and an Italian theatre idiom that is now a period sound. The figure stands at the top of the usual figure for its span, for the completeness of the text and the depth of the presence.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nearly six centuries. Form: whole. All ten panels, the frame and its heads survive, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: in view on the building from 1452 to the late twentieth century, among the most looked at doors in Europe, and now in the cathedral’s museum. Fabric: here the charges fall. The flood of 4 November 1966 tore panels from the doors; centuries of exposure dulled and encrusted the gilding; the doors were taken from the building for conservation, and what stands on the baptistery now is a cast, so the work no longer serves as the door it was made to be. The restoration completed in 2012 recovered the gold. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Inside the row for centuries with form whole, in its lower part, level with Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, which the same flood reached.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form is whole: both courts and axes, the pool, the tower, the throne hall, the four halls of the Lions, the two domes, the ceilings and most inscriptions are Nasrid and in place, and the loss on the south side, taken for the Palace of Charles V, falls outside both axes. The use has not broken, from the Nasrid court to the Catholic Monarchs and their successors to a monument; but a palace visited is not a palace lived in, and that is charged. The fabric, earth, gypsum, timber and tile, is the least durable of any monument of its rank, and has lost its colour, furnishings and planting, a ceiling to fire, and much of its stucco to restorers’ casts.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over about two centuries. The form survives whole: the text is the first edition of 1853 and the editions descended from it, and nothing in the work is missing or in doubt. Presence is wide: since the mid twentieth century the quintet has been continuously performed and recorded and stands at or near the head of its genre. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The cost is in the early record: the work was silent for its first generation and unpublished until 1853, so its public life began a quarter of a century after it was written. Below Op. 131 and Winterreise, both at 9.5, for that silence.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A span of some hundred and twenty-six years. The text survives whole, revised by its author and preserved in every state, from the first edition to the eighth. Presence is continuous: translated into the major languages, by A. A. Brill (1913), James Strachey (1953), Joyce Crick (1999) and others since; taught in literature, philosophy and the history of science; and quoted, the dream as “Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten”, the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious, above all. The figure is not the widest because its presence is now more historical and humanistic than practical: psychology reads it as history, and much of its reading is in the academy. The charge is light, since its general reading has never lapsed. The book has outlived the neurology and the Vienna that made it, which is this axis’s test.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival over a hundred and three years, which places the work in the span from seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the author’s final arrangement; the removal of “Mount Buzhou” was his own and costs nothing. Presence is continuous and very wide: read and taught in Chinese schools for most of a century, translated into many languages, staged and filmed, Ah Q above all. The presence is charged in part, and that charge holds it short of the widest figure: much of it has been official, the book carried by a state that made its author a saint and so read him narrowly, and his place in the school syllabus has been argued over in this century. The surface is fixed to a moment, the queue and the events of 1911 and 1917, but as setting, not as dependence; the condition outlives it.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ninety-seven years, a span whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1, with 9.2 for the widest presence. Form: the text survives whole as published and has never been out of print. Presence: it is taught in schools and universities in Britain, North America and beyond, translated widely and quoted in public argument, and its title is a common phrase. It has outlived its conditions: the Oxbridge of 1928, the poverty of the women’s colleges and the sum of five hundred a year are history, and the book is read for what they show. Charged: the surfaces fixed to the moment, the money figures, the passing remarks on Mussolini’s Italy and on Galsworthy and Kipling, and the class assumptions, have dated, and its presence, though wide, leans toward the academy and toward one argument. Held a tenth below the widest figure for that.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty-seven years, the text whole and read without a break. Presence is strong. The novel has been taught in Russian schools continuously, through the Soviet years and after; it is translated into the major languages and several times into English, by Duddington, Magarshack, Pearl and Schwartz at least; it was filmed by Mikhalkov; and its hero’s name is common speech in Russian. The surface fixed to its moment, serfdom, the chancellery, the bailiff’s letters, is the condition of its disclosure, and the book has plainly outlived it. Charged: its presence outside Russia is real but not the widest of its span, so it stands at the top of the usual figure for its age and not above it.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over one hundred years, and weighed as one hundred years. The text survives whole, as Hemingway passed it, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence has been continuous and wide: in print since 1926, widely translated, taught in schools and universities for most of the century, filmed in 1957, and in the public domain in the United States since 1 January 2022, which has widened its editions. The presence is wide but not the widest of its decade: The Great Gatsby is read more widely. Its surface is fixed to a moment, the expatriate Paris of the mid-1920s named bar by bar, and its anti-Semitism has charged its reception; neither has stopped its reading. The figure stands at the upper end of what a century earns, and a century does not stand level with the eldest texts.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and nine years. Form: the text survives whole and without dispute, as Eliot printed it and as he kept it in every collected edition. Presence is continuous and wide: “Prufrock” is among the most anthologised and most taught poems in English, read in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and its lines are proverbial. The fabric is charged in part: the Boston tea tables and the satires of “Cousin Nancy” and “Aunt Helen” are period pieces, and the volume as a volume is read mainly through the collected poems. On “Prufrock” alone the presence would be the widest its span can show; the book, whose lesser pages are kept alive by the great one, stands a step below that.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Eighty-seven years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, the novel as published in 1939, with no other version to choose between. Presence: in print, in schools and in translation without a break since 1939, among the widest of any American novel, which earns a tenth above the floor of the step. Fabric: the dialect, the topical politics of the late 1930s and the government camp chapters date the book in places, and some of its presence is the presence of a set text and of a famous film; for those the further tenth is withheld. Its central matter has long outlived the conditions that produced it and is read anew with each migration. Sales and prizes are counted here as presence, and as no more than presence.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 196 years, and what makes the work, the image, is whole: no loss of form. Presence is of the widest kind: one of the most reproduced images in French art, on currency, in schoolbooks and on posters. But presence is charged as well as credited. Bought by the state in 1831 and shown briefly at the Musée du Luxembourg, it was withdrawn from view as dangerous and returned to the painter, and for about two decades it was out of public sight; it was shown again at the Exposition Universelle of 1855 and entered the Louvre only in 1874. The surface is fixed to a moment by its title and its costume, yet it has outlived the July Monarchy, its occasion and its politics, and now stands for revolution in general. Held below the widest-presence figure for the eclipse; the cleaning of 2023 to 2024 bears here and nowhere else.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
One hundred and seventy-six years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The text is whole and has been read without a break since 1850: in print continuously, taught, translated into the major languages, abridged for children, and adapted for stage, film and television many times; Micawber and Heep are words in English. Adaptation and fame are presence, and count for little on their own. What holds the axis off the widest presence: the book is read more in its first half than its second, and the sentimental close has weakened, not strengthened, with time. A survival of under two centuries does not outscore one of millennia, but at its age the book has shown what survival can show.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the novel survives whole, in Turgenev’s book text of 1862, with nothing lost. Presence: a hundred and sixty-four years of continuous reading; a set book in Russian schools for generations; translated into English from the nineteenth century onward, by Constance Garnett in 1895 and many times since, and into most written languages; taught in courses on the novel and on Russian thought. Fabric: no charge. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the debates of 1859 and Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff, which Arkady gives his father in place of Pushkin, but it has outlived those conditions, since the quarrel of the generations is read for itself. Held a step below the widest presence such a span can show, because outside Russia it is read more in the classroom than the most widely read novels of its century are read at large, and a classroom presence is presence, not proof.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole and legible: the field, the figure and the three bands are all there. Presence: in the Prussian royal collection from 1810 and then the national collection in Berlin, never dispersed, and through the Second World War; but for some sixty years after the painter’s death it was little regarded, and its standing now is a recovery. The fabric is charged: the surface is cracked and darkened, the glazes have changed, and the sky’s first tone is in part a matter of inference, though the restoration of the pair removed yellowed varnish and recovered much of it. At 216 years it sits just past the band of two centuries. Wide presence earns its tenth; the long neglect and the fabric take it back.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five and a half centuries. Form: whole. The hair, the face, the hands and the feet stand as carved, and no part that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuously in view, for centuries in the Baptistery and since its restoration in the cathedral museum; fame adds little. Fabric: here is the charge. Wood and polychromy are fragile. The figure was submerged in the flood of 1966, and its surface had earlier been covered with a dark overpaint that hid the original colour; restoration removed it and recovered the flesh colour and the gold, which makes good rather than diminishes, but some loss of surface and the vulnerability of the material are real. Centuries, form whole, fabric damaged and heavily treated: the low end of its row.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The Woodland Chapel has stood for about 106 years and the completed whole for 86. The form survives whole: entrance, open slope, cross, grove, avenue, chapels and crematorium are in place as built, and the governing idea of a passage from city to forest is as legible as on the day it was finished. It has outlived its conditions: the central role of the Lutheran state church, the cremation movement, interwar Nordic classicism. The use is continuous and in its own purpose since the 1920s, a working cemetery and crematorium entered daily for burial and mourning, and this is the strongest evidence. The fabric is largely the makers’, in a living landscape that must be renewed tree by tree, closer to the upkeep of a fabric than the loss of a form. Presence adds nothing.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over ninety-seven years. The text survives whole as published, and the manuscripts and the alternative endings are public; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide and continuous: in print without a break, taught in schools and universities, translated into the major languages, and filmed twice. Its surface is partly fixed to a moment. The lovers’ idiom and the novel’s women are dated, and that is charged in presence, where the book is read by many in the academy against its handling of gender. The figure credits wide presence at the upper end of what its span earns, and withholds the step that belongs to the books read without that quarrel.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: dam, towers, spillways, powerhouse and Kaufmann’s treatment stand as completed, and the figure has outlived the Depression and the New Deal that made it, reading as of its decade only in the streamlined trim. The use has run without a break since 1936: storage, flood control and generation. The fabric has held: the monolith is sound, and the generators and turbines have been refurbished and uprated, which is machinery and the smallest charge. The charge falls on use. Drought in this century has drawn Lake Mead to historic lows and cut the dam’s output, so the purpose the form serves is under strain. The dam’s wide presence would earn a tenth; that strain takes it back.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text is whole, and was fixed by the author in the second edition of 1841; there is no loss or recovery to charge. Presence: read continuously since publication, taught in Russian schools across every regime of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and translated into the major languages repeatedly, in English alone by Nabokov, Foote and several later hands. For a span between seventy years and two centuries the axis takes the upper of its usual figures, because presence in Russian is as wide as any book’s, and the axis is held below the widest because outside Russia the presence, though continuous, is narrower than that of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Fabric: nothing in the book is fixed to its moment in a way that dates it; the Caucasian war is the setting, not the subject.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over a hundred and nineteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Conrad published it and corrected it for the collected edition; the serial and the book text are both known, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: slow at first, for it sold poorly in 1907, then continuous from the 1940s, in print throughout in many editions and translations, widely taught in English and comparative literature, adapted for stage, film and television several times, and returned to by a wide public after 2001 as the novel that had already understood terror. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the Greenwich bomb, the anarchist émigrés of the 1890s, a Home Office of top hats, but it has outlived those conditions by being read for what they show. Its presence is wide, not the widest of its era, and the slow start holds it here.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and twelve years. Form: the text survives whole, as published in 1914, with nothing lost, and the form is wholly legible. Presence: the widest its span allows within its language. In print without break since 1914, the book on which Iwanami built its fiction list, read in excerpt in the high schools for most of the twentieth century and since, filmed by Ichikawa Kon (1955) and by Shindō Kaneto (1973), and translated into the major languages, into English three or more times. Fabric: the boarding house, the Imperial University and Nogi’s death are history, and the book is read for what they bore on. Charged: its presence outside Japan is narrower than that of the most read European novels of its century, and the Meiji close, the part most fixed to its moment, is the part later readers find hardest. That holds it at 9.1 and not 9.2.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
A hundred and thirty-four years since its publication in 1892, and the text survives whole, with nothing lost and no textual dispute that touches the work. Presence is continuous: it is read in Russian schools and universities, translated into every major language, and set in nearly every selection of Chekhov’s stories in English. It has outlived both the provincial zemstvo hospital it depicts and the political readings of the Soviet years; the institution is its setting, not the thing it depends on. Not given the widest figure because its presence, large in Russia, is narrower outside it than that of Chekhov’s plays and of “The Lady with the Dog”: it is among the most read of the stories, not the most read.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: survival is shown over about nine centuries, and the composition is legible whole; the Christ, the two halves, the weighing, the lintel and its hands stand where they were cut, in the building they were made for, over a door still in use. The charges rest on a history the desk gives as reported, not verified in its dates: the relief hidden under plaster for some decades, the head of the Christ broken away in that work and later returned to the figure, and damage at the centre of the lintel. The loss touched the centre of the composition, though what stands is whole in its meaning, and the returned head is the original stone. Fabric: limestone weathering, sheltered within a later porch. The figure stands at 9.1, at the top of the band for loss and repair.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Centuries, and the text whole. Form: the play survives entire in Racine’s own revised editions, with nothing lost and no question of authenticity; nothing is charged. Presence: in the repertory of the Comédie-Française since its foundation, taught in French schools without a break, widely translated, and revived on the modern stage. The charge is on presence outside the French-speaking world, where the play is mainly academic: read, in English and elsewhere, as the second or third Racine, and rarely played. Three and a half centuries of unbroken life in its own language place it high among the works of its age; the narrower presence abroad keeps it below the top of that range, and well below the millennial texts.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is whole and legible: top light, the shaft, the layered views and the fragments in place survive as Soane fixed them, and the idea has outlived the conditions that made it, copied and answered by architects. The dwelling ended at his death, but the use he designed the house for and settled by law, a museum and an academy for students and amateurs, has run without a break since 1837, free to enter. The fabric is fragile, lanterns, coloured glass, plaster and paper, and has had close custody for two centuries, later changes reversed and the private floor restored from his records. That restoration is a small charge beside a form and a use that never lapsed, at 202 to 234 years.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: both palaces, the courtyards, the stairs, the bastions and the gold roofs are in place, the governing idea fully legible, and the building has outlived the conditions that made it, the Ganden Phodrang state ended in 1959 and the palace standing, answered and copied at Chengde. The use carries the charge: the residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of his government until 1959, it has been for sixty-seven years a state museum with limited entry. Religious use survives in part: pilgrims visit the chapels, lamps are lit, a small body of monks keeps it, and the circuit round the hill is walked daily. The fabric is largely the seventeenth century’s and later campaigns’, heavily restored in timber and earth in recent decades.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the score and Heine’s poems survive whole; the four songs removed before publication are not part of the work and are no loss to it. Presence: continuous since publication in 1844, in print, in the recital, in the conservatory and on record for about a century; with Winterreise it is one of the two most performed song cycles. Fabric: nothing is lost; the piano has changed since 1840 and the work has needed no retouching; the German is a barrier the tradition has carried most of its listeners across. The span is about a hundred and eighty years. Its presence is very wide within its field, and the field is the recital hall; the figure is held a tenth below the widest presence.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Five centuries, form whole: the design, the colour structure and every figure survive legibly. The charge is for the fabric. The canvas has suffered damage and old retouching, losses are reported in the sky and in parts of the figures, and a cleaning left a dispute over whether the result is faithful to the balance of its surface; the condition is known here in outline, not in detail. Form outranks fabric, and the form stands. Presence has been long and wide: princely and noble collections from Ferrara to Rome, then England, and public view in the National Gallery since 1826, continuously, as one of the most looked-at paintings in Britain. Repair of fabric with form intact sets the figure at 9.1.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: legible and whole. The plan, the arcade, the sanctuary, the apses and the mosaic programme are the twelfth century’s, and the cloister stands complete on all four sides. Use: the church is a cathedral and in worship; the medieval community did not survive, and the cloister no longer serves the monastery it was built for, which charges its use a little. Fabric: the largest charges are the fire of 1811, which took much of the roof, rebuilt with a new painted ceiling; repeated restorations of the mosaics; and the remaking of the west portico. Centuries of use with the form whole sit high on this axis; the roof’s loss and the restored surfaces bring it to the foot of that range.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form survives whole: portal, vestibule, court, four iwans, four madrasas, mausoleum and the southern minaret are legible as built, more than six and a half centuries on, having outlived the Bahri sultans, the Mamluk state and the Ottoman province. The use survives in part: it is a working mosque, but the four schools no longer teach and the cells are empty. The fabric is charged: the northern minaret fell and was rebuilt smaller; the medieval dome is lost; the bronze doors were taken some fifty years after completion and the lamps are in museums; restoration has renewed much of the surface. The fall of the portal minaret in 1361 is its own endurance failing.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, across about four centuries. The form is whole and legible: portal, passage, chamber and dome stand as built, and the governing idea is intact. Presence has been continuous, on the square, in view and entered, since 1619, and admired throughout. The use is diminished: the mosque is now chiefly a monument, with little regular congregational life, and its first use may itself have been limited; the axis charges it. The fabric carries a charge as well: the tile has been renewed in campaigns of the twentieth century and later, on the exterior of the dome above all. The figure is lowered for diminished use and renewed fabric, but not toward the range for ruin: the building stands whole, where it was built, doing in view the thing its form was made to do.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the text was printed in 1839 and is settled, and nothing is lost or in doubt. The presence has been continuous for 187 years: the set stands among the most played piano works of any period, in the concert hall, the studio and the teaching room, and two of its preludes are in the popular ear. The cost is in the presence of the unit, which is narrower than that of its parts: for its first century the set lived mostly in selections, a delay in whole performance of the kind charged to other cycles. The surface fixed to its moment is small. Held a tenth below the widest figure for that.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over a span of 198 years. Form: the text is whole, and nothing in it is in doubt but performance choices, the repeat first among them. Presence: the charge is the nineteenth century, when the work was published late and played rarely; its long public life begins about a century after it was written. Since then its presence is among the widest in the solo piano repertory: recorded by most leading pianists, standard in recital and competition. Fabric: no instrument has been lost, and the work sits on the modern piano without strain. The wide presence of the last century lifts the axis; the early silence keeps it from the top of its band. The work’s one gated axis that clears the bar.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over some four hundred and thirty years. Form: the text survives whole but double, and neither version is certainly the play as Marlowe left it; the A-text carries scenes often given to another hand, the B-text later revision by others. The great speeches agree in substance across both, so the charge on form is small but real. Presence: steady performance and reprinting from the 1590s to the 1660s; then a long neglect of the play as written, until Romantic criticism recovered it; staged and taught continuously since the late nineteenth century, by William Poel (1896), Orson Welles (1937), Richard Burton at Oxford and on film (1967) and the Royal Shakespeare Company repeatedly. The Helen line is proverbial far beyond the theatre. Centuries, with a long neglect and a presence now concentrated in the academy and the theatre: the top of the lower band.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole and the composition legible in every part, with nothing known to be lost or repainted by a later hand. Presence: continuous since 1863, first as scandal, then as monument; in the national collections by gift, on view in the nation’s museums and at the Musée d’Orsay since 1986, and among the most reproduced paintings of its century, a fixed point of every survey of modern art. Fabric: a canvas of 163 years, with no known damage; its condition and varnish history cannot be verified, and that keeps the figure from the top. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume, and was meant to be: the frock coats and the student’s cap are the subject, and they have aged into history without making the image local.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over five and a half centuries. The form is whole: Caxton’s text survives in one complete copy and one imperfect one and in a line of editions, nothing that made the work is lost, and Malory’s own text was recovered in 1934 besides. Presence ran from 1485 to 1634 in a run of printings, then stopped: no edition for 182 years, then two in 1816 and Southey’s in 1817, and unbroken presence since, in schools, universities, modernised versions and abridgements. The charges are that long neglect, and that the book is now read whole mainly by students and devotees, while most readers meet the matter in White, Tennyson or film. That places it at the top of the band for a text of centuries long neglected.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years, and the figure is among the wider for that span. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been in print since 1967, and the word edited out of Break On Through on the first issue is a fault of that release, not a loss of the work. Presence is wide and continuous, with Light My Fire, Break On Through and The End in broadcast for six decades and The End carried to new audiences by film. That presence is popularity in part, and partly the singer’s legend, and the album is heard less whole than its songs; but the songs have carried the album, not replaced it. The fabric is of 1966, the organ and the four-track sound, and the singer’s persona dates more than the music, but little in the surface depends on a technology that has passed, and the record has long outlived the conditions that produced it.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Eighty-one years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole as Orwell published it, and it has been in print without a break since 1945. Presence is as wide as a book of its span can show: read and taught in schools across the English-speaking world and beyond, translated very widely, animated by Halas and Batchelor in 1954, staged, and quoted daily in political speech; fame and schooling are presence, not proof. The axis charges a surface fixed to its moment, and this is a topical satire, built on a key of named events from 1917 to 1943; that charge takes back what the width of its presence earns. Against it stands the evidence that matters: the book has outlived the state it satirised by more than thirty years and is read by those who do not know the key.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A hundred and forty years are weighed as such. The text survives whole, in the author’s own edition, with no question of recension and nothing lost. The presence is among the widest of any English book of its century: in print without a break since 1886, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, adapted for the stage, film, radio and comics in every generation, from a stage version of 1887 onward, and its title a common phrase; fame is presence, not proof. That would carry the axis higher still. What holds it at its figure is a charge on form: the book’s defining form is a withheld secret, and its fame has made the secret known before the first page is turned, so that the mystery its first readers read is now read only as irony. The form is legible; one of its effects has not survived its own success.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A hundred and one years have passed since 1925, and a hundred since the text of 1928. The text is whole and stable, kept under the author’s control through later editions, and nothing is lost. Presence in Italy is the widest a book of poems can have: “Meriggiare pallido e assorto” and “Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato” are school texts read by every pupil, and the book has been continuously in print. Outside Italy the presence is real but narrower, a poet’s poet in English translation more than a general reader’s book. That is what holds the axis at 9.1 and not above: wide in its own language, moderate beyond it.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
A text of some hundred and seventy-eight years, whole, published in the author’s lifetime under his eye, and read without a break since. The presence is wide: continuously in print, taught as a principal Victorian novel, translated, and adapted for film and television again and again. The topical surface, Regency fashion, the court of George IV and the silver-fork world the book mocks, has been outlived: the novel is read for Becky and for money, not for its references. It sits a tenth below the top of its band and not at it because its presence, wide as it is, is narrower than that of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or the major Dickens, which are more read.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve, weighed on form, presence and use. Some 450 years on, the plan, terraces, axes and principal fountains are legible, and the water still runs by the original gravity system. The presence has been continuous, celebrated through the Grand Tour, the Romantic century and since. The use was the cardinal’s pleasure and reception; it is now a state museum and garden, walked, heard and looked at, no longer a household’s villa. The charges are real: the ancient statues sold and dispersed, a loss to the programme and not only to the fabric; the Rometta largely demolished; long neglect; restoration after the bombing of 1944; the planting transformed; the entry reversed. Form and water, the two things that make the work, survive.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and twelve years. Form: the text survives whole as published, with no loss and no contested recension; there is nothing to charge. Presence is continuous: “Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “Home Burial” and “After Apple-Picking” have been in school and university anthologies and taught without a break since the 1920s, and lines from the first two have passed into common speech and public use, which counts here only as presence. The fabric is fixed to a moment, the hill farms of New Hampshire around 1900 in decline, but as setting, not as a production era, and the book does not depend on the reader knowing it. The figure stops a step short of the widest presence because the presence is of the poems more than of the book: the unit as a book is read less continuously than its four anthology pieces.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-five years, and it is weighed as seventy-five years. The text survives whole, as published, in print continuously since 1951. Presence is among the widest of any American novel of its century: it is read, taught in schools and universities, translated very widely and argued over, and it has stayed present without a film to carry it, since Salinger permitted none in his lifetime. Popularity and sales are presence, not proof, and wide presence earns at most a tenth. The charge is on the surface: the slang, “phony” and “and all”, and the prep-school world are fixed to the late 1940s. That the book has outlived its idiom, and that the idiom has become part of what is read, limits the charge without cancelling it, and holds the axis a tenth below the widest figure. It does not stand level with works that have survived for centuries.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: on the core heads it is whole; faces, striations and perforations are legible, with corrosion and some damage on single pieces. The perishable dressing of hair, beads and veil is gone, a real loss of the image as used but not of its defining form. Presence: interrupted. The Wunmonije heads lay buried and unseen for centuries until 1938; the Obalufon mask was kept in the palace; the body has been continuously before attention only since then. The Olokun head, the one Frobenius saw, is lost and known only by a copy, a lost part of the body. Fabric: copper alloy is durable, and the objects have outlived the court that made them. Centuries with form whole, charged for buried presence, one lost piece and the lost dressings: 9.1.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: plan, section, iron structure and inscribed façade stand as built. The use has been continuous in its own purpose for about 175 years, through revolutions, the Commune, two world wars and the growth of the university, and the room is still entered and read in daily. The fabric is largely original, with the usual maintenance and modernisation of lighting, services and furnishing. The form has outlived its conditions as a model copied and answered. At about 175 years the building stands at the top of the usual figure for a work whose form, use and fabric survive together; its presence is strong in its field, not worldwide.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. Over 113 years the form has survived whole and legible: head house, concourse, ramps, roadway and yard as designed. The building has outlived the passenger railroad that made it, the company that owned it, and a serious attempt to build over it, defeated in court; that is survival demonstrated rather than assumed. The use is unbroken since 1913, a working terminal entered daily by a great crowd, though narrowed: the long-distance trains left for Penn Station in 1991, and the terminal now serves Metro-North commuter trains. The fabric holds, but the restoration of the 1990s made much good, undoing decades of advertising and grime, and the ceiling now seen is a replacement of the 1940s. Presence is as wide as a building of its age can have; the narrowed use and the remade ceiling hold the figure a tenth below the widest.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than nine centuries. The form is whole: the scroll survives at its full length, and no section that carries the journey is lost. The fabric is the smallest charge, but real: the silk is darkened and cracked, and the mineral pigment, laid thick, has flaked in places, which is why the scroll is rarely unrolled and cannot be freely shown. Presence was thin for most of its life, held in few hands and shown publicly only in the modern museum, and rarely even there; its fame is recent and very wide, and fame lifts the figure only a little. Nothing in its surface is fixed to its moment. With form whole, fabric fragile and presence thin until the last century, the axis stands above 9.0 and below the top.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across 130 years. The form survives whole: the Ricordi score is the performing version, and nothing is lost or doubtful. Presence is among the widest in the operatic repertory: continuous performance in every major house since 1896, and a recorded tradition from the early decades of the last century to the present. The presence is credited, but wide presence earns at most a tenth, and the surface fixed to its moment is not nil. The picturesque poverty and the consumptive heroine are period conventions, and they date more than the music. The figure stands a tenth above Otello on wider presence, and it is the only one of the five gate axes to clear its bar.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole and legible: plan, section and front stand as designed and built, and the drawing of about 1300 outlived the conditions that produced it by five centuries before it was fully built. But the whole form has existed only since 1880; the choir has stood since 1322. Use is continuous and in its own purpose: a cathedral since the choir was finished, the shrine still behind the high altar, back in use by 1948 after the war. Fabric carries the charge: the bombing brought down parts of the vaults, and medieval trachyte and nineteenth-century sandstone alike are in constant replacement, so that much of the surface is not the makers’.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: published, unrevised, performed as written since 1937. Presence is as wide as for any symphony of its century: performed continuously in the Soviet Union and, from the late 1930s, in the West; recorded continuously from Mravinsky onward; a staple of orchestras and of youth orchestras. The dispute over the coda’s metronome mark is a small textual doubt, not a loss. What holds the axis is the surface fixed to its moment: the work was made for an occasion of 1937, and part of what it says depends on knowing that occasion. It has outlived both the state that praised it and much of the debate over whether it praised the state.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a century and three quarters, from 1854 to 2026. Form: the text is whole and has been in print without a break. Presence is unequal. “Sylvie” and the sonnets are read, taught and set in French schools and universities and are widely translated; the volume as a whole, and “Jemmy”, “Corilla” and “Émilie” above all, is read mainly in the academy and in complete editions; and Nerval’s standing dipped after his death until Proust and the Surrealists revived it. A text read in part mainly in the academy sits at the foot of what such a span earns, not above it. Fabric: nothing in the masterpieces is fixed to its moment.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
A hundred and thirty-one years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole; the variants of the Heinemann and Holt editions and the episode cut from the serial are textual history and take nothing from the work. Presence: in print without a break since 1895, translated widely, taught in schools and universities, filmed by George Pal in 1960 and Simon Wells in 2002 and adapted many times, its title and its two peoples in common speech. Fabric: it has outlived the conditions that made it, since the Victorian class anxiety it draws on is gone and the book is read without it. Charged, a little: its science, the fourth dimension and the evolution of species in eight hundred thousand years, has dated, and part of its presence is the fame of the title and the device rather than reading of the text.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Ninety-eight years since the premiere. The text survives whole, in Brecht’s own revisions, which are versions of one work and not loss. Presence is continuous and wide: in the repertory of the German theatre without break since 1945, performed across the world in translation, studied wherever drama is taught. Banned under the Nazis from 1933, it was absent from its home country for twelve years, though played abroad. The song of its prologue is among the most recorded of the century; that is presence, worth at most a tenth, and the tenth is given. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the jazz idiom of 1928 and a satire aimed at the Weimar audience, but the Victorian London was already a mask, and the satire of money and charity has outlived the conditions that made it. The twelve years’ gap and the period surface hold it a tenth below the widest presence its span allows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and eighty-five years, and the figure sits at the usual height for that age. The text survives whole, in print without a break, in scholarly and popular editions, and its 1847 revision is stable. Presence is continuous and wide in the United States, where “Self-Reliance” is among the most read and taught essays in the language, quoted in commencement addresses, in politics and in advertising; the book has been translated into the major European languages. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the Unitarian controversies behind it are history, and it is read for what it says to the reader now. What keeps it from the widest figure: the presence is of two or three famous essays more than of the book, it is concentrated in America, and it is fame as much as reading.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible after some 465 years: the nine-church core stands as built, and the additions belong to the work. It has outlived the tsardom that made it, and stood through 1812 and through the clearances of Soviet Moscow. Use is charged: a museum since the 1920s, it has held services again since 1991, but it is no longer chiefly a working church. The fabric is in large part original, the brick and the white stone; the painted surfaces and the dome coverings have been renewed many times, and the colours seen now are a restorers’ reading of later campaigns. Centuries of whole form, with use in part, place it near the top of the range that partial use allows; its wide presence adds no more than a tenth.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: on almost every head the defining form, the face under its helmet, is whole and legible after about three thousand years. The charges are the cuts and pits reported on some heads, the weathering of those long exposed (the La Venta heads in an open park, the Tres Zapotes heads worn), and, if the hypothesis holds, the recutting of earlier monuments, which would be part of the work’s life and not loss. Presence is the heavy charge: the heads lay buried or abandoned, out of attention for something like two and a half millennia, until 1862 and the excavations of the twentieth century. Fabric: basalt, among the most durable materials sculpture has used. Near the foot of the row for millennia with the form whole, and above The Terracotta Army, at 8.4, which came out of the ground in fragments.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form of the medieval work is whole and legible: choir, chapels, Wenceslas Chapel, Golden Gate and tower stand as built, and the cathedral has outlived the Luxembourgs, the Hussite wars, the fire of 1541, the Habsburgs and the Communist state. Use has been continuous for nearly seven centuries in the building’s own purpose, and the crown is still kept above the saint. The fabric carries the charges: the nineteenth-century restorers reworked the choir’s exterior and stripped later work, and the tower’s top is Renaissance and Baroque. The completed whole has stood only since 1929; that is late completion, not loss, and it holds the figure where it is.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 169 years. The form is whole: no figure and no passage is lost. The presence is continuous: in the national collection since 1890, in view in Paris, first in the Louvre and since 1986 in the Musée d’Orsay, and among the most reproduced French images of its century, in school books and on calendars; wide presence earns a tenth and is not proof. The surface is fixed to its moment in the custom of gleaning and the costume, and neither stands between the image and a viewer who has never seen a harvest. It has outlived its first reading, as political threat, its second, as pious sentiment, and the fall of Millet’s name among modernists. Held a tenth below the top of its age because that widest presence is shared and nothing catastrophic has been survived.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a century. Form: the text survives whole as Eliot fixed it in 1925, with nothing lost and no textual crux of substance; the earlier magazine states are known, and add nothing and cost nothing. Presence is continuous since publication: in the anthologies of modern English poetry, taught at school and university across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and quoted far beyond any readership of poetry. That presence is near the widest a century can show, but part of it is the fame of two lines rather than reading of the poem, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric carries no charge: nothing in the surface is fixed to a technology or a topical satire, and the Guy Fawkes custom the poem draws on is still kept.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible to anyone who walks it: the walls stand on all four sides for much of their length, three land gates and the sea gate survive, the crossing streets are the town’s streets, the peristyle, vestibule, mausoleum and temple stand roofed or nearly whole, and the substructures keep the plan of the lost residence. The use has been unbroken for some thirteen centuries, as town, cathedral, baptistery, houses and shops. The fabric carries the charge: the imperial apartments are gone, the northern quarters survive as plan, the round temples are at their foundations, the sea gallery is walled and built over, the bell tower is a rebuilding, and houses have cut into the masonry for centuries.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one canvas, about 130 years old, with no later hand known and no loss of what carries the image. The presence is wide: it hangs in a public museum in Paris and is reproduced as widely as any picture of its decade, though that presence is shared across five versions and led by the subject as much as by this canvas, which holds the figure a tenth below the widest. The fabric is oil on canvas, thinly painted in places as was the painter’s habit, with no damage known and none charged beyond the general. The surface is fixed to its moment in clothes and pipe and in nothing else: the attention of two men needs no note. Above The Large Bathers at 9.0, finished where that canvas is not, and a decade older.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The design survives whole, in many impressions across the world, and a multiple has a survival no unique object has, since no single loss takes the work. Its presence is as wide as any print’s: collected in Japan and, from the 1860s, in Europe, and reproduced without end; fame lifts the figure a tenth at most. The fabric is paper and colour, some of it fugitive. The early state, which is the unit, survives in fewer sheets, many faded, and is shown rarely for light, and later impressions, darker and redder, stand between the public and the early colour. That is a charge on what most viewers see, not on the design, and it holds the figure a tenth below the widest step.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over about two centuries, and what makes the work, the image, is whole. No loss of figure, motif or passage is charged, and none is invented; the canvas is oil in apparently sound state, and no damage or heavy restoration is charged. Presence is charged a little: the painter’s reputation lapsed for some sixty years after his death, and the picture’s present fame, as wide as any German painting’s, is presence and not proof, earning at most a tenth. The surface is fixed to its moment in one thing only, the costume, and the picture has outlived both its period and the uses made of it. At about two centuries it sits at the join of the two upper steps of the test: the top of the one, the foot of the other.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over about ninety years. The form is whole and legible: the axis, the gardens, the plaza, the slab and the ring of buildings stand as built, and the governing idea has outlived the conditions that produced it, the radio age, the Depression and the single family owner, and been copied and answered. The use is unbroken in its own purpose since the 1930s: offices in use, broadcast still in the RCA Building, the Music Hall still a theatre, the plaza still the city's winter rink, through changes of ownership and a bankruptcy. The fabric of limestone and steel is sound. The charges are the demolition of the Center Theatre in 1954, a real loss of one of the original buildings, and the usual alteration of shopfronts and lobbies, set against careful restoration, the Music Hall's in 1999.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, never cut, never altered after the painter, eighty-three years old. Presence: as wide as any modern painting has, on view at the Museum of Modern Art almost continuously since 1943, reproduced without end, its standing never eclipsed; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: oil on canvas. The painter’s built-up whites are known to crack and yellow in his paintings; how far this canvas shows it is not known here, and no more than the general risk is charged. Against it too, the manner is the most copied style in modern design, and a style become a pattern risks being seen through its copies. So far the canvas has outlived them.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-four years, and it is weighed as seventy-four years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence has been continuous and very wide: in print throughout, read in schools in the United States and well beyond, translated, and filmed twice. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment. A Cuban fishing village, a skiff and a hand line are fixed to their time only as setting, and the baseball of 1950 is furniture. It is held a tenth below the widest figure because a large part of its presence is popularity and assignment, which are presence and not proof of permanence, and because its critical standing has cooled more than its readership. A survival of seven decades does not stand level with the centuries.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
A hundred and eight years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole as published and has been continuously in print; the only variant is Cather’s own shortening of the introduction for the edition of 1926, which costs nothing. Presence: wide and continuous; taught in American schools and universities for generations, in the Library of America, translated, and read beyond the academy. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a place and a moment, the Nebraska of the 1880s, but that moment is its matter, and the book has outlived the conditions that produced it, read more, not less, as the frontier receded. Held off the step’s widest figure because its presence outside the United States is real but narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its span, and much of its reading is in the classroom.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about five and a third centuries. Form: legible and mostly whole. The figure, the face, the ermine and the hand are the painter’s image. The charge is the ground: the black behind her is held to be a later overpaint over a lighter, bluish grey ground, which would change the space the turn happens in, from a lit room to a void, and sharpen the silhouette beyond what was made; the inscription at the upper left is held to be later too, and the edges and parts of the hand to be retouched. Presence: kept in collections throughout, out of Italian view after about 1800, seized in 1939 and recovered in 1945. Fabric: a walnut panel of its age. Held a step below the row for centuries of survival, at the top of the band for heavy repair.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: cylinder in block, dark stair into a lit circle of books, the governing idea intact after ninety-eight years and outliving the classical revival that produced it. The use is continuous and in its own purpose, the city’s main library since 1928, and for a building of this kind that is the best evidence there is. The fabric stands with the rotunda in place; the extent of modern repair is not stated, and nothing is credited that cannot be stated. Form, use and fabric survive, and nothing is charged. Presence is wide within architecture but not of the widest kind, and it adds nothing to the figure.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 375 years. Form: whole. The image is legible as the painter left it, and nothing that carried its meaning is lost. Against it, the cuts of 10 March 1914 crossed the back, the body’s central passage, and were repaired; the form survives intact, so the charge is modest and made on the fabric and on what the repair now holds. Presence: from 1651 in great private collections, long hidden from the public; in the National Gallery since 1906, on view, among the best known pictures in Britain. Fame is presence and earns little. Fabric: lining and cleaning, the ordinary history of an oil of its age. The repaired attack and the long seclusion hold the figure below the band for form whole.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, the image whole and legible after 136 years, and nothing charged to its condition. Presence: in the painter’s family’s hands after his death, lent and shown, on long view in Amsterdam, and in the Van Gogh Museum since it opened in 1973. It has outlived every condition of its making, including the legend that grew round it, which has done the image no harm. Fabric: oil on canvas of 1890; some of the painter’s pigments have altered in other pictures, whether any here have shifted cannot be settled, and nothing is charged for it. The span, 136 years, sits in the row of seventy years to two centuries. Its presence is among the widest in painting, but fame earns at most a tenth and proves nothing of permanence, and the figure rests at the top of the usual mark, short of the widest.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole; the groves, the mist and the peak are legible, and nothing that carried the work’s meaning is lost. Against it stands the arrangement: if the sheets were rearranged when they were mounted, as is debated, the form now seen is partly a later hand’s, and the discontinuities at the joins put the question. Presence: more than four centuries, but the record of the screens before the modern period is thin, and their wide fame dates from the twentieth century. Fabric: ink on paper, remounted and fragile. Centuries with the form whole would place the axis higher; the possible rearrangement and the thin early presence hold it a step below that, and still above Water Lilies (8.9), whose survival is of one century.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence and use, then fabric, over centuries running toward two millennia. The form is whole in its governing idea: the three tiers, the river arch and the channel stand as built, and the arches lost at the ends of the top tier take length, not legibility. It has outlived the empire, the city’s need and the aqueduct itself. The first use was lost when the water stopped; the bridge then served another use as a crossing, with its road deck of the 1740s, and is still crossed on foot. Presence has been continuous and wide. The fabric is largely the builders’ dry-laid stone, charged for the medieval damage to the piers and the repairs and restoration that followed. It stood through the floods of 1958 and 2002.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole and legible, nothing lost. The forty-eight stars, which might have dated it, have become part of what it shows, a flag of a particular time, and the painting has outlived the conditions that produced it, the authority of Abstract Expressionism and the politics of 1954. Presence: continuous since 1958, in The Museum of Modern Art since 1973, among the most reproduced American paintings. Fabric: encaustic is among the most stable of paint media and fixes the newsprint in wax; but newsprint is acidic, fabric on plywood is a composite support, wax is vulnerable to heat and handling, and the long behaviour of that composite is not yet shown. Over seventy-one years the form is whole and the presence wide; the untested composite holds the figure a step below the widest.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over ninety years. Form: whole. The image survives as printed from the negative, every element that carries the work legible. Presence: as wide as any photograph has had, continuously from 1936, in every history of photography and of the Depression; fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric and later hands: the negative survives in the Library of Congress, but not in its first state. The mother’s thumb, which held the tent pole at the lower right, was retouched out of it, and the image now circulates in two states. The charge is small, since the thumb carried nothing. The risk the axis names, a surface fixed to its moment, has been outlived: the image is no longer read as news.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Ninety-four years are weighed as ninety-four years: the text survives whole and has been continuously in print, read, taught in schools across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and set on the shortest shelf of twentieth-century books every general reader is expected to know. A survival of that length with the widest presence stands at the top of its step. What holds the axis a tenth below that top is a surface fixed to its moment. The Malthusian belts, the zeppelins and rocket planes, the sleep-teaching that research has since discounted and the cult of Ford all date the furniture, and the eugenic premise of the castes belongs visibly to its decade. The vision has outlived those conditions, and much of it has become more current, not less. Fame is presence, not proof, and it is counted for no more than a tenth.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at some eighteen to nineteen centuries. Form: the form of the body is whole and legible across its surviving panels, many with colour and wax surface remarkably intact, preserved by the dry burial; it is the largest surviving body of ancient panel painting. Loss is charged: what survives is what the sand chose, most of the practice is gone, and most panels are now separated from their mummies, so that the full form, face in body, stands in a minority of cases. Presence: buried and unknown for some sixteen centuries, present only since the late nineteenth, and now dispersed across many collections. Fabric: wood split and warped in places, wax and tempera abraded or flaked in some, much of it stable.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and thirty years for the design and a little over two hundred and twenty for this sheet. Form: the image stands as Blake printed and finished it, no part that carries its meaning known to be lost, though the sheet’s condition in detail is not established. Presence: obscure for most of the nineteenth century, then in the collection of W. Graham Robertson and at the Tate, and since the later twentieth century among the most reproduced British images; fame counts as presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a work on paper with watercolour, sensitive to light, shown in rotation and not continuously, its colours perhaps shifted. The fragility of paper and the long obscurity keep it from the widest figure.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The present form, completed in 1866, has stood some 160 years and is whole, and the older form within it, Thornton’s and Bulfinch’s block and Latrobe’s rooms, has been absorbed and stays legible inside the extension. The use has been continuous in its first purpose since 1800, broken from 1814 to 1819 after the burning; the Supreme Court left in 1935. The fabric is charged twice. The fire of 1814 gutted the first interiors, and what survives of Latrobe’s work is largely his own rebuilding; and the sandstone east front was replaced in 1958 to 1962 by a marble reproduction set forward, so that the front from which the dome is seen most closely is a copy. The iron dome has needed long restoration. Its presence is the widest a building of its age can have.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: keep, enclosure, wings, staircase and roof stand as designed and completed. The château was never ruined, and the Revolution emptied it without pulling it down. The form has outlived the conditions that made it, a young king’s ambition and the court of the hunt, as an image known across the world. The use is charged: the first use, as royal hunting seat and residence, was always intermittent and ended with the eighteenth century; since then it has been monument, museum and, in 1939, refuge for the Louvre’s collections, entered by many and lived in by none. The fabric is largely the builders’ tuffeau, much repaired, as soft stone must be, under renewed roofs.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 84 years. Form: no loss, later hand or refabrication is recorded, and the image as painted stands. Presence: bought by a public museum in the year it was painted and in its collection ever since, never in private hands and never eclipsed, and among the most reproduced and parodied pictures of its century; but ubiquity is presence, not proof, and earns little. Fabric: no charge is made, and the condition cannot be verified here. Against it, the surface is fixed to its moment in hats, suits and a cigar sign with its price, and its survival is partly as nostalgia, which can wear an image into period Americana. So far the canvas outlasts its parodies. Held a tenth above the lower usual figure for unbroken presence, and a tenth below the widest for the dated surface.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two hundred and sixty years. Form: whole. All thirty survive, together, as Jakuchū made them; nothing that carries the work is lost or replaced. Presence: the charge falls here. In the temple the set was shown once a year at a rite; in the Imperial collection from 1889 it was seldom seen, and it passed a long period of half obscurity before its recovery. The parting of the set from the triad in 1889 is a loss of context, not of the work, and the two are reunited for showings. Fabric: the ordinary history of silk scrolls, remounting and a recent full conservation, with no loss to the image. The usual figure for centuries with the form whole, at the lower end of its span and a tenth lower for presence. Fame since 2000 lifts nothing further.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Some five centuries, weighed on form, use and fabric. The form survives whole and legible in the church and the cloister, which carry the governing design, and the transept vault came through the earthquake of 1755: evidence of endurance, not only of luck. The use is divided. The church has remained a church, in use for a parish; the monastic use ended with the dissolution of 1833 and 1834, and the house became an orphanage and then a monument and museum, so the use that compelled the cloister is lost. The fabric is largely original in church and cloister, with the nineteenth-century restoration charged in proportion; the wing of that century is addition, not loss. The lost monastic use is what holds it below the band of a form whole and in use.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form stands as designed and completed, over three centuries: both domes, both colonnades, the four courts, the river front and the open axis to the Queen’s House, all legible and unaltered in their governing idea, outliving the monarchy that made it a statement and the navy that used it. The use is twice lost: the hospital closed in 1869, the naval college in 1998; the courts are now entered daily for teaching and by the public, but not as a hospital, and the Painted Hall and the Chapel are chiefly visited. The fabric is largely original Portland stone; the Chapel’s interior was lost to fire in 1779 and refitted, a heavy loss of one room, and that refitting is now part of the work.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Form first: whole and legible after about 118 years, nothing lost. Presence second: in public view in Vienna since 1908, in one collection and never dispersed, and as wide as any painting’s, reproduced past counting; presence is not proof of permanence, and it lifts the figure to the top of the usual band for a work of this age, no further. Fabric third: oil and metal leaf on canvas, with no significant charge known. What holds it from the top is the axis’s own test, a surface fixed to its moment. This is the Jugendstil of 1900 in its fullest form. The canvas has survived that style’s eclipse and its revival, and outlived the conditions that produced it, but its surface still announces them.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over some 430 years. The form is whole: block, towers, loggias, stair, hall and state rooms stand as maker and patron left them, and few houses of the age survive so little altered, because their heirs lived elsewhere. The form has outlived the household, the dynasty’s need of it and the Elizabethan world, and it is read today as it was planned. The use is charged: the house is no longer lived in, and its state rooms have received no sovereign or court for four centuries; it is entered daily, but as a museum of itself. The fabric is largely the makers’: stone renewed on the fronts and glass replaced over the centuries, a charge in proportion to weathering. A whole form and an unusually intact fabric set it high; the lost use holds it below the top.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: towers, cables, span, arch and colour are as designed, and the towers read not as a period piece but as the bridge itself, having outlived the Depression, the ferry age and the decade’s taste. The use has been continuous and intensive since May 1937, for traffic and on foot, broken only by closures for wind or events. The fabric is the most renewed of the three: bracing added in the 1950s, the deck replaced in the 1980s, the steel stripped and repainted, the structure retrofitted for earthquakes, a net hung below the walks. The cables and towers are original. These are repair and addition made to keep form and use whole, and they take little from the form. Presence is the widest a structure of its age can have; the renewed fabric holds the figure a tenth below what that presence would allow.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
A text whole and unproblematic, a hundred and thirty-one years from its first performance. Presence is very wide: in continuous revival in the professional and amateur theatre since its return to the stage in the first decade of the twentieth century, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, filmed by Anthony Asquith in 1952, and quoted daily by people who have never seen it. The one charge is on its first years: the first run was cut short and the author’s name suppressed on the playbills in 1895, so that its survival began interrupted; that is long past and costs nothing now. The widest figure for its span is kept for books of wider human reach, which holds the axis a tenth below it.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The defining form, a frame of nights in which a woman tells to live, is attested from the ninth century and legible in every witness since. But the Persian original is lost and the work survives as a tradition, not a fixed text: no recension has authority, the earliest substantial manuscript comes four or five centuries after the first evidence and breaks off, and the full count was reached only by a late compilation, partly under the pressure of European demand. That is a real charge on form, about four tenths. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any book, in Arabic recitation, in translation into most written languages since 1704, in children’s versions, film, music and theatre. The core cycles are well witnessed, and the printed text has been read without break.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Four centuries, and survival is demonstrated. Form: the text survives whole in the 1613 printing, with the author’s earlier versions of two pieces in a manuscript as well; nothing that made the work is lost, and the doubtful extra novella stands outside it. Presence: continuous in Spanish since 1613, reprinted, edited and taught across the Spanish-speaking world, with Rinconete and La gitanilla the pieces most read by the young. Fabric: the surfaces fixed to their moment, the romances’ corsairs and the Coloquio’s tirade, have aged as surfaces and have not taken the book with them. The charge is on presence outside Spanish: translated into the major languages from the seventeenth century, but read there mainly in selection and in the academy, a classic beside a greater one.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 115 years. Form: whole. The image is the image painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: on public view at The Museum of Modern Art since 1945, among the museum’s most visited pictures, continuously reproduced and taught as the emblem of the painter and of his Paris years. It has outlived its moment, the Paris of 1911 and the Vitebsk it recalls, destroyed in the war, and it has outlived the painter’s own later decades of softer repetition, which might have worn it down and have not. Fabric: the ordinary history of a canvas of its age, with nothing charged. Fame is presence and earns at most a tenth; the figure stops short of the widest, because its presence, though large, is narrower than that of the very few universal images.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The text survives whole, as Goethe published it in 1795 and kept it in his collected works, its metre revised by his own hand. It has stood for 231 years. The four poems withheld from the cycle were not lost but delayed, printed long after Goethe’s death: a change to what survives that adds rather than takes. In German its presence is continuous and general, in schools, anthologies and the collected works, and it has been widely translated, into English by David Luke among others. Outside German it is read mainly among readers of Goethe and in the academy, a narrower presence than that of Faust or Werther. The figure stands between the band for a text of centuries in general reading and the band for one read mainly by scholars: unbroken in its own language, academic abroad.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 127 years. Form: the canvas stands whole and legible, the image as Homer left it after his own reworking, which is making, not loss; nothing is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: in the Met for 120 years and on view for most of them, continuously studied and reproduced, the centre of a major exhibition in 2022; wide in America, narrower in the world than the most famous European canvases. Fabric: the ordinary lining and varnish of a canvas of its age, not known here in detail. The usual figure for a work whole and continuously present between seventy years and two centuries, held a tenth below the widest presence.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 153 years. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, and no part of what carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: shown on completion in Saint Petersburg in 1873, and now in the State Russian Museum, it has passed through the revolutions and every change of regime in Russia, each of which reread it and none of which put it away. In Russia it has the widest presence a painting can have: a school image, a phrase. Outside Russia its presence is narrower, which keeps the figure a tenth below the widest of its age. Fabric: nothing is charged, since no damage is known; the conservation record is not stated.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 190 years, against the row for seventy years to two centuries. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: exhibited in the year it was painted, held now by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and very wide in the United States, where it is reproduced in nearly every account of the nation’s art; less present outside it. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage touching the image is known. The upper end of the usual figure, short of the widest, for a presence that is chiefly American.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. Span: five and a half centuries, the governing form whole. The rock, walls, gates, ascent, palace front and temple stand as built and legible; the figure has outlived the Rathore state, the Mughal and British orders and princely rule itself. Use is charged in part: the fort ceased to be the royal residence in the twentieth century and lives now chiefly as a museum, a lesser use than the one it was made for, though the ceremony of the former ruling house continues and the Chamunda temple is in worship to this day. The fabric has held: the sandstone in good order, the palaces conserved by the trust. Presence is wide. Form whole, use reduced but not lost: the highest axis.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two thousand years. Form: nearly whole. The head, the body, the gesture, the breastplate’s programme, the cloak and the Cupid survive, and what is lost at the margins takes little from what makes the work. The loss of the paint takes something real: colour carried the legibility of the reliefs and the presence of the figure, and it is charged above ordinary wear of the fabric. Presence: broken. The statue was buried for most of its life and found in 1863; since then it has stood continuously in view and at the centre of its field, in the Vatican, for a century and a half. Fabric: marble, sound and cleaned. Burial and the lost colour take a whole form of its age down into the range for loss, to the upper edge of it. Fame is presence and lifts it only a little.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over one hundred and fifty-one years since the opening. The form survives whole: plan, sequence, stair, foyer, hall and fly tower are Garnier’s and in place, and have outlived the Empire that commissioned them, the Republic that finished them and the society they staged. The use has run without a break as a house of opera and dance, through two wars; since 1989 the main opera repertory has gone to the Opéra Bastille and the building is chiefly the ballet’s, a narrowing of its first use, not a loss. The fabric has been restored and cleaned rather than rebuilt. Charged lightly: the Danse on the front a copy, the first ceiling hidden. Presence is among the widest of any theatre, through Leroux and the musical; it earns at most a tenth, and the narrowed use holds the figure at 9.1.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the score survives whole, in its composer’s published text, and is performed as written. Presence: continuous since the premiere of 1893, and in the repertoire of every major orchestra. Fabric: no loss. Over a hundred and thirty-three years, survival is demonstrated. What holds it below the widest figure is the surface, which carries some of its moment: the “Indian” programme and the 1893 idea of the songs of Black Americans as raw material for the concert hall now read as period ideas, and the Largo has been worn by use as background and as sentiment. Popularity is not proof, and wide presence earns little beyond what survival has already shown.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: the block, the four courts, the vestibules, the staircase, the chapel, the theatre and the park axis with its cascade stand as built, and the governing idea is legible at every station. The dome and towers that were drawn and never built were never part of the work as made, and are not charged. The use the work was made for, a court, has gone: the palace has been a royal seat, a military headquarters and now a museum and state offices, continuously entered and widely visited, so its presence is unbroken while its purpose has shifted. War damage and long neglect are charged as fabric, the smallest charge, and partly made good. Over two and a half centuries: form whole, presence continuous, the first use lost.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
About a century and a half, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible; no loss of figure or field is known, and the composition reads as it was made. Presence: long and continuous, in a national collection in Paris, now in the principal galleries of the Musée d’Orsay, and the canvas is among the most reproduced images of its decade. Presence earns a tenth at most, and it is wide here without being of the very widest kind. Fabric is not charged. Its surface is known chiefly from reproduction, and that keeps the axis from the highest mark at its age, while form and presence carry it well above the gate.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over one hundred and seventeen years. The form is whole and legible: the gable, the long side and the faceted roof are as designed, and the lengthening of the hall in the late 1930s, part of the one work, continued the bay rhythm along the street rather than breaking it. The use is continuous and in its own purpose, which is rare for any building of its age and rarer for a factory: it still makes turbines. It survived the war in Berlin, the division of the city and the end of the AEG. The fabric is the smallest charge: glazing and finishes have been renewed and the building restored as a listed monument, which does not touch the form. Its presence is wide within architecture, not general.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 141 years. Form: whole; the image is the image the painter made, and the study and the lithograph survive beside it. Presence: in the family’s hands after the painter’s death and now in the Van Gogh Museum, among the most reproduced paintings of its century; it has outlived the Hague School, the peasant genre and the rural world it shows, and is fixed to no fashion. That presence is wide but narrower than that of the painter’s later images, so the widest credit is withheld, and fame lends nothing. Fabric: how far the darkness of the surface is original and how far it is the ageing of pigment and varnish is not settled; the charge is small, since the darkness is the picture’s own.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over some 180 years. The form is whole: the text survives entire and has never been out of print. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any nineteenth century novel: read in French and in a great many translations, taught, adapted and used. The surface is not fixed to its moment beyond the period furniture; the plot has outlived the July Monarchy entirely. The figure is the usual one for a text read without break over this span, and the further tenth is withheld because much of the presence runs through abridgements and adaptations rather than the text, and because its standing in the academy, repaired since the later twentieth century, was long below its readership’s.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: shaft, setbacks, crown, spire, ornament and lobby are Van Alen’s and in place, and the building has outlived the boom, the race and the fortune that made it. The use survives: it has been an office building without a break since 1930, though the client’s company left, the observation floor and the Cloud Club closed, and the ownership and the lease of the land have been troubled in recent years. The fabric has held: the steel keeps its surface after nearly a century. Presence is the widest a building of its age can have, and that earns at most a tenth. Ninety-six years on, with form whole and use unbroken, the widest presence lifts the figure to the top of its usual range, and the lost upper rooms hold it there.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-four years. Form: whole. The image is unchanged since it was first printed, and the crop is the maker’s own and stands as the work. Presence: among the most reproduced photographs ever made, continuously in view in books, exhibitions and teaching since the 1950s at the latest; presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: the image depends on one negative, and most prints in circulation are later prints by other hands. Those are light charges, since a photograph’s form survives its prints and the image is fixed in many of them. The figure stands at the upper end of what its age allows, a tenth below the widest, because the negative is single.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, never cut, with no part known lost or repainted by a later hand; the image stands as made. Presence: in a national collection since 1894, on view at Millbank for most of the time since, and among the most reproduced of British paintings; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: oil, its colour still bright; the general risk of change in certain greens and in thin glazes over some 170 years is charged lightly, and no condition is claimed that is not known. About 174 years, with a presence wide but below the very widest.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 155 years. Form: whole. The image survives as painted; nothing is known to be lost or replaced, and no later hand is known to have altered the composition. Presence: as wide as any American painting has had, in French public collections since 1891 and reproduced and parodied without end. Fame lifts the figure at most a tenth, and an image copied this widely risks being seen through its copies, which is charged lightly. Fabric: thin, diluted oil over a large canvas is more vulnerable than a worked surface, and its conservation history is not known here; the general risk is charged lightly. Nothing in the surface stands between a viewer and the seated figure. The highest of the twelve, below the widest presence.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric over some 860 years. The form is legible and nearly whole: the slender block, the three-zakomara facades, the drum, the carving and the mound survive. The gallery is lost, which changed the building’s base and approach, and the dome covering and roof are of later date. Use: a church in its own purpose for most of its life, closed to worship for much of the Soviet century and held as a monument, now used again. Fabric: the original white stone survives in the main body, the spring floods and the weather of centuries charged lightly. One significant loss and an interrupted use keep it a step below the highest survival.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 119 years since the exposure. Form: whole. The image exists in two published gravure editions and many impressions; no single loss could take it. Presence: continuous and wide; it is among the most reproduced photographs of its century and is taught in every survey of the medium. Some of that presence is misreading, and fame is presence, not proof, which holds the figure off the top of its row. Fabric: photogravure is ink on paper, among the most stable photographic processes; impressions vary, and the charge is small. At this span the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1; wide presence and stable fabric put the image at the top of that band.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole; no part is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: 154 years, reckoned from 1872, and among the widest in painting, since the canvas names a movement taught everywhere. The charges are two. The canvas was stolen from the museum in 1985 and was absent for five years, a real break in presence, though the object came back. And whether it was the canvas shown in 1874 was once doubted, a lapse of presence in its own century. Neither touches the form. The steamships and chimneys read as weather, not as period. Fame is presence, not proof: the figure is the usual top for its span, and the tenth that the widest presence would add is withheld for the theft.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eighty-five years. Form: whole and legible. The image stands in the negative and in many hundreds of the maker’s prints in public and private collections, and no single loss would take it. Presence: very wide and continuous since the 1940s, reproduced without end; fame and price are presence, not proof, and lift the figure only to the top of the usual band. Fabric: gelatin silver well processed is durable; the negative survives, though it was thin and was chemically intensified in the maker’s lifetime, charged lightly. A smaller charge on form: the sky changed with the printing, but the relation of moon, range and crosses is the same in every print.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and twenty-nine years. The text survives whole, as published, with only an abridgement of 1901 beside it and no dispute about the text. Presence is continuous and very wide: the book has never been out of print, is translated into a great number of languages, is taught in schools and universities in English and in Gothic and Victorian studies, and is reread as well as adapted. Its presence is among the widest of any English novel of its century, and this is its highest axis. A tenth is withheld in part because a share of that presence belongs to the films and the figure rather than to the book, and fame is presence, not proof. Its surface is fixed to its decade, the phonograph, the typewriter, the London of the 1890s, but that surface is now read as period, not as obsolescence.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole; its one change is the author’s own revision of 1951, the text scored, and the 1937 text survives beside it. The presence is continuous and of the widest kind for a book of its century: in print since 1937, widely translated, read to and by children in every generation since, taught in schools, and adapted for radio, the stage, animation in 1977 and three films from 2012 to 2014. Fame and sales are presence, not proof. The surface is barely fixed to its moment: the nursery voice of the 1930s has dated a little, the matter not at all. Held a tenth below the widest: part of the presence since the 1950s has come through the later book and the films, and eighty-nine years stand well below the millennia of the epics it draws on.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The span is some five centuries. The form is whole and legible: the block on its piers, the bridge and the gallery stand as built in their governing idea, and nothing of the form that carried the work’s meaning is lost. The use has changed rather than ended: it is no longer lived in by its owners but entered daily as a house museum, and the gallery is still walked across the river as it was meant to be. The fabric carries the charge. Roguet’s restoration for the Pelouze family stripped Catherine’s additions from the entrance front, so that a later hand removed part of the one work to recover an earlier state; there was damage in the Second World War; the tufa has been renewed over the centuries, as tufa must be.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, and all three survive. The building is about 103 years old, whole, unruined and never rebuilt, and has served its own purpose without interruption since its inauguration: the council still sits in its chamber. The fabric, brick, copper and mosaic, has been maintained rather than replaced. Its presence is wide: the tower is the emblem of the capital, and the Nobel banquet carries the Blue Hall each December to an audience of millions, which earns a tenth at most, since fame lends nothing. Its form has also outlived the taste that made it, and that counts for survival.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the print of 1725, sonnets and lettered parts together, with nothing lost or doubtful in the music. Presence is the charge. After a life in Paris that lasted to the middle of the century, the set was largely unheard for about a century and a half, until the Vivaldi revival of the twentieth century brought it back. Since then its presence has been as wide as any concert work’s, and the tenth that wide presence earns is credited; the commercial ubiquity of Spring’s ritornello proves nothing more. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the depictions now read as the work’s own world.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over about 108 years from the first performance. The form survives whole: the score is complete, published and played as Holst left it. Presence is among the widest of any orchestral work of its century: continuously performed and recorded since the 1920s, a staple of the Proms and of orchestras worldwide, and its central tune sung as a hymn at national occasions. That breadth earns at most a tenth, and part of it is wear: Jupiter’s tune is now often heard as a patriotic anthem the suite never wrote, and Mars as cinema. The surface fixed to its moment is small; the astrology is a frame, not a topicality. The wear holds the figure a tenth below the top of its step.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-six years. Form: whole. The image exists in its negative and in a number of vintage prints by Weston’s hand, and no single loss would take it. Presence: continuous and wide; the picture has been shown, reproduced and taught without interruption since the 1930s, though fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: a well-processed gelatin silver print is among the more stable photographic materials, and Weston’s printing was careful. Prints by any other hand are not the work as he printed it and are not credited as its survival. The figure stands a tenth below the widest, because the presence is great in its own medium but narrower beyond it than that of the most famous paintings.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one canvas, unaltered in 114 years, and nothing that makes the work is known to be lost. Presence is among the widest any modern painting has: the Armory Show in three cities in 1913, one of the founding collections of modern art in Philadelphia, and a place in every history of the period. Fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a tenth. The fabric is oil in thin browns, with no damage known, and only the general risk of a canvas of its decade is charged. Against it: a fame fixed to a scandal of one year, and a work famous for shocking risks outliving its shock. It has outlived it: the joke is a century old and the painting is still looked at.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, one canvas, never cut and never repainted by another hand, 205 years old. Presence: in the National Gallery since 1886, and among the most reproduced paintings in Britain, on prints, tins and table mats; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. The reproduction tests the object, and so far the object holds: the canvas has outlived a reputation as a chocolate box, and its rereading since the 1970s has raised it rather than lowered it. Fabric: oil on canvas, and the protest of 2022 is weighed with no loss to the image charged. The cart and the costume belong to 1821; the subject, weather over water, belongs to no decade. Held at 9.1 because two centuries are not the centuries of the frescoes.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-six years. Form: whole; the image stands as painted, and no part is known to be lost or altered by a later hand. Presence: as wide as any American painting, continuously on view in Chicago since the year it was made and among the most reproduced images of its century; but fame is presence and lifts the figure at most a tenth, and much of that presence is the parody rather than the picture. Fabric: beaverboard is a less stable support than a hardwood panel or a canvas, and no damage is known. Placed at the top of the usual band rather than at the widest-presence step, the support holding it a tenth short.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and whole: plan, arcade, clerestory, apse and conch mosaic are the sixth century’s, and the building has stood, roofed and entered, for nearly fifteen centuries, outliving its city, its port, its monastery and the relics it was built to hold. The use is continuous but thinned: still a consecrated church, the saint’s body gone into the city since the ninth century and the monks long dispersed, it is now chiefly visited as a monument. The fabric carries the largest charge: the revetment stripped in 1449, the atrium lost, floor and presbytery altered, the mosaics restored in parts, roof and walls repaired more than once. Those losses pull the figure below the usual range for a form so long whole and in use, and it stays near the top of the charged range because the governing form and the apse are intact.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the governing form, a peripteros of thirty-four columns with its entablature complete on all four sides, survives whole and legible, better than any other Greek temple of the mainland; the pediment groups, the cult images and the interior arrangement are lost, and the roof is a Byzantine vault. Use: its use as a temple ended in late antiquity; it served as a church until 1834, a use that kept it roofed and standing, then as a museum, and it is now a monument only; the lost use is charged. Fabric: the marble is weathered and the paint gone, but little is replaced. Among buildings that have lost their first use, the near-complete form sets it near the top.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over about 122 years. The form is whole: the figure, the guitar and the key are intact, and nothing that makes the work has been lost. Presence is continuous and wide: in a public collection since 1926, a century on view in one of the most visited museums in the United States, and among the most reproduced paintings of its century. Fame and reproduction are presence, not proof, and earn no more than presence allows. The one charge is to the surface. The woman’s head the painter covered now shows through the thinned blue at the upper left, a change over time in what the eye receives. It is small, it is the painter’s own layer, and it does not touch the guitarist, but it is charged.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a century and a half. Form: the French text survives whole, as Verne and Hetzel published it, and has never been out of print; nothing is charged. Presence is of the widest kind: Verne is among the most translated authors of any language, this book among his two or three most read, and it has been read without a break since 1870, in schools and in every language. The charge is in the kind of presence: in English, for a century, much of it was in a cut and corrupt version; much is as a book for the young, abridged; and much is as a story known through its films, Disney’s of 1954 above all, more than through its pages. Fabric: the surface is fixed in part to the science of 1869, and has outlived it. Raised a tenth for the breadth of presence, held below the widest by its abridged life.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over eighty-one years. Form: whole. The image survives entire in the Associated Press distribution and in prints made from the negative from 1945 onward. Presence: continuous and as wide as any photograph’s, kept before attention by a national memorial in bronze, by the stamp, by schoolbooks and by constant reuse; presence earns at most a tenth, and it earns it here. Fabric: an image that survives in a distributed edition does not depend on one sheet of film. Against the widest figure, the surface is in part fixed to its moment, a wartime emblem whose meaning has been contested and partly reread, though it has outlived the conditions that produced it. One tenth under the widest figure for its age.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 133 years. Form: whole. The image is the image she painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1910, on view and reproduced since, one of the most reproduced pictures of its museum and of its subject. Fame is presence and lifts the figure a tenth at most; it is given within the row rather than at its top, since its presence, though wide, is not the widest of its period’s images. Fabric: lining, varnish and cleaning would be the ordinary history of an oil of its age, and no damage is known. Its costume and furniture are of their decade and do not stand between the picture and its viewer.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use, fabric and presence together. The form is whole and legible as completed, 162 years after the opening, and the towers are older still. The use has been unbroken since 1864: the bridge still carries road traffic and walkers on its own purpose, though under a weight limit that records how far the traffic has outgrown the structure, a light charge and not a lost use. The fabric of chains, rods, towers and anchorages is the 1860s’, the chains older still, from Hungerford; the deck has been renewed and safety works added, and that is the smallest charge. The presence is as wide as any British structure of its century and continuous since the towers stood empty, but it is national rather than worldwide.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some sixteen centuries. The form is legible and whole: plan, section, colonnade, walls and apse are the fifth century’s. The use is continuous: a church throughout, in the Dominicans’ care since the thirteenth century, and still the station church where the pope opens Lent on Ash Wednesday. Much of the fabric is original: the columns, much of the brick, the opus sectile band, the inscription and the doors. The charges are real. The apse mosaic is lost; the windows and their grilles are modern; the sanctuary and the schola are reassembled; and the building as seen is a restoration’s judgement of what the fifth century was, reached by removing four centuries of the church’s own life. It is the strongest axis and the only one to clear the Epochal Gate.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over ninety-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the score is complete, published in the composer’s lifetime, with no textual doubt that touches the work. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any orchestral work of its century, in concert, recording, broadcast, film and dance; Torvill and Dean’s Olympic programme of 1984 is the famous instance. The fabric is sound, for the work needs only an orchestra. It earns the widest presence on the evidence, and is held a tenth below the top of its span because much of that presence is as excerpt, background and cliché, which proves circulation more than permanence.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some nineteen centuries. The form is whole and legible from end to end: both tiers, the piers and the line stand as the Romans set them, and it has outlived the empire, the kingdoms that followed and the city’s rebuilding round it. The use was continuous for most of its life, carrying the town’s water into the twentieth century, the strongest evidence of permanence an aqueduct can give; that use has ended, and the arcade survives as monument and passage. The fabric is charged: some 36 arches, about a fifth of the arcade, were destroyed in 1072, stood broken for four centuries and were remade in 1484; the inscription is lost; the granite has been eroded by modern traffic. The highest of the twelve.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over 134 years, and it is shown. The text is whole: the twelve stories as printed, never lost or recast, and the one known slip of a name is part of what survives. Presence has been continuous, in print in every decade, translated, taught in schools, read by children and by adults, and adapted without end; it is among the most widely read books of its century. Two charges hold it below the widest presence. Fame is not proof, and much of the presence is of the figure rather than of this book: the deerstalker, which the text does not give him in Baker Street, and “Elementary, my dear Watson”, which these stories never print. And the surface is fixed to its moment, gas-lamp, hansom and telegram, though it has outlived its conditions and become part of the charm.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Some 113 to 115 years, weighed in order. Form: whole and legible. The main building’s fronts and corners are as designed, and the governing idea has outlived the conditions that produced it, copied and answered throughout the century. Use: the strongest case on the axis. The building is still a factory, still making lasts for the same firm under the same name, after more than a century, a continuity of first purpose rare in industrial building of any age. Fabric: restored in stages, and a wall of glass in light steel is the most perishable kind of modern fabric; that is a charge on the fabric where the form stays legible, and the smallest of the three. The building’s presence is wide in its field, not the widest among buildings. Continuous first use carries the axis to 9.1, the highest of its twelve.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 102 years, inside the span of seventy years to two centuries, whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole. The image survives in prints of the period, its reference print is in a national collection in Paris, and its reproduction in Littérature in 1924 put it in public circulation from the first. Presence: continuous and wide, through the Surrealist literature, the exhibitions of Man Ray’s work and the histories of photography, to the sale of 2022; but much of that late fame is price, and price is presence, not proof. Fabric: gelatin silver on paper is stable when kept. The uncertainty over how many period prints exist and which carry hand painting is a small charge on the record, not on the form. The upper end of the usual figure, short of the widest.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, across ninety-four years. The form is whole and wholly legible: nothing of the arch, deck, pylons or approaches is lost. The use has been unbroken since 1932 and is heavier now than at the opening, in its own purpose, carrying rail, road, foot and cycle; the change of the tram tracks to road lanes in 1958 to 1959 is part of the one work and alters the use, not the form. The fabric stands, the original steel and rivets kept by continuous repainting and corrosion work, the granite sound. Its presence is among the widest of any engineering work of its century. It has outlived imperial supply, the tram and the steam locomotive, adapting rather than standing unchanged: the highest axis of the twelve.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 145 years, within the span of seventy years to two centuries. Form: the composition stands whole, one canvas, with no part recorded as lost or replaced. Presence: continuous, in an American private collection opened to the public, and on view in Washington for a century, among the widest of any painting of its century; presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no restoration recorded against it and none charged. Against it, the surface is fixed to its moment by design: the boaters’ singlets, straw hats, bustles and river leisure of 1880 are its subject. The picture has outlived that moment as an image of leisure as such, and the figure stands a tenth below the widest-presence mark for the span, for the period surface.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over 102 years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: Gershwin’s piano part, the themes and the order are in score; his own recordings and piano rolls of 1925 preserve his playing; and Grofé’s 1924 scoring survives and has been performed again since the 1970s. Presence has been continuous for a century and is as wide as any concert work of its time: in the repertory, recorded constantly, played at public ceremonies, carried into film and advertising. The charges: the band scoring was little heard for half a century while the work lived in later dress and cut form, and some of its presence is excerpt and jingle. The dance band’s fabric is fixed to 1924, now heard as the work’s world.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over eighty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in score and in continuous performance; nothing is lost or doubtful. Presence is the widest of any concert work of its decade: choral societies and orchestras perform it everywhere, every year, and its opening is known to people who have never heard a cantata. That presence is itself charged. The work entered the repertory in Nazi Germany, and its later fame is partly as a cliché, the opening chorus used until it can sound like a parody of itself. It has outlived both and is still performed whole. The charges hold it from the widest figure; the evidence holds it above the usual figure for its age.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about seven centuries. Form: whole as far as is known; the image is six fruits on paper, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost. Whether the sheet was trimmed from a larger composition is not known; if it was, what was cut is not part of what makes this work. Presence: kept at Daitoku-ji and shown only rarely, it has been present to attention in Japan and, from the twentieth century, in reproduction across the world. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: ink on paper is fragile and carries the ordinary history of remounting. The lower part of the row for centuries with form whole, charged for the thin early record and the uncertain extent of the sheet.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over ninety years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the score survives complete in the composer’s own arrangement and has never been in doubt. Presence is as wide as that of any concert work of its century: performed continuously since 1938, recorded by most orchestras that play strings, broadcast at public deaths, carried into film and into choral, band and dance versions. The charge is on the surface. Ubiquity at funerals and in films has worn the work toward a sign for sadness, and much of its presence is use, which counts as presence, not as proof of permanence. The figure stands a tenth below the widest presence its age allows.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The span is more than eight centuries. Every storey of the three campaigns stands, but the form stands bent: the upright design was lost to the ground within five years of the first stone, and the tower came near enough to falling that it was shut for eleven years and held by counterweights and the extraction of soil. The first builders’ failure is charged here. The use as a campanile continues in name, and its use now is chiefly to be climbed and seen, which is a use, not a loss. The fabric is largely its own marble, with replacements over the centuries. A survival of eight centuries against a failure from the start, bought with intervention and still watched.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 237 years, a little past the row for seventy years to two centuries and interpolated toward the row for centuries. Form: the image is the image she painted, and no loss is known that touches what carries its meaning. Presence: it has been seen and reproduced continuously, and it holds a place in the Louvre; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a panel of its age has the ordinary history of varnish and conservation, and no damage to the image is known. The figure stands a tenth below the widest presence the row allows, because the presence is wide but not the very widest, and the picture fell from serious attention for long stretches, though its presence never lapsed while its esteem did.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, has never been out of print and has been read without a break since 1868; it is widely translated and taught, and it has been adapted again and again: films of 1933, 1949, 1994 and 2019, and versions for the stage, for opera and in Japanese animation. Its presence is among the widest of any American novel of its century, though fame and adaptation add little to survival on the text alone. One thing holds the axis from the top of its span: a surface fixed to its moment in one respect, the didactic narration and the period’s piety about self-denial, which later readers have had to read around. The scenes and the sisters have outlived those conditions.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The highest of the twelve, weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: palace, parterre, axis and Gloriette stand as one legible design and have outlived the dynasty, the empire and the court culture that made them. The first use is lost. The imperial residence ended in 1918; the building is now a museum and a stage for state receptions and concerts, entered by millions, so it is used constantly, though for another purpose, and the Gloriette is a café and a viewpoint. The fabric is largely the eighteenth century’s, with the nineteenth century’s campaign on the fronts part of the one work; damage by bombing in 1945 and its repair are reported, and are a small charge against the whole.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The span is 107 years since the consecration and 151 since the first stone. The form is whole and wholly legible; nothing of the design is lost, and the silhouette has outlived the politics that made it, so that many who see it do not know them. The use is continuous in its own purpose, and its purpose is perpetual: the adoration begun in 1885 continues, and the church is among the most visited in France. The fabric is sound; the self-whitening stone has worn as designed. The one charge is the glass, destroyed in 1944 and replaced, a small part of the whole. Its presence is among the widest of any building of its age, credited by a tenth: the highest of the twelve.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over a hundred and thirty-two years. The form survives whole: the towers, piers, bascules, walkways, chains and side spans are those of 1894, and the bridge has outlived the shipping of the Pool of London, the hydraulic age and the Victorian quarrel over its dress. The use survives with one charge. The road and footways have carried traffic without a long break since 1894, and the bascules still lift for ships, though far less often; but the walkways lost their use as a crossing in 1910 and serve now as an exhibition, a change of kind. The fabric is charged lightly: the steam power replaced in 1976, its engines kept, the steel repainted and repaired, the deck renewed. Presence is as wide as a structure of its age can have, and earns at most a tenth. The walkways and the power hold it below the top of its span: the highest of the twelve.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at some eight and a half centuries. Form: the pieces survive whole in nearly every case, faces, attributes and carving legible; the ivory has cracked and darkened in places and a few pieces are damaged, but no rank is lost from the set as the hoard preserves it. Some pieces are reported to have been coloured to tell the two armies apart; that colour is gone but for traces, so that the sides are no longer visible as two, and the sets were incomplete as found. Presence: interrupted, unknown for centuries until 1831, then continuously on view in London and Edinburgh and widely reproduced; the division between two museums is presence, not loss. Fabric: walrus ivory is durable and stable. Held below the usual figure for the lost colour, the incomplete sets and the centuries out of sight.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 154 years. Form: the canvas survives whole, its image legible in every part, the veil and the figures intact. Presence: shown in 1874, now in the Musée d’Orsay, and for the last half century among the most reproduced Impressionist pictures by a woman; its subject has outlived the conditions that made it. Fabric: an oil on canvas of its age, with whatever lining and revarnishing such pictures receive, charged at nothing that can be named. At this age the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1, and 9.2 is kept for the widest presence. This presence is wide but late, and not of the widest kind: 9.1, and the highest of the twelve.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 109 years. Form: whole. The image is what Flagg made, in many surviving sheets, and no part that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind, reproduced, parodied and taught without break since 1917; fame is presence, and earns a tenth at most. Fabric: poster paper is fragile, but the edition is large enough that the survival of the image is not in doubt. One charge, the rubric’s own: the surface is fixed to its moment, a call for one army in one war. The image has outlived that moment and been put to work again for a century, which is the evidence the axis asks for; the widest tenth is withheld for the topical surface.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order. The form survives legible: the frame, the registers, the garden’s rise and the turn of ch. 74–80. What is lost is the fall in Cao’s hand. The commentary of his own circle refers to later chapters unlike the printed ones, says some were lent out and lost, and records his death with the book unfinished. That is the heavy charge. The completion by other hands, printed in 1791, is how nearly every reader has met the work; it gave the novel a presence no manuscript could, and it overlaid Cao’s design with a household restored and Daiyu’s death moved to the wedding night. Weighed both ways, it is a net credit to survival. Presence since the 1790s is unbroken. The eighty themselves are unstable: rival manuscripts, two chapters disputed, ch. 22 unfinished.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is weighed over ninety-seven years. Form: the text survives whole; the corrected text restored readings the first edition had normalised, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence is where the axis is charged. The book sold little on publication, and its wide presence came later. Since then it has been continuous and wide: the novel is taught across American and world literature and translated widely. Its rendering of Black speech and Black lives is contested in teaching today, a charge on presence, not on form. The slow start of its first years holds the axis where it stands, and a survival of a century does not stand with a survival of millennia.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The form is whole: the score Berg finished is the performing version, and the text is not in doubt. Presence runs 101 years from the premiere, continuous in the major houses since 1945 and in the recorded tradition, but broken in Germany from 1933 to 1945 by the ban, and narrower than the core repertory, given in the largest houses, seldom in smaller ones, for its forces and its rehearsal. Its surface is less fixed to its moment than most of its decade: no technology or topical satire dates it, and the poverty it shows has not become historical. Held at the usual figure for its age, not above it, for the twelve years’ ban and the rationed presence.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over 510 years: through the end of its order, the Revolution, removal to Munich in 1917, evacuation in the Second World War, and three centuries of neglect. The image survives nearly entire, and it has outlived what made it: the order, the hospital and the disease, whose cause is known and whose epidemics are past. People come for the body on the cross, not the therapy. What holds it is what has been lost of the form. The casing, hinges and frame are gone; in Colmar the three openings stand side by side, so the act of opening is no longer performed; and the surface read is the one left by a cleaning whose extent was disputed while under way. The image survives whole; the machine survives as parts.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is weighed over seventy-four years. Form: the text survives whole, as published in 1952, with nothing lost. Presence: it is among the most taught American novels in schools and universities, and it is translated into many languages. Its surface is fixed to a moment, the Communist left of the 1930s and the Harlem riot of 1943 behind the riot of the last chapters, but those are its matter, and the book is read for what they pressed on. Charged on presence: its readership abroad is narrower than at home. Seventy-four years of survival stand below a century’s, as a century’s stand below millennia, and the axis stands where that span places it.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the score is complete and was published, and the only question of text is the composer’s permitted choice of voice, which divides performances and loses nothing. Presence: continuous in the concert hall and on record since 1911, recorded in Vienna under Walter in 1936, and central to the Mahler repertory and to the alto’s. About 115 years have passed, and the figure is the one the desk gives a work of that age with wide presence that is not the widest of its decade. The surface fixed to its moment is Bethge’s chinoiserie of 1907, which dates more than the music. Held there.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, over about 4,650 years. The form is strongest: the six steps and the plan of the enclosure are wholly legible, and the form has outlived its world as a model copied and answered for millennia. The use is lost: the cult ended in antiquity; it is now a monument for visitors. The fabric carries a heavy charge: the fine casing is gone, the core weathered and consolidated, the enclosure wall mostly low ruin, and much of what a visitor walks through at the entrance is Lauer’s anastylosis. The whole form over so long a span holds it at 9.0; lost use and surface keep it off the top.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, in print for sixty-one years. Presence is wide and working: the songs are in other musicians’ repertoire, and Dylan has kept them in performance in changed arrangements. The record has outlived the folk revival it left, the mono LP and the hip-and-square quarrel of its moment, and the lyric names no politician, war or event. The fabric is fixed to its year: the thin drums, the mono-era mix, a session band finding the songs as it played. That sound and the length of the span hold it level with Psycho and 2001: A Space Odyssey, films of its decade as continuously present, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated, with no discount for age: about seven hundred and thirty years, the text whole, carried in manuscript, in print since 1576 and in the national edition since 1932, read in Italian schools and translated widely; Project Gutenberg alone carries it in Italian, English, French, Dutch and Finnish. It became a painter’s lifelong subject in Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and Dante’s Dream. The form is legible, the text entire, the presence continuous since the nineteenth century. Charged: a surface fixed to its moment larger than the great epics carry, in the physiology of the spirits, the coterie of the fedeli d’Amore, the numerology and the divisions, all of which now need a note; and a readership that comes to it, much of it, as the Commedia’s prelude.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-three years. The text survives whole, as Beckett published it: in print with Minuit since 1953 and in Beckett’s English since 1958, alone and in the trilogy, and translated widely. Its presence is continuous. It is taught in universities in French and in English, Berio set it, and its last clause is quoted far beyond the book’s readers. The surface is not fixed to its moment: apart from a chophouse near the Paris shambles, nothing in it belongs to the 1940s. Held where it is for two reasons. Its presence is narrower than that of Waiting for Godot, and lies mostly in the academy and among serious readers. And at seventy-three years it has only just entered the span in which survival is shown.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is millennia, but the form is charged twice. The text was recovered after long loss: no reader between late antiquity and 1872 knew it. And it is fragmentary: it survives in pieces assembled from many manuscripts that differ, with substantial gaps in several tablets and lines still being found, so that the reader reads a reconstruction. Both charges apply in full, and the figure sits at the floor the recovered and fragmentary texts share. What keeps it from falling below is that the defining arc is fully legible, from the prologue through the death, the quest, the Flood and the return to the walls, with every major episode and speech surviving in some state; and that presence since recovery has been continuous and wide, translated into most written languages, taught in world-literature courses, set by Martinů as an oratorio (1955) and carried into popular culture, as in the Star Trek episode “Darmok” (1991). Fabric: clay is the smallest charge, and has outlived every other medium of its age. The figure stands below every work read without break across millennia.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-five years. What makes the work survives whole: an authorial text, from the French first edition of 1951, without loss or later hands, and an English made with the author in 1955, which strengthens the text’s survival rather than charging it. It has been in print without a break in French since 1951 and in English since 1955, translated widely, taught in universities across languages, and read beyond them. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: there is no period dress, no topical satire, nothing that requires 1950 to be understood. It is charged on presence in one respect: its readers are fewer than the readers of Godot or of the most-read novels of its century, and it is read largely by serious readers and in the academy.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: the axis from the town to the horizon, the lodge, Le Vau’s block with the Hall of Mirrors, the wings, the chapel, the parterres, the fountains, the canal and the Orangerie. It has outlived the monarchy and the court. The use that defined it is lost, and that is the largest charge: the court left in October 1789 and never returned, and the house has been a museum since 1837, kept in part for the state by Parliament in Congress. Fabric: the contents sold, the princes’ apartments gutted, the staircase, the grotto and the Labyrinth gone, the trees replanted, the royal gate a re-creation of 2008. Presence, continuous and wide, earns at most a tenth.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A survival of a little over a century, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, published complete in Mann’s lifetime, with no question of version; nothing is charged. Presence: continuously in print in German since 1924, translated into the major languages, twice into English, the second translation nearly seventy years after the first, taught in German and comparative literature, and a common point of reference beyond the academy. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a world that ended, the sanatorium cure that antibiotics closed and debates dated in their terms; but that surface was already historical when the book appeared, since the foreword sets the story in a world gone, and the book has outlived the cure it describes. Held at the foot of its step because the presence is narrower and more academic than that of the most read novels of its decade: the book is assigned less and read whole less often, and its English life rested for nearly seventy years on one older version.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ninety-five years. Form: the text is whole and stable, in print without a break since 1931 and carried in the Hogarth uniform edition, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: read and taught throughout, and translated widely. It has outlived its conditions: the public school, the Raj and the London of the 1920s are history, and the book is read for what passed through them. Its presence reaches past the page, in Katie Mitchell’s staging Waves at the National Theatre (2006) and in the third part of Wayne McGregor’s ballet Woolf Works (2015), to Max Richter’s score. Held below the widest presence because it is read less than Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and more within the academy than outside it.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in Tolstoy’s manuscripts and the complete editions; the censor’s cuts in the first Russian printing were a loss later made good, and the lack of an edition authorised in his lifetime costs little, since the last redaction is the text read. Presence is continuous since 1912, in the Russian and Soviet collected editions and in translation from the Maudes’ of that year onward, as the chief of the late works rather than at the centre of the culture where the long novels stand. The surface is fixed to a war of 1851 and 1852, but that war is the matter, and later wars in the same mountains have made it read as more pertinent, not less.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
A survival of seventy-nine years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, published complete in Mann’s lifetime; the author’s note on the twelve-tone method, added to later printings after Schoenberg’s protest, is paratext and is neither charged nor credited. Presence: in print in German without break since 1947, translated twice into English and widely elsewhere, and taught in German and comparative literature. Fabric: the surface is fixed to two moments, the Wilhelmine and Weimar culture of the life told and the war years of the writing, and that has not dated it, because the moment is the subject. Held at the foot of its step because the presence is real but not the widest: the book is read less than The Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks, and largely within the academy and by serious readers.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across 139 years: continuous performance since 1887 in every major house, the work abroad within two years, and a recorded tradition from Toscanini, who had played in the orchestra of the first night, to the present. The work survives whole. The 1887 score is the performing version; the ballet added for Paris in 1894 came after the work was complete and has not displaced it. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The Credo’s theology is a late-Romantic Mephistophelean pose and dates more than the music. The staging of Otello’s blackness has become a question each production must answer, though the libretto’s own racial language is slight. And the work depends on a role few can sing, so its presence is continuous but rationed.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, past four-track tape, the mono LP and the group’s touring years. Presence is continuous and in daily use: sixty years in sale and broadcast, children singing “Yellow Submarine” without knowing the album, its songs in other genres, and a remix that charted in 2022. The fabric carries 1966: “Taxman” names its year’s party leaders, “Doctor Robert” is a period joke, and the stereo needed rebalancing. Those surfaces and the span hold it level with 2001: A Space Odyssey, above Persona of its year on the width of its presence, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-one years, judged without an age discount. The text survives whole, in the author’s English, with nothing lost. The book has been in print continuously since 1955, taught, filmed twice, by Stanley Kubrick (1962, the screenplay credited to Nabokov) and Adrian Lyne (1997), and argued over in every decade, the argument growing rather than fading. Its surface is fixed to a moment, the motels, roadside attractions, movie magazines and slang of postwar America, but that surface is now read as the book’s period document, not as topical colour. It has outlived the conditions that made it a scandal and found a harder audience, which reads it for Dolores rather than Humbert. What it lacks against the summit is elapsed time: seven decades, not centuries.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, weighed form first. The defining form is legible: all four Gospel openings survive, with the Chi-Rho, the cross page, the Virgin and Child, both narrative pictures, the Passion pages and the canon tables. About thirty leaves are lost by the usual estimate, among them the end of John and the beginning of the prefatory matter, and no portrait of Mark or Luke survives; a binder’s trimming has cut into marginal decoration. What carried the meaning survives. Presence has been continuous: Columba’s relic at Kells, in Dublin since the 1650s and long on view. Four pages shown at a time is the codex’s own condition, and the whole is present in facsimile and digitisation. The lost cover, the theft and the cropping hold it here.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
No age discount: survival shown, and what the work is built to bear. What makes the work, the image, is whole. The canvas has hung in one museum since 1937, and the unfinished state is not damage and is not charged here; it is how the painter left it. The surface is fixed to no moment: no costume, no event, no fashion in the bodies, and the pastoral is as old as painting. It has outlived the Salon and the academic nude it argued against, the mockery of its maker, and the Impressionism he left. Against this: thin paint and bare canvas are more vulnerable than a worked surface and depend on care, and the test so far is 120 years in studio and museum, with no catastrophe survived. Demonstrated survival is quiet, and the figure is held at 9.0 for that.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival of about 278 years, weighed on form, presence and surface. The form is whole: the text survives in Richardson’s own editions, with no question of loss, and is fully legible. Presence was enormous in its century across Europe, in English and in French in Prévost’s translation; then it thinned through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, when the book was read chiefly in abridgement or not at all. Since the 1980s its presence has been real and largely academic, with one television adaptation, the BBC’s of 1991. The surface (the marriage settlement, the arrest for debt, the sponging house) is fixed to its moment, yet the book is read for what those things pressed on. It stands at 9.0 for the long neglect and the academic reading.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The defining forms are legible: the Suger chevet survives at its lower level, its double ambulatory and crown of chapels as built; the thirteenth-century upper church survives whole; the west front stands, but without its north tower and its column statues and with its sculpture largely restored, so its form is charged. Use has been continuous as a church since the twelfth century, broken in the 1790s when the roof lead was stripped and the building put to other purposes, then restored to worship: abbey, necropolis, cathedral. The necropolis survives as monuments, not as burial: the kings were thrown into pits in 1793. Most of Suger’s glass is gone, the doors are gone, and Debret’s restoration damaged the fabric before Viollet-le-Duc corrected it.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-eight years. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout; nothing is lost. Presence: as wide as that of any novel of its age, read in schools across Africa, the Commonwealth and the United States, and translated widely. Fabric: colonial Nigeria and the decade of independence that produced it are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon; its setting is the 1890s, and its prose has not dated. The figure is the highest a survival of under seventy years carries. It does not stand level with survivals of centuries: the oldest epics and the great novels of the nineteenth century hold more on this axis.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Some twenty-six centuries, so the step begins high. Form is the heavy charge: the nine books are gone, one poem survives entire, under a tenth of the body is extant on any estimate, and much of that is scraps of a word or a line; the defining form, a body of sung poems arranged in books, is legible only in a few poems and in the metres. Presence partly offsets it: her name and standing never lapsed, and the hymn and fragment 31 were read continuously through the critics who quoted them and through Catullus; but most of what is now read went unread from late antiquity to the twentieth century. Fabric, papyrus scraps, is the smallest charge. The charge on form takes the figure to the foot of the band for a fragmentary text of millennia.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated: in continuous performance since 1941, the most performed of Messiaen’s works and among the most performed chamber works of its century, and recorded many dozens of times. Nothing in the music is fixed to its moment. The preface’s prose has dated a little; the music has not. The risk is particular: a work whose story is told at every performance may be surviving on the story. The evidence is against that. The music has been played for eighty years by players born long after it, and the Louanges and the Abîme are performed on their own. Held at the figure because eighty-five years is a shorter demonstrated span than two centuries.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nearly seven centuries. Form: the north and east walls are legible whole, with the repainting and losses usual in fresco of this age; the west wall is badly damaged, much of the effects of bad government lost or illegible and the vices about Tyranny only partly readable. That wall carries half the argument by symmetry, and its loss is charged in proportion, though the argument stays legible from what survives. Presence: continuous and of the rarest kind, in the room for which it was made, in a building still the seat of the city’s government, preached on in 1425 and in view since. Fabric: damp, earlier restorations, repainting. The whole good walls set the figure in the upper half of its band; the ruined wall keeps it from the top.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
No discount for age; form, use and fabric weighed together. The form is legible over most of the hall: the field and its doubled arches, the four campaigns, the caliphal bays, the mihrab and the domes are Umayyad and in place. Worship has not broken in more than twelve centuries, four and a half as a mosque and nearly eight as a cathedral, though the qibla and the mihrab no longer serve their purpose. The losses are charged: the open north front, the columns and arches removed for the cathedral and the chapels, the minaret encased in the tower, the ceilings largely remade, the minbar and the furnishings gone. The conversion that cost these losses also kept the building standing.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form first. The text has survived whole and in print since 1904, in paperback series and in critical editions, and it is taught in universities; nothing that carried meaning is lost. It has outlived its conditions: the silver concession and the gunboat republic are history, and the book is read for what they disclose. For a survival of about a hundred and twenty years the usual figure sits here. Its presence is charged a little because it is read chiefly in the academy and among novelists, far less widely than Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim, and because its difficulty keeps it from the common reader.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and seventy-one years. Form: the text survives whole, in a magazine text and a book text close to each other, with no loss; nothing is charged. Presence is charged for the long neglect. From 1856 to the 1920s almost no one read it; since the revival it has been continuously in print, anthologised, taught in schools and universities across the United States and widely beyond them, translated into the major European languages and others, made a play by Lowell and an epigraph by Ellison, and that presence is still rising with the attention now given to the history of slavery. Fabric: nothing to charge; the ship, the trade and the court are long gone, and the way of seeing the novella exposes is not. Fame and teaching are presence, not proof, and seventy years of near silence keep the axis at the foot of its band.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
About a century has passed since 1926, and the text survives whole, with its variant later editions. Its presence is continuous in translation into the major languages, and it is taught as a central book of Russian modernism and of Jewish literature in Russian. At home that presence was broken: Babel was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940, his books were withdrawn until his rehabilitation in 1954, and a censored selection returned in 1957. The interruption holds the figure at the foot of its band and earns no lift from the wide presence elsewhere. The surface is fixed to one campaign of 1920, a war few readers know, yet the book has outlived the state that produced it and is read for what it shows, not for the history.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty years. The form is whole: the mono master survives and has been the reference for every reissue. Presence is continuous and wide. God Only Knows and Wouldn’t It Be Nice are in daily use in broadcast, film and ceremony, sung by people who do not know the album, and the album has held its place at the head of critics’ lists for decades. The fabric is sound: no topical surface, no named event, nothing fixed to 1966 but the timbre of its studios, aged into period colour. Two charges stand: presence began narrow in its own country, and the album is heard less widely than its two songs. It stands level with Revolver and Vertigo, a tenth below Tokyo Story, two below the Parthenon.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible: ellipse, rings, radial walls, cavea and arena read from every point, and on the north the full elevation of four storeys stands. It has outlived the empire, the games and the city that made them. The use is lost: no games since the sixth century, and afterwards housing, fortress, quarry, shrine and monument; the presence has been continuous and of the widest, which earns no more than a tenth. The fabric carries a heavy charge: the outer ring fallen on the south, the marble seating and the arena floor lost, the travertine robbed and pocked, the hypogeum open to the sky. Legible form and the widest presence weigh against ruin and lost use.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole as issued. Presence is continuous and wide: the record still sells and still gains listeners, many of whom hear no other jazz; its three standards are played by musicians born decades after the sessions; it entered the National Recording Registry in 2002. The fabric is sound. An acoustic sextet recorded with great fidelity in a large room carries almost no date, and the one fault of technology, side one’s speed, has been corrected. Sixty-seven years place it level with Psycho and Lolita, works of its years as continuously present, and a tenth below Waiting for Godot and Tokyo Story, which have lasted longer. The length of the span holds it there, well below what has lasted for centuries.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over six centuries. The form is legible and whole: walls, axis, altar, Vault, raised way and hall stand in their governing relation, and the design has outlived every condition that made it, the dynasty, the rite, the cosmology as doctrine of state. The use for which it was made has been lost for more than a century, a real charge; in its place the precinct has been continuously present and heavily used as a public park since 1918. Fabric: most of what stands is Qing; the principal hall burned in 1889 and was rebuilt to its form, and the precinct was a foreign camp in 1900. In a timber tradition rebuilding to the form is the expected mode of survival, and is charged lightly.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A text of 1881, weighed in the band for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole and uncontested, from a serial and a book Machado oversaw, with later editions in his lifetime and no textual problem of consequence; nothing is charged on form. Presence in its language is continuous and total: read in Brazilian schools and set for university entrance for generations, edited without break, quoted in common speech. Presence beyond the language is thinner and later, built largely in the last seventy years and much of it in the academy, with the sell-out of the Penguin translation of 2020 as evidence of a widening readership. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment in a way that harms it: the Empire and slavery are its matter, not its date stamp.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The form is wholly legible: all three registers, the frame and the axis survive, and no part that carried meaning is lost. Presence to attention has been continuous for five centuries, but not presence in place. From 1816 or 1817 to 1919 the panel hung in the Accademia, and the unit read here, the panel on its altar at the end of the axis, did not exist; it has been whole again for a century since. That is the main charge. The fabric is oil on panel at a vulnerable size, open to splitting, flaking and darkening, and the surface has been treated more than once. The image is not a restorer’s guess, and the surface is nearly free of its moment: no portrait of the patron, no topical sign, a feast still kept in the church that bears its name.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
A hundred and twenty five years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, published complete in 1901 and carrying no substantive later revision; nothing is charged. Presence: in print without a break since 1901, translated into most of the world’s written languages, taught in German schools as a set text, and the house in the Mengstraße made a museum under the book’s name. Fabric: the Hanseatic grain trade, the customs union and the senate of a free city are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon; it has outlived its conditions. Held at the floor of its step because outside the German language its presence is narrower than that of the first rank of the century’s novels, and its reputation abroad has rested partly on Mann’s later books.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, with no discount for age. The later campaigns are the work’s own and are scored with it; loss, repair and rebuilding are weighed here. The form survives: nave, transepts, crossing and choir arcades stand whole and legible. Its endurance failed once: the first choir vault cracked and was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, keeping the plan. The Romanesque apses are gone, replaced by the Nine Altars, and the central tower was rebuilt. The use is the one it was built for, through the change from priory to dean and chapter in 1540–1541, broken briefly in 1650. The fabric within is sound and largely original. The heaviest loss is the shrine: the church was built for a cult whose focus was destroyed, and the grave is now a slab.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then on presence. Form: the text survives whole, and the work survives in its copies, each a complete realisation of the book; nothing that carried meaning is lost. But the unit is words and designs together, and most readers have met the book typeset, without the designs, so the form in which it is most present is not the whole form: a small charge on form. Presence: some two hundred and thirty-five years, of which the first seventy were near silence, a handful of copies seen by a handful of people. That long neglect is charged. Since the 1860s the book has been continuously printed, taught and quoted, its Proverbs are in common use, and the doors of perception have become a phrase of the language. The breadth of the present stands against the silence of the start, less the charge for a presence that is mostly typeset.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form first. The text is whole: nothing that makes the work is lost. It entered the Pléiade, with Mort à crédit, in 1962. On presence, it has been read continuously in France for ninety-four years, a fixture of the paperback canon, translated widely, and taught, though the teaching is uneasy. That is the charge here, and it is small: the author’s antisemitic pamphlets and his conduct in the war have kept the book from the full ease of the school syllabus and from the public honour given to its peers, and in some quarters it is read under protest. Its surfaces, the 1914 front, the colonial company, the Ford line of the 1920s, are history, and the book is read for what they pressed upon, not for the surfaces. A survival of near a century, without the widest presence.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in four copies etched by the author, with variants of order and content between them and the Preface in two; nothing that carries meaning is lost, and the variance is the author’s, not damage. Presence: two centuries, but not continuous. The poem was all but unread until the 1860s, and since then it has been read mainly in the academy; both are charged. The Preface’s presence as a hymn is among the widest of any English verse and earns a tenth, but it is the presence of the lyric, not of the epic it opens. Fabric: the illuminated book is read by most in facsimile; the copies are in libraries and intact.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty years of publication, fifty-three of the full text, at the widest presence. Form: the text survived its author’s lifetime unpublished, a burned first version, the censor’s cuts and the cut serial; the work’s form is whole and legible, and the variants between editions of an unfinished revision are the smallest charge. Presence: as wide as any Russian novel of the century, continuously in print in Russia since 1973 and translated into most written languages, in several English versions; taught, staged and filmed. Fabric: its Soviet surface, the housing committees and the currency raids, is its matter and not a dependence, and the book is read more for what pressed on them now than in 1966. The figure stands at the top of what sixty years can show; it does not stand with the centuries.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The work is a sequence in a book, reprinted in many editions, and the eighty-three images and their order survive entire; differences of crop and printing between editions are small beside the sequence and are charged lightly. Presence: the widest for its span in its medium, a book taught, exhibited and reproduced without break; that presence is weighed at most a tenth, and it is not proof. Fabric: a book has no single fabric to lose. The table gives 8.8 to 9.0 for fifty-five to seventy years, and 9.0 for the widest presence. Its surface is fixed to its moment, the America of the 1950s, and it has already outlived that moment and been read past it.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One hundred and seventy-one years, the text whole and read without break. Presence is real: “Andrea del Sarto”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Childe Roland”, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Two in the Campagna” stand in every anthology and syllabus of Victorian poetry, and “less is more” and “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” have left the book for the language. Three charges hold the figure at the lower end of its step. The book as a book is read less than its anthologised pieces. It was broken up by its author in 1863, when he kept thirteen poems under the title and sent the rest to “Dramatic Lyrics” and “Dramatic Romances”, so the volume of 1855 is not the arrangement most readers meet. And Browning is now read mainly in the academy.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
One hundred and six years of survival shown. The text is whole: the changes made for the London edition of 1921 were small, and the Cambridge edition of 1987 restored the text from Lawrence’s typescripts. Presence is continuous: in print throughout, taught as a central modernist novel, and filmed by Ken Russell in 1969, a film that won Glenda Jackson an Academy Award and brought the wrestling scene into the culture. Its surface has dated in places: the Edwardian bohemia, the racial vocabulary of “Moony” and the Tyrol, the doctrine in Birkin’s mouth. Its matter, industrial mastery and the will in love, has outlived its conditions. Charged on presence: contested since Millett, the book is held now more in the academy than among general readers, which keeps it at the foot of its span’s usual figure.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over a span of sixty-three years. The form is whole and Scharoun’s: hall, terraces, ceiling and foyer stand as built, and the gold cladding completes the exterior. The building has outlived the conditions that made it, a West Berlin house of culture on the edge of the Wall, and is now the centre of a reunified city’s musical life; its model has been copied and answered round the world. The use is continuous and its own: since 1963 it has been the home of one of the world’s leading orchestras, whose identity is bound to it. The charges on the fabric are small: the roof fire of 2008, which damaged the roof insulation and closed the hall for some weeks, was repaired; the cladding changed the colour of the exterior; and the acoustic fittings have been adjusted. Its presence among concert halls is wide.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-one years, and weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published, undamaged, and nothing is charged to it. Presence: continuous since 1955, in print without a break, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, and gathered into The Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award in 1972, and into the Library of America in 1988. Fabric: the surface is fixed to its moment, the rural South after the war, the displaced persons of Europe, the Confederate reunion, but the stories do not depend on it. Its racial vocabulary troubles readers now and has prompted reconsiderations of the author; it has not removed the book from teaching. The book stands at the usual figure for its span of seventy years to two centuries; the widest presence is not quite reached.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy-five years, with no credit for time not yet elapsed. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as Beckett published it in French and as he made it in English, and it has been in print in both languages throughout. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: a room, a bed, a pencil, an asylum and a boat carry no date, and nothing in it needs 1951 to be understood. The charge falls on presence. The book is read chiefly as the middle volume of the trilogy, bound with its neighbours in one English volume since 1959, and its readers are more in the academy and among writers than across the culture; it has nothing like the presence of Godot. Seventy-five years shown are not the centuries behind the oldest works, and the bar is cleared with half a point to spare.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 176 years. Form: the composition stands legible, and nothing in it is known to be lost. Presence: considerable but intermittent in its first decades, continuous since in the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay; famous among painters and historians, though not of the widest public presence. Fabric: whether the dark grounds and blacks have sunk, so that the mourners read more as one dark band than they did, cannot be stated here, and is charged lightly if at all. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and in the politics that made it a scandal, and none of that now stands between the viewer and the picture: the scandal is gone, and the town at the grave remains. The figure is the usual one for its span, short of what the widest presence would give.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, about 128 years from the plaster. Form: whole. The plaster survives, and the bronzes carry the form as Rodin left it. Presence: withheld from the street for forty-one years and kept at Meudon, but continuously present to artists and through photographs, then public in Paris since 1939 and in several museums; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the bronzes are posthumous casts from the finished plaster under the rights Rodin left to the state, the ordinary condition of his bronzes, which takes little from a work modelled for casting; a patinated bronze outdoors weathers and is maintained. The delayed and partial presence of the first forty years and the posthumous fabric hold it at the usual figure rather than the one kept for the widest presence.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives in print, in two editions, 1609 and 1615, with words and music whole; nothing of the scored work is lost. What is doubtful is the realisation: much of the instrumentation is left open, the continuo is unwritten, as in every such print, and the different ending in the libretto of 1607 puts the close in question from within. Presence is charged most. The score was seldom heard after its first years, and its continuous public life, from d’Indy’s Paris performance of 1904, is a little over a century. The text is whole and the presence since 1904 is wide and growing, which lifts the figure; the long absence and the open realisation hold it here.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and forty-five years from book publication. Form: the text survives whole in two authorial states, both in print, with no loss; the revision is a fact of survival, not a charge. Presence: continuously in print, taught in universities across the English-speaking world and beyond, and adapted, by the BBC in 1968 and by Jane Campion in 1996, with Nicole Kidman. Fabric: it has outlived the conditions that made it; the expatriate society of Florence and Rome, the market in American heiresses and the marriage law of the 1870s are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on. What holds it at the usual figure for its span is presence: it is read more in the academy and less by general readers than the most widely read novels of its century.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the score is published, complete and undisputed, and the 1905 version is the one performed. Presence runs across 121 years: continuous in the German repertory from the premiere, international since the 1920s, recorded complete since the 1940s, and in every major house now. The early bans in Vienna, New York and London interrupted presence where they applied, and are charged a little. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the Jugendstil and orientalist decor of the court and the Dance, and the quintet of the Jews, whose caricature each production must now answer. And the role is rationed: few sopranos can sing it, which limits presence without threatening it. The figure stands level with Otello’s.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over seventy years, and it is weighed as seventy years. The text survives whole, as published, and there is nothing in its form or its fabric to charge. Presence is continuous: in print in French since 1956, translated widely, read and taught in literature and in philosophy, though less widely than L’Étranger or La Peste. Its surface is fixed to its moment only lightly. The Paris of advocates and the Amsterdam of the early 1950s are settings; the allusions to the Occupation and to the deportation of the city’s Jews are history rather than topicality; and the quarrel with Sartre behind the book is no longer needed to read it. Seventy years of continuous presence, short of the widest, do not stand level with the survival of works that have lasted for centuries.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the 1890 score, in print since 1892 and in two critical editions. Its text is doubled, a cost and a gain: two versions and three editions, and which is heard depends on the conductor. Presence has been continuous in the Austro-German repertory since 1892 and worldwide since the middle of the twentieth century, recorded by most major conductors, though never at the widest presence of a Beethoven symphony. The surface fixed to its moment is small but charged: the dedication to Franz Joseph, the programme of emperors, and the work’s use as a German monument in the 1930s, to which Haas’s edition belongs.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
About one hundred and sixty-five years. The text survives whole, as published, without textual question. Presence is continuous: in print in Russian since 1862, in English since the 1880s and in at least four English translations of standing, read in schools and universities, cited in histories of punishment and of the Gulag. It has outlived its conditions: the penal labour of Nicholas I’s reign, the shaved half-heads and the gauntlet are history, and the book is read for what they show. Charged a little below the widest presence: its reading is narrower than that of Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, and much of it is as a document of Dostoevsky’s life or of Russian penal history, which is presence of a narrower kind.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival over eight centuries, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the poem survives complete in three principal manuscripts among more than thirty witnesses, and the existence of versions is a fact of its transmission, not a loss. Presence is the charge. It was copied and read from about 1200 into the early sixteenth century, then went unread for about 240 years until 1755; today, outside the German school and the academy, it is read far less than its name is known, and part of its modern presence was as political myth. The fabric is intact. The long neglect is the larger charge, and it places the poem in the band for a text long neglected, at the top of that band, since the form is whole.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and one years, and weighed as a century. The text survives whole as published, with nothing lost; the cut of “Up in Michigan” and the additions of the 1930 edition belong to the book’s history, not to its survival, and the 1925 text is in print. Presence is continuous: the stories are anthologised and taught wherever English is taught, and the book has been widely translated. The figure stands at the foot of what a century earns, not above it, on presence as a book: the stories are more present than the whole, and most readers meet “Indian Camp” or “Big Two-Hearted River” in an anthology, without the interchapters that make the book. Hemingway’s standing has also been charged over the last half century on grounds of manner and of gender, which has narrowed his presence without breaking it. A century does not stand level with the eldest texts.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival of the text, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Written in 1825 and printed in 1831, the play has lasted about two centuries, at the edge between the desk’s two longest spans. Form: the text survives whole, and the manuscript variants are known and published. Presence: read without a break in Russia, taught in schools and universities, printed in every edition of Pushkin, translated into the major languages, and staged in Russia repeatedly since the 1860s. Fabric: the Time of Troubles was already two centuries past when Pushkin wrote, and the subject, legitimacy and the people’s silence, has outlived the empire that censored it. What holds it at the usual figure for two centuries and no higher: it is read far more than it is staged, and outside Russia it lives mostly through Mussorgsky and is largely an academic text.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over 166 years. The form is whole: the text was published in Eliot’s lifetime and survives entire, with no question of version that alters the work. Presence is continuous: in print since 1860, widely taught in schools and universities in Britain and beyond, translated, and adapted for film and television. It falls short of the widest presence because it is read less than Middlemarch and less than the most read English novels of its century, Austen’s, Dickens’s and the Brontës’. Its surface, the corn trade, the law of water and the Dodson proprieties, is fixed to a moment, but the book has already outlived that moment, and its readers do not need the mill to be moved by the sister and the brother.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Just under a hundred and forty years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries, within its usual band. Presence is continuous and wide, and not mainly academic: among the most staged plays of the Scandinavian repertory, translated into the main languages of the world, filmed by Sjöberg (1951, sharing the Grand Prix at Cannes), Mike Figgis (1999) and Liv Ullmann (2014), made a ballet by Birgit Cullberg (1950) and operas by Ned Rorem and William Alwyn. It has outlived its conditions. Charged on form a little: the first edition’s cuts stood for decades, so the text most read was not the whole one, and the Preface’s Darwinism dates the frame. Not higher, because its fame is a theatre’s, narrower than the most read novels of its century.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
About a hundred and ninety years. The text survives whole in Gogol’s final version of 1842. Presence is continuous: in the Russian repertory without a break since 1836, taught in Russian schools for generations, translated into most of the world’s literary languages and often played abroad, and adapted for the screen and the opera house. It has outlived its conditions: the Nicholaevan district town, its posts and its ranks, are history, and the play is performed for the mechanism they pressed into view. Charged: its surface is bureaucratic satire fixed in a particular administration, the kind of topical surface the axis weighs against a work, and its presence outside the Russian sphere, though steady, is a fraction of its presence within it. That holds it at the floor of its band, below the figure of the widest presence.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Form, then presence. The text survives whole as the edition of 1869 set it, a span of a hundred and fifty-seven years, and longer for the pieces printed in periodicals from 1855. The order and the title are the editors’ decisions, taken from Baudelaire’s notes (he used both Le Spleen de Paris and Petits poèmes en prose), and some pieces may lack his final revision: a small charge on form. Presence is continuous: read, taught in French schools and universities, translated many times into English and into most European languages, and “Enivrez-vous” and “L’Étranger” are among the most quoted French prose of their century. That presence is wide, but below that of Les Fleurs du mal, and the book is read more in the academy than its verse sibling. The figure sits at the foot of its range.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Span: 128 years from the date painted on it. Form: whole; the image and its inscription are intact, and nothing that carried meaning is lost. Presence: continuous, with dealers and private collectors in Paris, then ninety years on view in Boston, widely lent, reproduced and named; the title has become a common phrase. Fame is presence, not proof, and is given little weight. Fabric: thin, matte oil on a coarse, absorbent cloth is a fragile system, and its condition history is not known well enough here either to credit or to charge. The canvas has outlived its moment, Symbolism, the culture of the colonial exhibition and the painter’s notoriety, and it has outlived a hard critical turn against its maker, which has changed how it is read but has not taken it from view. Held where it is for the fragile fabric and a test still short of centuries.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the image as the painter left it hangs complete and uncut in the collection that bought it the year it was first shown. Its presence has been continuous for seventy-four years, at the Museum of Modern Art and on loan, with no eclipse; its standing has been contested rather than diminished, and the feminist critique has kept it at the centre of argument. Fame earns little here. The fabric is a heavily worked surface of oil and enamel, scraped and repainted, a less stable structure than a planned oil; nothing is charged that cannot be seen, but the method is a known risk. The cosmetics, the dress line and the advertising grin are of 1950 and read now as period signs, though they have not stood between the image and its viewers. The fabric and the dated surface hold it.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 95 years. Form: whole, and nothing that carries the work is known to be lost. Presence: continuous since 1931, and among the most reproduced images of its century; wide presence earns little, fame is not proof, and the picture’s ubiquity on posters and in parody wears it. The test is whether the small canvas outlasts its copies, and it does: people go to the museum to see how small it is, and find the precision no reproduction carries. Fabric: a small oil kept indoors, whose conservation record could not be verified and is not argued. The surface is fixed to its moment in the pocket watch, an object receding from use, and that has not dated the image. Held at the foot of what this span allows.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-eight years. Form: the book survives whole, its sequence and its layout kept through repeated reissues; it carries most of the unit, and it is intact. The exhibition as hung does not survive and is known through its checklist and record, a loss charged lightly. Presence: continuous within photography, in print, taught and cited; wide, but chiefly within one art. Fabric: the vintage gelatin silver prints are held in museum collections, and the material is sound. Every plate is fixed to the 1930s, but that moment is the work’s subject, and the book has outlived the conditions that made it. The usual figure for its age, not the widest, for the lost hang and a presence confined chiefly to one art.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Ninety-one years since the complete book of 1935, ninety-three since the first volume. Form: the text is whole, authorised and stable, and nothing is lost. Presence: read, taught and translated continuously in every major language, and “Walking Around” and “Sólo la muerte” are among the most anthologised Spanish poems of the century. But the widest presence belongs to Neruda’s other books, the Veinte poemas and the Canto general, and this one is read above all by poets and in the academy, which holds it off the top of its band. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the colonial setting is incidental to a condition that has outlived it. Fabric: nothing to charge.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over a century and a half. The form is whole: the text survives entire and unaltered. Presence is continuous: in print in the standard series, Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics and Everyman, taught in university courses in English and comparative literature, and adapted as a BBC serial in 2002. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the gaming table, the marriage market and the question of a people’s home have outlived the 1860s. It stands at the floor of its band and not above because its presence is narrower than Middlemarch’s or Anna Karenina’s: it is read much more in the academy than outside it, and its general readership has been shaped by the verdict that half the book may be skipped.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over 176 years, and the axis stands at the usual figure for that span. The text is whole and authorised in its final form; nothing is lost, and there is no charge on form or fabric. The poem has been in print without a break since 1850, is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry, and is quoted in public and private mourning to this day. Two things keep it from the widest figure the span allows: its presence dipped under modernism, and it is read mainly in selected sections, the whole poem mostly in the academy. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the Victorian debate of faith and science and the evolutionary hope of CXVIII; its core, the shape of grief in time, has outlived those conditions.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seventy-three years. Form: the text survives whole, in one version, in print without a break since 1953. Presence: it is read, taught in schools and universities, and translated. Its presence is wide in the United States and narrower abroad, where Baldwin is read more for his essays and for Giovanni’s Room, and it lacks the world presence the widest figure asks. Its surface is fixed to a time, a Harlem storefront church in the 1930s, but that time is its subject and has not dated it; the book has outlived the conditions that made it. Seventy-three years stand in the span of seventy years to two centuries, and the axis stands at the foot of that span’s usual figure, held there by its narrower presence beyond the American syllabus.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and three years. Form: the text survives whole, in two editions both authorised by Stevens, with nothing lost, and nothing is charged to it. Presence has been continuous since the 1950s and wide in the English-speaking world: “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar” stand in every anthology of American poetry and are taught every year, and Stevens is widely translated. The surface is not fixed to its moment. Two charges hold the axis where it stands. The book was little read in its first decade; and it is read now mostly as the first section of the Collected Poems and through its anthology pieces, chiefly in the academy and among poets rather than across the culture.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 182 years. The form is whole: the train, the bridge, the river and the weather read as they were meant to. The presence is long and wide, in the national collection since the bequest and among the most reproduced of British paintings, and presence adds little to the figure. The subject was a novelty, an engine of the 1840s, and the picture has outlived the railway it painted as new; the subject is now history rather than topicality. The charge is the hare. Turner’s late technique is known for fugitive pigments and unstable layering, and the hare, small and thinly painted, is now very hard to make out. Whether that is change or was always faint cannot be settled, so the charge is light: a small loss to a part that carried meaning.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Span: about 120 years, in the table’s row of seventy years to two centuries, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1 and 9.2 needs the widest presence. Form: the image is whole; no loss, overpainting or damage to the field is known, and the dense working makes it less vulnerable than the barer canvases to the ageing of exposed ground. Presence: continuous since the painter’s death, in a public museum, a fixture of the Philadelphia galleries, reproduced and lent. The surface is fixed to its moment in nothing. It has outlived the conditions that made it, the scorn of the press and the modernism that took it as a founding text, and is still read on its own terms. Held at 9.0 because its presence, though steady, is not the widest: the image that stands for the mountain in common memory is shared among the versions.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over eighty-six years, and weighed as eighty-six years. The text survives whole as published, in print without break since 1940. Presence has been continuous and wide: read, widely translated, filmed and taught, and the book through which most readers of English meet the Spanish war. Three charges hold it at the foot of its band. Its rendered Spanish has dated faster than the plain English of the early books and is a common object of parody; the reception of the love story has cooled; and the widest presence belongs to books read by nearly every reader of the language, which this one is not. Fame lends nothing here: the figure rests on unbroken print, translation and reading over more than eight decades.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole; nothing in the composition has been lost, and the red and the reserve lines stand as the painter left them. Presence: thin for its first four decades, a decoration declined by the buyer it was offered to, two exhibitions where it was mocked, sixteen years in the painter’s keeping and then a London club; on view in New York since 1949 and widely reproduced, though far less a public emblem than its museum’s most famous canvases. Fabric: oil on canvas; a large field of one colour would show any change in its pigment, and none is charged here. Over 115 years the form is whole and the presence narrower than the widest; the early decades out of view hold it at 9.0.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 187 years. The form is whole: the oppositions that carry the meaning, ship and tug, sun and moon, thick and thin, are fully legible. Its presence has been continuous, from the Academy of 1839 to the painter’s keeping and then to the national collection with the bequest, and its standing has grown rather than lapsed. The subject is the kind of topical surface the axis penalises, one old ship broken up in 1838, and the picture has outlived it entirely: a viewer who knows nothing of Trafalgar reads the day ending and the pale thing carried off. The charge is the smallest one, the general fragility of Turner’s late materials and methods, whose surfaces have needed care.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 186 years. The form is whole: the image is the one Turner made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Its presence has held. Shown at the Academy in 1840, owned by Ruskin and then sold, in New York before Boston, it has been on public view in the Museum of Fine Arts since 1899, and it has outlived early ridicule, its owner’s discomfort with it, and a long phase in which it was admired as colour with its subject forgotten. Its standing is as high as ever, and its subject has given it a second life. Fame lifts the figure only a little. The charge is on the fabric: Turner’s late materials and methods are known to be unstable, and this canvas’s condition record is not known here.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, in continuous print, and the stereo master is the record still sold. Presence is as wide as any album’s of its age: continuous sale and broadcast, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something” among the most played songs of the century, and a sleeve known to people who have never heard the record; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric bears its moment lightly: the synthesiser tones and the music hall pastiche of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” are of 1969, and little else is topical. It stands at the head of the records of its age, level with Revolver at 9.0, above 2001: A Space Odyssey at 8.8, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two thousand years. The form is legible and largely whole: the father, the younger son and the coils carry the work, and they survive. What was lost was arms and coils, the father’s right arm among them, and the father’s arm was found again: the gesture that makes the group, bent back toward the head and not flung out, is the original. The remaining losses and the open question of the elder son’s place take a little from the form. Presence: buried about fourteen centuries, then as continuously present as any sculpture since 1506, through removal to Paris and return. Fabric: marble broken and rejoined, worked over and then unworked by restorers.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The work has survived whole, about ninety-four years from its completion. Form: the four panels stand as painted, and the glaze on wood, chosen for permanence, has held. Presence: it is in a public collection in Dresden, among the most visited works of its galleries, and a standard image of the war. What keeps it at 9.0 and no higher is presence: its public life began late, so that its first years left a gap, and its reach, though wide, is not the widest. Its surface is not fixed to its moment. It has outlived the Weimar argument that produced it and reads as a statement on every war since.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about ninety-three years. Form is whole: all twenty-seven panels stand where they were painted, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost or replaced. The threat was real and was survived: calls to whitewash in 1933, and decades in which the painter’s politics made the cycle an embarrassment to its owner, while the mural Rivera painted in New York the same year was destroyed. Presence is continuous, in place and in view in a public museum; the museum’s crisis of 2013 to 2014 did not reach the walls, which cannot be sold. Fabric is sound, true fresco on the building’s walls with ordinary cleaning and conservation. The surface is fixed to 1932, one car and one plant, but that is its subject. Presence is wide in its country, not the widest, and the figure stops at 9.0.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eighty-seven years. Form: the image is legible whole in its place, on the row of seventy years to two centuries. Presence: continuous, as the centre of a public building that became a cultural institute and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1997 with the murals named in its value; the image has become an emblem of Guadalajara’s cultural life and is widely reproduced. That presence earns a tenth at most, and outside Mexico it is not the widest of its row, so the tenth is not given in full. Fabric: fresco in a building that has needed care against water and the region’s earthquakes; nothing is charged that cannot be named. The surface belongs to the mural programme of the 1930s, and the dome is the part of the cycle least fixed to it. 9.0.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over nearly ninety years since the first staging. Presence is among the widest of any score of its century: in the repertory of nearly every large ballet company, in a dozen choreographies; the suites in the concert hall since 1936; the Montagues and Capulets known far outside music. Popularity is presence, not proof, and earns at most a tenth. Form is where the charge falls. There is no single settled text: the version of 1935, the version of 1940, and productions that cut and reorder. The tragic score survives whole and legible, so the charge is small, but it offsets the presence credit, and the figure stands at the usual mark for its span, level with Otello.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: platform, hall, court and the three-towered eastern wall stand as raised in 1907, kept by the cycle the building was made for, and the form has outlived the colonial state under which it was built. The use is continuous in its own purpose, a mosque for Friday prayer for more than a century. The fabric is renewed every year by design, the work’s own mode, and is not charged as loss. What is charged: the dependence of the whole on an annual act that conflict and insecurity have threatened, the old town listed in danger since 2016; and the restoration of 2009 to 2010, a campaign outside the cycle. The long life of the first mosque’s tradition is the survival of a type, not of this building, and earns no more than presence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The text survives whole, never lost, continuously in print in German since 1795 and continuously translated, over about 230 years. Presence is the question. In Germany it is read and taught as a classic, though far less than Faust or Werther; outside Germany it is read mainly by students of the novel and of German, and known widely by name and through the genre it founded more than in itself. Its songs have had a wider and freer life than the novel, set and sung without the book. The surface is in part fixed to its moment: the theatre of its decades, the estate reform and the Tower’s eighteenth-century pedagogy date it. The charge is for a text of centuries read mainly in the academy, and the figure stands at the top of that band.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The text survives whole in the author’s own last arrangement, with no problem of transmission beyond the known enlargement of 1827, and the authorship of the Marianne poems is a question of credit, not of loss. It has stood for 207 years. It is continuously in print in German, in every collected Goethe, and taught in German schools and universities; it has been translated many times into English and into Persian, Arabic, Urdu and other languages; its poems are sung in the Lieder repertoire; and its name was taken by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded in 1999. The charge is for presence: outside German, and to a degree within it, it is read more in the academy than by the general reader. That sets it at 9.0, at the foot of the band for texts of centuries.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the plan, the enclosure, the courtyard, the arcade system and the transept are al-Walid’s and legible from the courtyard as built; the governing idea is whole and has outlived the dynasty that made it, the Abbasid move of the capital and every later regime. Use: continuous, a congregational mosque since about 715 and the city’s principal mosque throughout. The fabric is charged heavily: the fires of 1069, of 1400 to 1401 and of 1893, the last of which destroyed the prayer hall’s roof and interior, rebuilt in the 1890s; most of the mosaic lost and what remains much restored; columns and dome largely replaced. Form whole, use continuous and fabric heavily rebuilt: the figure sits between the ranges for each.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, three figures and their grounds as painted. Presence: in public view and in the literature since 1945 and in the Tate’s collection, among its most recognised pictures; wide in Britain and in the international literature of the figure, not the widest, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric is the charge: oil on board is not built for centuries as a sound canvas is, and the panels are shown under glass for their protection; no damage is charged. The surface carries nothing fixed to 1944, no uniform, no ruin, no topical sign: its war is in its pressure, not its furniture. It has outlived its first shock and its own second version. Held at the foot of the usual figure for its age, for the support.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1890; Hamsun’s later revision of its spelling to the newer Norwegian norm is context and does not touch the work. Presence: some thirteen decades of continuous reading in Scandinavia, in print in English and the major languages through the twentieth century, taught as a founding text of the modernist novel. The charge falls on presence. Hamsun’s support for the Nazi occupation of Norway and his trial after 1945 cost his name a generation at home, and outside Scandinavia the book is held more among writers and students of the modern novel than across the wider readership. That keeps it at the foot of its band rather than at the widest figure.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the stereo master of 1968 is still the record, and later remixes have not replaced it. Presence is continuous and wide: in print since release, its songs in broadcast and in the general repertoire, its sleeve an image of the plain itself. The fabric has aged better than most records of its year: the bare production belongs to no year, and the pastiche, being of older styles, was never of 1968. Charged: “Revolution 1” and “Piggies” carry the politics of their moment, and a later attachment to a notorious crime is a surface the record did not make and cannot shed. It stands level with Revolver at 9.0, above Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at 8.9 and 2001: A Space Odyssey at 8.8, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Seventy-four years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as Celan published it, with his own revisions of the earlier poems settled in it, in his collected works and in print: form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide but uneven. “Todesfuge” has as wide a presence as any German poem of its century, in schools, in translation, in memorial use and in the other arts; it was read at the Bundestag’s commemoration of 1988. The book as a book is read mainly by readers of Celan and in the academy, its lesser poems known chiefly as the setting of the great ones. Its subject is a historical event, but the poem has outlived the conditions of its first hearing. The widest presence belongs to one poem, and the figure stands at the foot of what its age allows.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: sixteen sides as recorded, in this order, in print or available almost continuously since 1961. Presence is the widest the tradition has: the songs are played by every generation of blues and rock guitarists, the sides are heard far beyond the audience for prewar blues, and the record is the usual first door to it. Two charges: part of the LP’s presence has passed to The Complete Recordings (1990), which carries the same sides, and from 1938 to 1961 the recordings lay nearly silent. The fabric is transfers of 78s with surface noise, and the voice and guitar carry through. Sixty-five years place it level with Kind of Blue at 9.0, above Low at 8.7.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Three hundred and eighty-two years. On form there is no charge: the text survives whole, in Milton’s own printing, with nothing lost, nothing in doubt and no textual crux of consequence. On presence the charge is real. The work had little presence in its own decade, and its continuous life begins with the revival of the eighteenth century. Today it is read mainly in the academy, in the study of Milton, of the seventeenth century and of political thought, and in the free speech tradition, where its sentences are better known than the whole. It stands at the upper end of the charged band for a text of centuries, because the survival since the revival is unbroken and the text is perfect.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ninety-eight years, a span whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Form: the text survives whole as published, in print without a break and widely translated. Presence: it is taught in every survey of modernism and in gender studies, it is the Woolf most often adapted, and its presence has risen over the last fifty years. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment and its circle: the private jokes about Vita, Knole and the Sackville inheritance, and the literary London of 1928, are now read with notes. It has outlived them; the jokes are footnoted and the book is read for what they carry. Held a tenth from the top of its span for that surface, and because it was long read as the lighter book among Woolf’s.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
For a text, the survival of the text. The Berlin version is about seventy years old and the play’s first version about eighty-eight. The text survives whole, in a settled form, and the earlier versions survive beside it as versions, not as loss. Presence has been continuous: steady production in Germany and abroad, a set text in German schools, widely taught in English, translated widely. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the bomb and the Cold War, but the play has outlived those conditions and is read as more pertinent with each later turn of science. Its presence is wide but not the widest of its span, and nothing is added for fame.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Eighty-six years are weighed as eighty-six years, and the usual figure for that span is given, not more. The text survives whole, as published, in print throughout in Britain and America, translated widely, and taught in schools and universities as the central novel of Greene’s career and of the Catholic novel in English. Its surface is fixed to one persecution in one Mexican state in the 1930s, and to a Church before the Second Vatican Council: the confession, the Latin, the fear of dying in mortal sin. Both have passed, and the book is read now for what outlives them, which is the evidence the axis asks for. What holds it at the usual figure: its presence is wide but not the widest among the books of its decade, and part of it is concentrated in Catholic readers and the classroom.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-nine years and weighed as such: form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as published, in print throughout, with nothing lost; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide for the stories and narrower for the book. “Hills”, “The Killers” and “In Another Country” are in nearly every anthology of the American story and are widely translated, but they are more often read among the collected stories than in this book as a book. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the manners of the 1920s, the gangsters of Prohibition, the Italy of 1927 in “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, but that is matter, and the stories have outlived it. The figure stands at the foot of what this span earns, for a book whose presence runs through its parts.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, the two blocks, the hall, the light and the interior scheme are Wright’s and in place, and they have outlived the conditions that made them, the Oak Park parish of 1905 and the Prairie decade, as a model studied and answered for over a century. The use survives without a break: the congregation that commissioned the building still worships in it, which few buildings on the desk can claim. The fabric is charged: an exposed concrete shell that cracked and leaked from early in its life, whose concrete, roofs, finishes and services were repaired, reinstated and renewed in a restoration completed in 2017. Presence is real among architects and modest beyond them. The figure is the foot of the usual range for a building of its age with form whole and use unbroken, held there by the fabric.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Joint highest of the twelve. The span is from 1779, close on two and a half centuries. The text survives whole, in Johnson’s own revision of 1783, with no doubt about what he wrote except the known case of Croft’s Young. It has been in print continuously since 1779, edited twice at full scale, by G. B. Hill in 1905 and by Roger Lonsdale in four volumes in 2006, and is quoted constantly. But its presence is narrow in kind: it is read mainly in the academy and by students of criticism, very largely in selections, the Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Savage and Gray, and the whole is seldom read through by the common reader it invokes. The major lives have never been out of use, which sets it at the top of the lower band.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric and setting. Form: whole; the granite figures stand as carved. Presence: continuous since 1932, through the occupation of Belgium from 1940 to 1944 and after; a known place of visit and commemoration, though not of the widest presence. Fabric: weathered granite, the smallest charge. Setting: the work was moved once, with Peter’s grave, from Roggevelde to Vladslo. The relation of the parents to the field of graves, which is part of the work, was kept; the first siting, where Kollwitz herself saw it, is gone, and that is a small charge on what now stands. Ninety-four years as finished: the span between seventy years and two centuries gives 9.0 to 9.1, and the move holds it at the lower figure.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Ninety-six years since publication, in the span of seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole and settled, and it has stood in every collected Eliot since 1936. Presence is wide and continuous: it is taught, anthologised, the first and third sections above all, translated widely, and read in churches on the day it is named for. Nothing in it is fixed to its moment: no topical surface and no period furniture beyond the liturgy, which is older than the poem. It stops at the usual figure for its span because its presence is wide but not the widest: it is read less than The Waste Land, and much of its reading lies within the academy and the church.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Published in 1956 and 1957: about seventy years, on the edge of the step from fifty-five to seventy years to the step from seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, and nothing is charged. Presence: it has been in print and taught continuously in the Arab world, and translated into many languages since the Nobel Prize of 1988. Fabric: its surface is fixed to a moment, 1917 to about 1944, the occupation, the Wafd and the war, but it has outlived that moment as history rather than dating with it. The usual figure at seventy years is 9.0 to 9.1. Held at 9.0 because the widest presence, which would earn more, the trilogy does not have outside Arabic.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives legible and whole: the plan, the sequence of narthex, nave and choir, the elevation, the light and the inner portals; the governing idea is intact. The use has never broken: a church of worship and pilgrimage nearly nine centuries after its nave was raised, its great pilgrimage weakened after 1279 and since revived. The fabric carries a heavy charge. The Wars of Religion and the Revolution took sculpture, the outer west portal’s among it, and by 1840 the church was near collapse; the restoration that saved it renewed much of what is seen. The inner narthex portals, the heart of the carving, survive original.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric at about ninety years. Form: whole, the three panels together, no part known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is credited or charged. Presence: unseen in Germany in its first years, then in public view in New York since 1942 and among the most shown modern figure paintings there; presence earns at most a tenth and is not counted as proof. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no damage known. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the cabaret props and liveries of Weimar, and it has outlived that moment and the regime it foresaw; the meaning has not dated. The usual figure for its span, and not above it.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on span, form and presence. Span: seventy-eight years from the definitive text of 1948, eighty-nine from the first book of 1937. Form: whole, with nothing lost; the condensed version Kawabata made near the end of his life sits beside it and does not displace it. Presence: continuous in Japan, in school reading, in editions and in two film versions, and wide in translation, with Seidensticker’s English in print since 1956 and versions in the major languages. The surface is fixed to a moment, the geisha economy of a hot spring town before the war, and has outlived it: the book is now read for what that world disclosed, not as report. Held at 9.0 and not higher because its readership abroad, though steady, is narrower than that of the great Russian or English novels, and in Japan Sōseki’s Kokoro is more universally read.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: frame, translucent envelope, moving partition and the insertion beneath the retained storey are in place, and the governing idea has outlived the conditions that produced it, answered and copied in a later age. The use: the house stayed a dwelling in one family for some seventy years, a rare continuity for a modern house of its date, and it is still a private residence with limited visits; the medical practice, half its programme, has ended, a real charge. The fabric is by repute well kept and restored, with original fittings and much of the glass block retained. Its presence is narrow, a private house long little known, and with the lost practice that holds it where it stands.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: plan, wings, courts, the ceremonial sequence and the vaults stand as built, and the stair and the imperial hall carry their frescoes as painted. The building has outlived the see that built it, secularised in 1802 to 1803, and the order that made it legible. Use is the first charge: the prince-bishop’s seat became a grand duke’s and a king’s, and since the end of the monarchy a museum, a concert hall and quarters for a university; the ceremony is gone, though reception and music go on in its rooms. Fabric is the second: on 16 March 1945 the roof and many rooms burned, and the Mirror Cabinet and much else are reconstruction completed in 1987. The vaults held, and the frescoes survive.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, with no part dispersed or replaced, and the image legible from edge to edge. Presence: held by the Museum of Modern Art and in every history of the century’s painting; fame is presence, and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: industrial enamel and oil on canvas, materials not made to last, in layers of different paints that age at different rates, with puddled enamel that wrinkled as it dried. The surface is fixed to no moment except the look of postwar abstraction itself, which it made. Seventy-six years is a record long enough to show survival and short of the centuries; fabric holds the figure at the foot of what that record allows, and presence keeps it there.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over 87 years. Form: no loss, later hand or refabrication is recorded, and the image as painted is the image that stands. Presence: shown publicly in 1940 and now in a public museum in Mexico City; but for about three decades after the painter’s death in 1954 it was a local presence, overshadowed by Rivera’s, and its present ubiquity, the face on bags and posters, is presence, not proof. The early eclipse cancels what that ubiquity would add. Fabric: no charge is made, and the condition of the surface cannot be verified here. The surface is fixed to no passing moment: the dress is traditional, not fashionable, and the anatomy does not date. Held at the figure its age and whole form support, with nothing added for fame.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Eighty-six years, weighed on form, presence and surface. The text survives whole: the cuts made at the Book-of-the-Month Club’s request in 1940 were restored in 1991, and the restored text is now the one read, so the only charge on form, that the book’s first public form was not Wright’s own, has been made good. Presence is wide and continuous: in print without a break, taught in schools and universities across the United States, translated, staged in 1941 and filmed three times, and returned to in each decade’s argument about race and justice. Against it, the surface: the Communist frame of Book Three, the Labor Defenders and Max’s speech are fixed to the late 1930s and read now as period, though the condition they argue has not dated.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the charge falls on the form. The original ending is lost and a substitute stands in its place; the order of the prologue is in doubt; interpolation is heavier than in almost any other tragedy. The text comes down in two manuscripts only, L and P, outside the Byzantine school selection, and was little read for a millennium before Erasmus. It is not fragmentary: what carries its meaning, the brothers, the arrival, the indictment, the supplication and the decision, is whole and legible. Presence since the Renaissance is wide, in translation, the French stage, opera, schools and modern staging. The damage to the ending touches the meaning and not only the fabric, and that sets the figure.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The span is about 140 years, and the usual figure for that span is the floor of this one. Form first: whole and legible. The image is what Munch left, and its scraped, unfinished look is the work, not damage. Presence second: in the national collection at Oslo for most of a century, reproduced widely, and kept present by the later versions in Gothenburg, London and Stockholm; but its presence is narrower than that of The Scream or The Starry Night, and it does not earn the extra tenth. Fabric last: a heavily built and scraped surface of the 1880s, its present condition stated here as open, with no known loss that touches the form. The figure sits at the floor of its step because presence is solid but not the widest.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form stands whole and legible: the quadrangle, the court with its slipping order, the garden loggia and the painted rooms, the governing idea outliving the court that made it as the best-known text of licence in architecture. The use is lost. It was a prince’s villa of leisure and reception; the Sack of 1630 emptied it, the Gonzaga lost Mantua in the early eighteenth century, and in modern times it is a museum and exhibition house, entered constantly and no longer lived in. The fabric is largely the makers’: stucco over brick has needed renewal, the eighteenth century altered parts, the frescoes have been restored and in places retouched. What was stripped, furniture, tapestries and collections, was not the work. Form whole, use lost, fabric largely original: the middle of its range.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as its author published it in 1955; nothing is lost or assembled, and there is nothing to charge. Presence: seventy-one years of continuous print in Greek and, since 1960, in Bien’s English, with translation into many languages; steady reading in Greece, where Kazantzakis is a national author; renewed reading abroad after 1988. Fabric: its surface is not fixed to the 1950s, since its matter is first-century Galilee and a perennial theology. Held at the foot of the figure its span can show, not above it: part of its presence is borrowed from scandal and from the film, and fame is presence, not proof; outside Greece it is read more than taught; and its standing among Kazantzakis’s books rests partly on its notoriety.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over seventy-four years. Form: the text survives whole as Borges left it, and nothing that makes the work is lost; no charge. Presence: continuous since 1952, in print in Spanish throughout, taught across the Spanish-speaking world, translated widely, and its central essays anthologised in English since 1962. Against it, the book as a unit is read less than its famous pieces, which travel in selections, and the occasional reviews are fixed to their moment, Américo Castro’s alarms and a forgotten book of the 1940s among them. That charge holds the figure at the floor of the band its age allows, not above it. Fabric: nothing to charge.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival of eighty-six years. The poems’ presence is among the widest of any English poetry of the century: anthologised, taught, recited at funerals and in public crisis; “Funeral Blues” reached general use through its recital in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). The text itself survives whole; nothing is lost. Two charges hold the figure where it is. The book as a book is less present than its poems: it is read almost entirely through Auden’s later collected and selected editions, in which several of its poems are revised, cut or absent, so the 1940 text survives in print but is not the text most readers meet. And some of its surface is fixed to its year: the occasional poems are bound to Spain, Munich and the outbreak of war.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 151 years. Form: whole. Every figure and the composition stand as painted, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. Presence: continuous but partial for most of its life, in a medical college’s hall rather than a gallery, then at the centre of its city’s two museums since 2007; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: charged. A cleaning in the earlier twentieth century abraded the glazes and shifted the balance of dark and light, a real charge in a picture whose tonality is its argument; a later restoration sought to recover the original tonality, with Eakins’s replica and early photographs as guides. That restoration is a making good of loss, weighed here only. The figure stands at the foot of its row for the abrasion.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, at 114 years. The form survives whole: the front, the balconies, the courtyards, the frame and free plan, the attic and the roof are Gaudí’s and in place, and the house has outlived the bourgeois city of rented flats that produced it to become one of the defining images of Barcelona. The use survives in part: the house is entered daily, but chiefly as a monument, the principal floor an exhibition hall. The fabric has been charged and renewed: most of the first interiors lost to later decoration; the attic made into flats in 1953 and restored only in the 1990s; the roof and front repaired in a long restoration. The widest presence earns at most a tenth, and the change of use and the interior losses take it back.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: river front, towers, axes and principal rooms are the makers’, and the building has outlived the Victorian state that built it as the image of parliamentary government. The use is continuous and in its own purpose since the 1840s, the strongest survival of use a building of its age can show, broken only when the Commons sat in the Lords from 1941 to 1950. Its presence is as wide as any building’s. Then the charges. The Commons chamber, the heart of the use, was destroyed in 1941 and rebuilt by another hand in a plainer idiom: the form kept, the makers’ room lost. The fabric is heavily renewed, the Anston stone decaying within decades and refaced since; many murals failed early; the services are near failure, and a renewal of the whole is in train.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the bronze stands as made, its profile intact, and the series stands with it. It has outlived the conditions that made it, and its form has been copied, answered and absorbed. Presence has been continuous, in a major museum for most of its life, with the series spread across several; wide, though not the widest, and fame is not proof. The fabric is cast bronze, among the most durable materials of sculpture, and the charges are small. The mirror polish tarnishes and must be kept, so the gleam that carries the work is maintained by conservators rather than simply surviving. And the streamlined look became a decade’s commercial style, which the form has had to outlive, and so far has.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface. The text survives whole. Its history of refusal and of copies made by hand belongs to the circulation of 1889 to 1891; the printed text is settled and read without dispute about what it is. Its presence is continuous over a hundred and thirty-seven years: in print throughout, translated into the major languages, set for study, adapted for stage and film, and named in music. The charge falls on presence and surface. The book is read less widely than The Death of Ivan Ilyich or the great novels, often as a document of Tolstoy’s late doctrine, and that doctrine is fixed to its moment in a way the action is not. That keeps it below the widest presence; nothing argues for less than the full figure of its span.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Eighty years, and the text whole and continuously in print. It is taught without a break in American schools and universities, kept in the standard series, and held in view by two films and an opera. The book has outlived Huey Long and the populism of the Depression that occasioned it, and is read now for what it says about power and responsibility, not as a key to a governor: Warren denied that Stark is a portrait of Long, and the book does not need the question settled. The charges keep it at the lowest figure its age allows: its presence outside the United States is modest beside Faulkner’s or Fitzgerald’s, and some of its surface, the dialect of the hick politics and a racial order described in passing and rarely examined outside the Cass chapter, is tied to its moment.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
A hundred and sixty-four years have passed since 1862, and survival is demonstrated. The text survives whole, from the author’s own volume and fair copy, under a standard variorum. Presence has been continuous: “Remember”, “Up-Hill”, “A Birthday” and “Song” have been anthologised and set to music since her lifetime, and the title poem is taught in every survey of Victorian poetry. Little is fixed to its moment but “In the Round Tower at Jhansi”, the volume’s weakest survivor. Two charges hold the axis at 9.0. Its critical standing sank for some decades after the First World War, when she was read as a minor devotional poet, though the lyrics stayed in anthologies and hymnals and the title poem in print for children; and its widest presence rests on the title poem and a few lyrics more than on the volume as a book.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole. The designs survive complete in many impressions and in complete sets, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: continuous since issue, first in the Edo market, then in Europe from the 1860s, then in museum collections and in reproduction; fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric is the smallest charge, but here it is real. Prints are paper and fugitive colour: the reds and blues of many surviving impressions have faded, and later impressions were pulled with altered colour from worn blocks, so the work as made stands in good early impressions only. About 170 years, with the widest presence; the fading and the degraded later states hold the figure at 9.0.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, the image in this paint, over 129 years. The form is whole: no part of the image is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is charged because none is known. Presence is charged in part. For about twenty-five of its first twenty-six years the canvas was out of sight; its author died before it reappeared; the one public body it was offered to refused it; and its authenticity was questioned when it surfaced, a doubt that did not hold. Since 1939 it has been continuously in view at The Museum of Modern Art, lent and reproduced, among the most familiar images in that collection; wide presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is not proof. The fabric, an oil on canvas of the 1890s, is not charged. The lost quarter century holds it at the figure usual for its span rather than above it.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: about 68 metres of a perishable textile have survived about 950 years, and the story is legible from Edward to the English flight. Against it, the end is lost, and with it the close of the argument, most likely the coronation that completes the claim, which takes more from the form than a margin would; and the last stretch as it stands is substantially a nineteenth-century restoration. Presence: kept at Bayeux on the record from the cathedral inventory of 1476, through the Revolution, Napoleon’s display in Paris and the Second World War, when it was under German study, and now among the most visited works of its age. Fabric: stains, holes, restitching and a replaced backing. The survival of a textile this long and this whole stands high, held down by the lost end.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and six years. Form: whole, as first published, in print without break, with no loss and no textual dispute. Presence: continuous and wide in the English-speaking world; taught in American schools and universities as a standard text of its period; filmed in 1924 and 1934 and by Martin Scorsese in 1993, and staged in 1928. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment, but the moment is the book’s subject, already history when it was written, so it has not dated as a topical surface dates. It stands at the usual figure for its span and not above it: its presence is strongest in America and in the academy, and it does not have the world presence of Anna Karenina (9.3) or Madame Bovary (9.2).
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
A book of 1922, a hundred and four years old, whole, in print without break, in its author’s settled text. Survival across that span is demonstrated. Presence is wide but uneven. “Le Cimetière marin” is among the most read and taught French poems of its century: recited, set in schools, widely translated, its last line a common quotation in French. The rest of the book is read more in the academy than outside it, and Valéry’s standing has had periods of eclipse since the 1950s, when the generation after him found him official. Nothing of the text is lost. Presence uneven across the book is not neglect, but it holds the figure at the foot of the range its age and survival earn.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about five centuries. Form: the carved face is legible whole; every ring, sign and date can be read, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost. The paint that once coloured the signs survives only as traces, and colour carried part of the meaning. Presence: broken twice, by burial after the Conquest, out of sight until 1790, and by nearly a century set into the base of the cathedral tower, exposed to weather and to use. Since 1885 it has been on museum view, and since 1964 at the centre of the national museum, the widest presence, which lifts it only a tenth. Fabric: basalt, sound. Centuries survived with the form whole, presence and colour charged: the strongest of the twelve, and held within the charged band by its burial.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over about ninety-six years. The form is whole and legible, the governing idea entire: arch, hinges, box, cross walls and approaches stand as Maillart made them. The use survives: the bridge still carries the road to Schuders, the purpose it was built for. The fabric is charged. Exposed concrete in an Alpine climate deteriorated and was repaired in the late 1990s; the arch itself was kept, not rebuilt. That is the smallest kind of charge, fabric where form and use survive, and it is modest. Presence is wide among engineers and historians and narrower in general culture, and presence earns no tenth here. The bridge at Tavanasa, its ancestor, was destroyed, which shows the type’s vulnerability to its mountain setting but is not charged to this work.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, unaltered after the painter so far as is known, the image legible in full at seventy-six years. Presence: shown in the year it was painted and now held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; wide, but not the widest, since the poured canvases in New York are seen and reproduced at least as much, and fame lifts the figure little. Fabric: commercial enamels and aluminium paint are materials no painter of the earlier centuries trusted, and their ageing is less known than oil’s; no damage to this canvas is known, so no more than the general risk is charged. The surface is fixed to nothing of its moment. It stands at the foot of what its age allows, the fabric’s open question holding it there.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible in its governing idea: the most complete temple of ancient Egypt, roofed over its inner rooms, the pylon at full height, the enclosure wall intact; more of the Egyptian temple survives here than anywhere. The use is lost: worship ended in late antiquity, and since its clearing the building has been a monument, entered by visitors and not by its cult. The fabric is sound, though relief faces were hacked away and the hypostyle ceilings blackened, and its survival owes much to burial rather than presence: for centuries it was the foundation of a village, half out of view. It has outlived its religion, its language and its dynasty, and it stands as built.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Form first: whole after 138 years, the composition, the figures and the colour legible as painted, nothing that makes the work lost. Fabric second: no part that carries meaning has gone. Presence last, and charged slightly: the picture spent its first forty years with the painter, unseen by the public; since 1929 it has been exhibited, and at the Getty it is one of the museum’s best-known pictures. Its surface is fixed to a moment, Belgian politics of the 1880s with their parties and bands, and it has already outlived those conditions: the parade reads without them. The usual figure for its span, not the highest that presence can lift it to.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, seventy-one years from completion. The form is whole and legible: the axis, the raised museum, the cenotaph and the dome stand in the relation Tange set, and the trees have grown into the frame of the view. The use has run without a break: it is among the most visited places in Japan, and the axis is walked each 6 August in the ceremony held at the cenotaph. Its presence is among the widest of any modern building. The fabric has been repaired and seismically strengthened, and the main building has been an Important Cultural Property since 2006. The charges hold the figure at the foot of its step: the fabric needed substantial repair, the halls beside the museum are not the work, and the dome’s survival depends on continual consolidation.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface. The text survives whole. The censor’s cuts of 1899 were never the only text: the full novel was printed abroad the same year and is the text read since, so nothing of the form is lost. Its presence is continuous over a hundred and twenty-seven years: in print in Russian and in the major languages throughout, taught in Russian schools and in courses on Tolstoy and the Russian novel, filmed in Russia and abroad. The charge falls on presence and surface. Outside Russia it is read chiefly by readers of Tolstoy, and taught much less than War and Peace or Anna Karenina; part of its surface is fixed to its moment, the penal system of the 1890s and the land question argued in Henry George’s terms, though its subject has not dated. That keeps it at the usual figure for its span, below the widest presence.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
A survival of 167 years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text survives whole in all five editions, each authorized, with nothing lost and nothing in doubt; nothing is charged. Presence: from 1861 to about 1930 it was among the most widely read poems in English, in every pocket and gift edition, and it has been in print without a break since. That presence has narrowed. The poem is quoted more than read, taught less than its Victorian peers, and read as much in translation studies as in poetry; that is not a loss of the text, but it holds the figure at the foot of the step rather than at the widest presence. Fabric: the Victorian Persian dress is of its moment, and has survived its moment.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, no later hand known on the image, seventy-nine years old, so that its survival is shown, if at the near end of the span that shows it. Presence: in a public collection since 1952, long on view in the museum’s postwar galleries, reproduced widely, its standing never eclipsed; but it is not the most famous of the painter’s canvases, and fame would lift it only a little in any case. Fabric: a heavy impasto with nails, tacks, coins, cigarettes and matches is riskier than plain oil, with organic matter and metals embedded and thick passages that can crack. No loss is known, and only that general risk is charged. The surface is fixed to its moment in nothing but its method, and the method has outlived the mockery of its decade.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over eighty-seven years. The form survives whole: plan, courtyard, sauna wing, pool, canopy and interiors stand as the house was built, and no substantial addition or reconstruction is recorded. The house has outlived the conditions that produced it, a patron family of the 1930s and the young republic’s industrial wealth, as a model studied and answered. The use survives in large part: the house remains in the family’s keeping and is shown, though whether it has been lived in since Maire Gullichsen’s death in 1990 is not established, and that keeps the figure where it is. Timber, render and turf need renewal in this climate, and no loss of consequence is recorded. Its presence is real but not the widest.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The text survives whole as Hesse published it, ninety-nine years ago, with no question of form or transmission. Its presence is continuous and wide: translated into many languages, read across two separate generations’ revivals and still widely read now, and taught, though less centrally in the academy than Mann or Kafka. The jazz and the foxtrots are dated surfaces the book has outlived. It sits at the foot of the usual figure for its span and not above it because much of its presence is the reading of the young and of one cultural moment, the 1960s, which carries its own fixity.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Ninety-one years, from 1935 to 2026. Form: the text is whole, settled by its author and continuously in print. Presence: performed without a break since 1935 in cathedrals, churches, schools and theatres, set for examination for generations, filmed by George Hoellering (1951) and made an opera by Ildebrando Pizzetti, Assassinio nella cattedrale (1958). Fabric: the surface is not fixed to its moment; the medieval matter dates nothing, and the Knights’ modern prose, topical in 1935, has stayed legible because the reasoning it parodies has not gone away. It stands at the foot of what its span usually shows rather than above, because its presence is now narrower than it was, more school and church than general stage.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about seventeen to eighteen centuries. Form: whole. The body, the face, the posture and the halo, which carry the work, all stand, and no loss known to the desk touches its meaning. Presence: charged. The sculpture was lost to sight for well over a thousand years, buried with the sites of Gandhara after the decline of its Buddhism, and it has been in public view only since its recovery and its entry into the Lahore Museum; continuity of attention is short against the span. Since then its presence has been wide, as the image of Gandharan art, and that lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: schist has proved durable, with surface wear only. A form that survived whole, charged for the long burial.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 157 years. Form: the Mannheim canvas is whole, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost; the cutting up of the London canvas belongs to that version, not to this one. Presence: suppressed at birth and kept from exhibition in France in its maker’s lifetime, then held in a public museum in Mannheim; known since the later twentieth century through exhibitions and the literature of Manet, and less visited than the Paris canvases. It has outlived the regime it accused, the political occasion and the scandal that hid it, and it is read now as a painting rather than a pamphlet. Fabric: not weighed beyond the whole of the image. The span of 70 years to two centuries is the row this figure sits in; a presence narrower than the widest holds it at the foot of that row.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, with no part known lost or replaced, and at seventy-four years it stands on the step from seventy years to two centuries, where a whole canvas usually holds 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: about twenty years in private hands with intermittent showing, then fifty-three years on view in one national collection, lent abroad only on occasion. Presence is wide in Australia and narrower worldwide than for a canvas in New York or Paris, and that holds it from the upper figure; fame and price are presence, not proof, and do not lift it. Fabric: commercial enamel and aluminium paint, with glass, not made for permanence; no failure is known, and only the general risk is charged. Its moment, the 1950s and the legend of the painter, has not stood between the canvas and its viewers. Held at the usual figure.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Ninety-two years since publication are weighed as ninety-two years. The text is whole and stable; its one textual question, the ending Waugh wrote for an American magazine serial, is settled by the book’s published form. Its presence has been continuous: in print since 1934, widely taught in courses on the modern English novel, translated into the main European languages, filmed by Charles Sturridge in 1988, and named by many critics as Waugh’s finest. The charge against a surface fixed to its moment applies in part. The slang, the divorce law that required staged evidence and the chromium flat are of 1934; but the book takes its period as its subject and has outlived it. Its presence is not the widest: it is read less than Brideshead. Fame is presence, not proof, and is counted for no more than a tenth.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: the 1908 hall, its stair, foyer and fronts stand as built, the glass and the skylight included. The use is unbroken: the same society has used it for the same purpose for nearly 120 years, through the Civil War and the Franco years, when Catalan culture itself was suppressed. The fabric has been restored, its stained glass, tile and organ repaired, as a building in hard use requires. The extension changed the setting, the church beside the hall demolished and a new side front and plaza opened; it is part of the one work, done in sympathy with the hall and taking nothing from it. Its presence is wide, a World Heritage listing and a fixture of the city, though not the widest.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: plan, section, towers, west front and the roof’s profile and pattern stand as the building’s own, and the governing idea of one hall under one roof beside one spire is unaltered. The use has been continuous for some eight and a half centuries, as parish, chapter and cathedral, broken only by the fire and the rebuilding. The fabric carries the largest charge: the medieval roof frame and roof, the Gothic choir stalls and the old great bell are lost and replaced, parts of the vault rebuilt, the top of the south spire rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and the stone under continual renewal by the lodge. The pulpit, the tomb and the altar survived. The form outlived the duchy, the empire and the fire.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible, and more complete now than at any earlier date: the governing idea of 1395 survived the fire of 1592, was rebuilt in 1608 to the same rule and carried forward to nineteen chambers in 1836, which the hall has kept. The use is charged: the dynasty ended in 1910, and the rites of a reigning house have shrunk to one annual rite held by its descendants; the shrine is now mainly a monument visited, its use surviving in kind but not in office. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: nothing of the first building stands. What stands is of 1608 and after, itself over four centuries old and much repaired. The whole form and the age of the rebuilding hold the figure high.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Eighty-eight years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form takes no charge: the text survives whole as Orwell published it, and the later setting of two chapters as appendices changes the order in most copies now read but loses nothing. Presence was charged at the start and has been strong since. The book was barely read on publication and through the war; from the 1950s, after the fame of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the American edition, it has been continuously in print, taught in schools and universities, translated widely, and it is the book most read in English on the Spanish war. Its surface is fixed to a party quarrel of 1937, a real charge, but the quarrel has outlived its conditions because the book made it exemplary. The early neglect, and the debt of its presence to its author’s later fame, set it at the foot of its band.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over eight centuries. The form survives and is legible: the three lower storeys, which carry the fluting, the balconies and most of the calligraphy, are the first campaign’s. But lightning struck the top in the 1360s and the upper stage is Firuz Shah’s rebuilding in another material and manner; the earthquakes of 1505 and 1803 required repair, and the restoration of 1828 renewed balconies and parapets and added a cupola, removed in 1848. Use is charged: the call is not given from it, and the stair has been closed since 1981. It has stood in view for eight centuries, and its stone has held well.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order,. The form is legible in its governing idea: graded wall, cornice, two-light windows and court are Michelozzo’s and in place. But it has changed in two terms: the open corner loggia is walled, and the Riccardi extension has made the near-cube a long front and moved the portal off any centre the first palace had. The use is continuous but not the first: the family left in 1540, and it has been a government office since the nineteenth century, with a museum within; it has never stood empty or ruined. The fabric of front and court is largely original, weathered and restored.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, across 149 years since the consecration. The form is whole and legible: the plan, the tower, the masonry and the painted interior of the first campaign survive as built, and the form outlived its conditions as a model copied across a continent. The use is unbroken; the parish has worshipped here since 1877. The fabric is sound and repaired, under two charges. The east end was remodelled in 1938, altering the chancel of Richardson and La Farge; and the church stands on timber piles that survive only below the water table, so that its endurance has needed the groundwater beneath it watched and managed since the twentieth century. Its presence is wide in American architecture and modest beyond it. The charges keep the figure at the usual end of its span, not the upper.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Six centuries, and the text whole. On form there is no charge: the poem begins with its proem and ends with the waking, nothing in it is a fragment, and it survives in some fourteen manuscripts and early prints and has been continuously in print since the fifteenth century. The charge is to presence. The poem lives mainly in the classroom and the scholar’s edition, and its life beyond the university is slight except through the association of Saint Valentine’s day with the choosing of mates. A text of this age read mainly in the academy stands below the usual mark for six centuries of survival, and this one stands within that lower band.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: the arch, the four openings, the profile and the deck are as the Sui builders set them, and the form has outlived the dynasty, the road and the carts it served, through floods, wars and earthquakes. The use was continuous as a road crossing for some thirteen centuries and is now reduced to a monument crossed on foot, a real charge. The fabric charge is heavy: outer rings fell away and were rebuilt, the restoration of the 1950s renewed much of the visible stone, the deck and the balustrade, and the original carved slabs are museum pieces. Charged on both use and fabric, the bridge is placed by its age and the integrity of its form at the head of the lower band.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible as built: plan, section, dome, scarsella, order, roundels and portico stand, and the idea has outlived the convent culture and the family that made it, taught for five hundred years. What the form lacks is its own completion: the attic stands closed and the front above the columns reads as unfinished, a loss to the work’s design rather than to time. The use is charged: the room is entered daily, but on a museum circuit, and the friars’ chapter, for which the bench and the Apostles were made, no longer meets in it. The fabric is largely the fifteenth century’s; the flood of 1966 and the restorations since are the smallest charge.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: Pedro’s palace stands in its plan, its two cores, its façade, its throne hall and its courts, and the complex keeps its walls, courts and gardens; the design has outlived the dynasty, the frontier and the Andalusi culture that produced it. The use is continuous in its own purpose: a royal residence since 1248, commonly called the oldest royal palace still in use in Europe, its upper rooms still the crown’s, though the palace’s core now lives chiefly as a monument. The fabric carries the charge: the Gothic palace remade after 1755, much of the stucco and its colour restored, the Doncellas garden under paving for four centuries, the Abbadid and most of the Almohad palace lost.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole at its core: keep group, approach, gates, turrets and walls stand as built, legible from the city as in 1609, having outlived the war, the domain and the class that made them, and come through the Meiji years and the firebombing of 1945 when almost every castle of its time was lost. The use is lost: no lord, no garrison, no government, and the palaces, the outer moat and the town are gone. The fabric is still largely the builders’ timber, stone and plan, but heavily handled: the keep dismantled and re-erected in 1956 to 1964, its west pillar replaced, its roofs and plaster renewed again in 2009 to 2015.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 487 years. Form: whole and legible. Medallion, pendants, lamps, inscription, corners and border stand, and the design reads as its makers drew it. The repair is the charge. The London carpet was made good with knotted material taken from its pair, of the same campaign and the same cartoon, so what was restored is the original design in original knots; but the carpet that stands is in part a composite, and its pair was cut down to make it. Presence: continuously on view in London since 1893. Fabric: pile worn in places, and wool that light harms, so it is shown in the dark.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The target, the four casts, the box and the front are all present, none known to be lost or replaced, and the work stands as it was made. Presence: continuous since 1958 in a public collection that shows it often, to a wide public though not the widest; the image is known and has not been worn smooth by copies, and fame is credited only a little. Fabric: encaustic is a stable medium, but newsprint is acid and yellows, plaster chips and its tint can wear, and a hinged front is a moving part. No record of the work’s conservation is given here, and only the general risk is charged. Over seventy-one years the form has held; the fragile fabric of the casts and a presence below the widest hold the figure where it stands.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Ninety-six years are weighed as ninety-six years, in the band of seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the form Hammett gave it, with nothing lost and nothing in dispute beyond the minor difference between serial and book. The presence is continuous and wide: the novel is carried in the Library of America’s volume of the complete novels (1999), taught in courses on American fiction and on the genre, and translated widely. The films made from it are presence and earn at most a tenth; they are counted for no more. The surface is fixed to a moment in its slang and manners, the “gunsel”, the hotel rooms, the telephone at the bedside, but as setting rather than as a production era, and the book does not depend on it. What holds the axis at the foot of its band is that the presence, though wide, sits in the genre’s reading more than in the widest reading of the American fiction of its time.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 385 years. Form: the image is the one the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence is charged. The painter’s name was lost from about the end of the seventeenth century until 1915, and for most of its life the canvas was not in view as his. Its presence since has been steady and growing, a picture now widely reproduced, and wide presence earns a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, lining, cleaning and varnish, with no particular damage claimed. Centuries with the form whole would place it higher in its row; the long loss of presence holds it at 9.0, three tenths below The Milkmaid at 9.3.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
About a hundred and sixty-six years, weighed on form and presence. The form is whole and stable: printed since 1860, with no textual loss. The presence: continuously in print, in the major classics series, taught in courses on the Victorian novel and on crime fiction, translated widely, and adapted again and again for stage, film, radio and television. Adaptation and fame are presence, count for a tenth at most, and prove nothing on their own. The figure is the first a survival of this span can reach, given for unbroken print and teaching, not for screen versions. What holds it off the widest presence: the book is read as the best of its kind more than as a book the culture cannot do without, and its suspense surface is tied to its genre.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eighty-eight years. Form: the figure is the figure Moore carved, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: in the national collection since 1939, shown in London and abroad, standard in every account of modern British sculpture; but seen in a gallery rather than on the terrace and against the horizon it was made for, a site it left within a year or two, and that removal is a small charge. Fabric: Hornton stone is soft and weathers outdoors, which is why the carving lives indoors; the general risk is charged and no particular wear. Fame is presence and lifts it only a little. The usual figure for its span.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, at about seventy years. The form is whole and legible: nothing of the governing idea is lost, and the four faces stand as made. The use is continuous and in its first purpose: it has been the central library of the university since it opened. The fabric holds by design: natural stone does not fade as paint does, which was the point of the material, and seventy years of highland sun have not taken the colour. Panels and joints have been conserved, and any adaptation of the interior, whose extent is not established, is charged lightly, as fittings, not form. Presence is of the widest within its field: the emblem of the national university, its campus a World Heritage site.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Seventy-three years, weighed on form and presence. The form is whole: the text has been in continuous print in English since 1953, in the Library of America since 1995, widely translated, and in the Japanese canon through Murakami’s version of 2007. The presence is broad: general readers, readers of crime, the academy in American studies and in the study of noir and Los Angeles, and film. It won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1955. Fame and the film are presence and earn nothing more. The figure is the low end of the step this span can reach, and what holds it there is a surface fixed in places to its moment, in slang and in the period’s attitudes to women, homosexuals and Mexicans, and a charge of sentimentality. It has plainly outlived the conditions that made it.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 82 years. Form: one panel, the image as made, with nothing that carries its meaning recorded as lost. Presence: in the Dolores Olmedo collection, shown and lent widely, and since the 1980s among the most reproduced images of twentieth century painting. Fame lifts the figure only a little: the image is present partly as an icon of the painter’s persona, a surface tied to a cult, and that is a small risk. Fabric: oil on hardboard, small; masonite is stable but can warp or delaminate, and no specific damage is charged. The condition of the surface is not stated here. The figure is the one its age and whole form support, without the step for the widest presence.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. At 83 years the canvas stands on the step from seventy years to two centuries, where a whole work usually holds 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole, one canvas, never cut, the image legible and, after conservation, nearer its first state than it had been for forty years. Presence: continuous but not of the widest kind. For about six decades it hung in a university museum outside the main circuit; in 2008 a flood forced its removal from that building, and for some years it was shown elsewhere or stored; around 2011 its sale was proposed. Since the conservation and the European loans its presence has widened. Fabric: oil and casein on canvas, a later varnish yellowed and removed, no loss known. Set at the lower edge of the step, for presence charged, not fabric.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, never cut, the image whole and legible after 138 years. Presence: as wide as any painting of its century, in the National Gallery since 1924, on view almost continuously and reproduced without end; wide presence earns at most a tenth, and fame and price lend nothing. Fabric: the canvas depends on chrome yellow, a pigment known to darken under light, and red lake pigments in his work are known to have faded. How far this canvas has shifted cannot be settled here, but any shift bears on the colour that is the work, so the risk is charged as a small charge on form, more than ordinary fabric would carry. The widest presence and that charge offset each other, and the figure rests at 9.0.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: base, tower, crown and lobby are Gilbert’s and in place, and the building has outlived the company that built it, the five-and-ten economy and the style it wore. Use survives in part: the lower floors are still offices, but the client left in 1998, the observation floor closed long ago, the upper tower is now private apartments, and the lobby, the building’s public room, has been open only by tour since 2001. Fabric is the largest charge: the terra cotta failed under weather and much of it was replaced in the restoration around 1980, so the skin one sees is in good part a replacement that keeps the form. A hundred and thirteen years with the form whole earns the figure; the changed use and the replaced skin keep it there.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric over some 740 years. The form survives whole in its legible parts: the full circuit of curtain and towers stands, most of it near its full height, the bands and polygonal towers intact, the Eagle Tower whole in its mass. What is missing is mainly what was never built, the interior and the full gate, which charges the work as made and not its survival; the cross wall, the roofs and the floors are lost. The use is lost: its first use as a seat of royal government and garrison ended long ago, though the investitures of 1911 and 1969 kept it in public use as a symbol of state. The fabric is largely original, repaired in the nineteenth century. Walls near entire, use gone.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated: the text is whole and has been since 1637, printed again in 1645 and 1673 and in every collected Milton since, and the earlier states in the Trinity College and Bridgewater manuscripts enrich it rather than cloud it. Presence was wide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the stage in Dalton’s version and in anthologies and schools. The charges are on presence now and on the surface. It is read mainly in the academy and staged rarely; its surface is fixed to an occasion more than most works of its age, a Lord President’s office, the Earl’s children, the Severn; and the masque as a form is extinct. It has outlived its conditions as a poem, not as a spectacle, and the charged presence holds it beneath what a whole text of nearly four centuries would otherwise stand at.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. Form: whole and legible; both halves stand as built, and the governing idea of the north half is untouched. Use: continuous, offices since 1891 to 1893 with shops at the street, never abandoned. Fabric: the original walls and frame. An early settlement of the north half’s foundation is reported, a failure of the first structure weighed here rather than under the making; it has not compromised the form. The restoration under private ownership from about 1979, of the corridor, the stairs and the shopfronts, is weighed as survival. The span, more than a hundred and thirty years, sits in the band where 9.0 is usual; its presence is well known in its field but not of the widest fame. It is placed at the foot of that band for the settlement and for an interior restored rather than survived.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 121 years, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. The form is whole: the image is what the painter left, and the states he painted out in working it are part of its making, not losses. Presence is continuous: in collections and in view, held privately until it came to the National Gallery of Art with the Chester Dale Collection, on public view in Washington since, and widely reproduced. Presence earns nothing above the usual figure. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment in a way that dates it, and no loss in the fabric carries meaning. The usual figure, with no tenth for presence.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed at about 84 years, form first, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole; no loss to it is known, and although decalcomania layers are delicate in principle, no damage to them is recorded here, which keeps the figure from rising. Presence: continuous, in a public museum that acquired it early, steadily exhibited and reproduced, though Hartford is not among the most visited collections and the widest presence is not earned. Fabric: oil on canvas, a stable support. The meaning has outlived its moment: the war is over, and the picture still reads as an image of what war leaves. The usual figure for its span.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
About twelve hundred and seventy years, on paper, on which almost nothing of the Tang survives. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the head, neck, mane, forequarters, post and tether, the parts that carry the picture, are legible; the tail and parts of the hindquarters are generally held to have been restored or retouched by later hands, though the extent is not settled, and seals crowd the field. That charge on form is small in proportion to what those parts did. Presence: the scroll has been before collectors for most of its life, and its colophons are the proof; beyond specialists its presence is modest. Fabric: the paper is reported worn and darkened. The lower row of the table, near its top.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 119 years. Form: whole, with no loss of any part that carries the work known, and no restoration recorded. Presence: in a private house to 1938; then seized with the household’s property; then on public view in Vienna from about 1941; then a contested object in court; and in New York since 2006. It has been in view for some eighty-five years and has passed through the century’s worst dispossession without damage to the image. The seizure is a charge of a moral kind on how it was present, not on whether the picture survived. Fabric: leaf and raised ornament on canvas are more exposed than oil alone, and the general risk is charged lightly. Its fame lends nothing further. The figure sits at the foot of the step for a span between seventy years and two centuries.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible, its governing idea unaltered. The use is unbroken: a parish church since its consecration in 1940, and the tower front in use from the later 1920s. The fabric is brick in good condition, with no war damage, rebuilding or loss on record. The span is eighty-six years from completion, about a century from the tower, a hundred and five years from the competition design. The building has outlived the conditions that produced it, national romanticism and the memorial culture of the interwar years, and is still looked at as a model. Nothing is charged. It stands at the usual figure for its span, not above it, because its presence, steady in Denmark and in architecture, is not of the widest kind.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-eight years. Form: whole. One canvas, the image as the painter made it, with no loss or alteration of what carries its meaning recorded. Presence: continuous in Brazilian attention since 1928, first as an emblem in reproduction and then as an object; bought in 1995 by Eduardo Costantini and shown at MALBA in Buenos Aires since the museum opened in 2001; a national symbol of Brazil abroad and among the most reproduced images of Latin American art. Its leaving Brazil is a charge on presence in its country of meaning, not on survival, and fame lifts the figure little. Fabric: the canvas’s state is not given, and nothing here turns on it. Presence wide but not of the widest sets it at the foot of its row.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Seventy-one years are weighed as seventy-one, at the foot of the step that runs from seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, as published, without a problem of variants. It has been continuously in print and widely translated since 1955, read inside and outside the academy, adapted three times for the screen across six decades, and its hero’s name is in common use; that presence earns at most a tenth, and fame and films are presence, not proof. The surface is fixed to its moment in its means, ocean liners, traveller’s cheques, a world in which a forged signature and a passport photograph could carry a man across Italy, but not in its matter, and the period has worn into the book’s character rather than dated it. What holds the axis at the foot of its step is that the presence leans toward the films and the figure, and the book is read more than it is taught.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-six years. Form: the composition stands legible; whether any part has been lost, replaced or repainted is not known here, and nothing is charged. Presence: in a public collection and on view, and the image is among the most reproduced of the century; but fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little, and what is reproduced is the type as much as this canvas. Fabric: the painter’s whites and the oil of these years are prone to cracking and to yellowing or greying, and some of his canvases have been retouched; this one’s condition is not known here, so nothing specific is charged and the figure is not lifted. Nothing on the surface belongs to 1930.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
About a century and a half, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole; the image is the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: charged. Shown in 1877, the canvas stayed with the family and was little seen for most of the next ninety years; it entered a public collection only in 1964, and its standing dates from the painter’s recovery in the 1970s. Since then it has been continuously on view and among the best known pictures in its museum. Wide reproduction earns a tenth at most, and that tenth is withheld for the long obscurity. Fabric is not charged. Its surface is fixed to 1877 and has outlived that moment, as documents do.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric over seventy-four years. Form: the published score survives whole. Tudor’s first score is lost and the sources differ, but the frame they share is not in doubt, and nothing that makes the work is lost. Presence: performed, broadcast, taught and argued over without a gap since 1952. That presence is wider as an idea than as an experience; far more people know of the work than have sat through it, and presence of that kind is not proof of permanence. Fabric: none to decay. The provocation of 1952 has partly worn, the anger of Woodstock turned to amusement or reverence, but the work never depended on its shock: the hall still hears itself.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One hundred and seventy-four years, weighed on form, presence and surface. The form is whole: never lost, in print without a break since 1852, its first edition and its serial both known. Presence is continuous and wide: the fastest and largest sale of any American novel of its century, taught across the United States, translated early. Sales and the long life of the stage versions are presence, which counts for little on its own. What holds the axis at the foot of its band: its presence is now in large part the academy’s and the historian’s, its persons survive in the language chiefly as epithets the book did not intend, and much of its surface is argument with the Fugitive Slave Law and the church politics of 1850, fixed to its moment.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 97 years. Form: whole; the two elements stand as painted, and nothing that carries the work is lost. Presence: continuous and very wide. The image is among the most reproduced of its century, and it is one of the few paintings whose meaning passes entire into reproduction, so its copies do not thin it; but wide presence earns little, and fame is not proof of permanence. Fabric: a small oil in one museum, whose condition and conservation could not be verified and are not argued. The surface is fixed to its moment only in small things, the pipe and the copperplate hand, both receding from daily life, and neither stands between the work and its claim, which is not of 1929. Held at the foot of what this span allows, for the span and for the fabric unverified.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about ninety to a hundred years. Form: the tales survive whole, but the texts were long corrupt, in the pulps and in Derleth’s editions, and were corrected only in the 1980s; that is charged a little. Presence was long confined to the pulps and the genre press, and the critics of the 1940s dismissed it, Edmund Wilson most famously; its passage into the academy and the major series, Penguin Classics from 1999 and the Library of America in 2005, came late. Now it is very wide: continuously in print, translated into many languages. Fame and the myth’s commercial life are presence, not proof, and earn at most a tenth. The racial fear and the pulp manner fix the surface to its moment, and are charged. The figure sits at the foot of the usual range.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival over 114 years, weighed in order. Form: whole, so far as is known; one canvas, not cut and not altered after the painter, and the image that makes the work stands. Presence: in a major museum, shown often and reproduced in the histories of abstraction; wide but not the widest, since it is one of several Kandinskys of the period that stand for the same moment and not the one most often reproduced, and fame lifts the figure little in any case. Fabric: oil on canvas of 1912; no specific damage is known, and nothing beyond the ordinary risk of an oil surface of that age is charged. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment: abstraction aged into a tradition, not out of fashion.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible, nothing of the governing idea lost, and the building has outlived the conditions that made it: the fire, the quarrels within the movement after Steiner’s death, the expressionist moment. It remains a model answered by a school. The use is continuous since 1928 in its own purpose, as seat, school and theatre, a full survival of use that is rare for a building of its century. The fabric is the original concrete, repaired and renovated; the finishing of the great hall is a later campaign of the one work and no loss. Its presence is real but narrow, known to architecture and to a world movement more than to the public, and it earns nothing extra. The axis stands at the usual figure for ninety-eight years kept whole: the building’s highest.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
About a hundred and sixty years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as left. The canvas is unfinished, but that is the state in which the maker left it, not a loss; nothing that carried its meaning is gone. Presence: thin in the first decades, little shown in the painter’s life; since then in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and one of the most reproduced images of the nineteenth century, which is presence and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age, with no damage to state. The thin early presence keeps it at the lower edge of its row, and the reproduction does not lift it.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: the front, the dome, the wings and the booking hall stand as built. The use is continuous and in its own purpose, as terminus and as railway headquarters, without a break since 1887 and at a scale its builders did not imagine; the building has outlived the empire and the company that built it and has been adopted by the city under a new name. The fabric has borne weathering, pollution and campaigns of restoration on the stone, and the sheds behind have been extended and largely rebuilt. The attack of 2008 harmed people far more than fabric. The rebuilt sheds keep it at the foot of its band.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 96 years. Form: whole; the image is the image the painter made, one canvas, nothing lost or replaced that carries its meaning. Presence: in a public collection since 1931 and on view through most of that time, carried by the Whitney into each of its buildings, reproduced very widely, and secure through the decades in which realist painting fell from critical favour; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: oil on canvas; its condition is not stated here. Against it, slightly: the low commercial row of the 1920s has largely gone from the American city, and the image now carries period as well as presence.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, nothing known to be lost or altered, a hundred years old. Presence: continuous, in the Metropolitan Museum since 1969, and reproduced very widely. Fame is presence, not proof, and the presence is wide but not the widest, for the canvas is not on the plane of the few paintings known to everyone; it takes no tenth for it. Fabric: oil on canvas, no known damage, nothing charged beyond the general risk. Against it, lightly: the image has become a commodity of posters and calendars, and a surface fixed to its copies risks being seen through them. So far the canvas has outlived them. The figure is the usual one for a work between seventy years and two centuries old.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at almost ninety years: the row for seventy years to two centuries. Form: whole. The image is as the painter left it, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced; the painter’s long reworking belongs to its making. Presence: held in a public museum in Paris and among the most reproduced of the late bath pictures; it has outlived the doubts of the decade after the painter’s death, and its standing is higher now than then. Fame is presence and lifts the figure a little at most. Fabric: an oil of its age with the ordinary history, and no damage is known to the desk. Nothing on the surface is tied to its moment, no fashion and no topical sign. The usual figure for the row, not its widest presence.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred years. Form: one canvas, whole; no part of the image is lost, and no later hand on it can be named. Presence: a century in one public collection, never dispersed, and among the most reproduced of the painter’s late works; but the Guggenheim rotates its collection, so the canvas has not been continuously on view, and its presence, though wide, is not the widest. Fabric: oil on canvas, its condition in detail not known here; no loss is charged and none is credited. The surface is fixed to no moment: the circles of 1926 look no more dated than the circle. Held at the usual figure for a painting of its age, and not lifted for presence.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Seventy-three years are weighed as seventy-three years: in print without break since 1953, taught very widely in schools in English and in translation, and in continual public use whenever censorship is argued. That is presence at the widest. Two charges hold it at the usual figure for its span. The surface is fixed in places to its moment: the atomic war of jets overhead, the apprehension of the Cold War, a domesticity of the 1950s in Mildred’s parlour, though the parlour walls and the seashells have aged forward rather than back. And for some years an expurgated school edition circulated in place of the whole, a charge on the transmission that was made good when Bradbury had the full text restored; the form survives whole. Fame is presence, not proof, and the widest presence earns at most a tenth, which the surface takes back.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across about 83 years. The form is whole and legible as built, vaults, tower, canopy and front in place, and it has outlived its conditions: the suburb’s casino closed within a few years, when gambling was banned in 1946, while the church is copied and answered as a model. The use began with a gap: the archdiocese would not consecrate the church until 1959, a lapse in its own purpose at the start of its life. It is now a parish church and a monument. The fabric carries the smallest charge: thin concrete and tile have needed restoration more than once, and the lake has suffered pollution. Wide presence, listing in 1947 and World Heritage in 2016, earns at most a tenth, and the early lapse and the restorations take it back.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival over 103 years, weighed in order. Form: whole, one canvas, with no cut, loss or later hand known, in the row for a work between seventy years and two centuries old, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: continuous and wide but not the widest. The canvas is in the Guggenheim’s collection, often on view and much reproduced as the emblem of Kandinsky’s geometric phase, but its public is that of a major museum’s signature work, not of a universal image; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only within the row. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no loss, overpaint or structural damage known, so only the general risk is charged. Against it, the vocabulary has passed into design and decoration, and a style become ornament can be seen through its copies. So far the canvas has outlived them. Set at the foot of the usual figure.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 142 years. Form: whole but for one change. The shoulder strap that hung from the shoulder at the Salon was repainted upright by the painter himself after the exhibition, and the canvas has shown the corrected state since. It is the maker’s own final state, not a later hand, and the image stands complete; but the detail that carried the picture’s one note of undress, and its scandal, is gone from the canvas and survives only in a period photograph and in the record. A tenth is charged for that. Presence: about thirty-two years in the painter’s studio, narrowly seen, then on view in the Museum since 1916 and among its most visited pictures. Fabric: the ordinary history of an oil of its age.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over eighty years. The form is whole: the text survives as published in 1946, with no loss or recovery to charge. Presence is continuous and wide: in print throughout in Greek, translated widely, read across the world as the best-known modern Greek novel, and kept in view by the film and its music. Fame and sales are presence and not proof, and part of this presence belongs to the film more than to the text: many who know Zorba have not read the book, and its academic presence outside Greece is narrower than its popular one. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment, in the creed of vitalism and the treatment of women, but the book has outlived the conditions that made it and is still read for itself. Eighty years are weighed as eighty years, and do not stand level with the survival of works of centuries.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over 124 years. The form survives whole: prow, walls, ornament and cornice are those of Burnham’s office and in place, with the tip shop of 1902 and the penthouse floor part of the work. The building has outlived the Fuller Company, the commercial phase of its district and the style it wears. Use is the charge: an office building for most of its life, it now stands emptied for conversion, so that its use is to survive in another purpose, and the break is recent and its outcome not yet seen. The fabric has held, the terra cotta in place for more than a century. Its presence is as wide as that of any building of its age. The changing use takes two tenths.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 146 years. Form: the image is the image Böcklin left, coffin and white figure included, his own addition to the canvas and part of the work; nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost. Presence: in a public collection in Basel for about a century; the composition never left attention, though its esteem fell steeply after 1905 and the association of one version with Hitler shadowed it. Five versions and endless reproduction are presence, which lifts the figure only a little; they also split the image’s survival across objects, so that the first version is not alone its bearer. Fabric: no loss is known on this canvas. The usual figure for its span.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety years, which gives the row from seventy years to two centuries. Form: the three parts stand together and legible as a service; no loss of a part is on record, though the history of its conservation is thinly known. Presence: in the Museum of Modern Art, reproduced in nearly every account of Surrealism and of modern sculpture; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: fur on cup, saucer and spoon, a perishable material sensitive to light that cannot be renewed without becoming another object, the most fragile fabric of any work in its class. The span and the presence would allow a higher figure in the row; the fragility of the fabric, the smallest charge, holds it at the foot.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over more than three centuries since its completion. The form survives whole and legible: the four rings, the hall and the gate are in place, and the figure has outlived the banditry, the feud and the clan economy that made it. The use survives but thinned: a dwelling made for hundreds of one surname is now kept by far fewer, and much of its life is visitors, and that loss is charged. The fabric is earth and timber, renewed as such buildings always are; the earth wall is the clan’s own, and the timber has been repaired in the years of the inscription and since, to an extent unverified. Form whole, use continuing but thinned: the strongest axis.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-one years. Form: whole. The design survives in original lithographs from the first and later printings, and the image is intact in every respect that makes it. Presence: continuous and very wide, among the most reproduced posters of the century, sold as prints and on objects; reproduction and fame earn at most a tenth, and are counted at most. Fabric: paper and lithographic ink, perishable sheet by sheet but multiplied, so that the design’s survival does not hang on one object. Against it, the surface is fixed to its moment by its office, an advertisement for the sailings of a ship that burned in 1942. That it has long outlived its subject is the axis’s best evidence, and charge and evidence meet at the usual figure for the span.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at seventy-eight years. Form: whole, one panel, with no loss, later hand or replaced part recorded. Presence: in the Museum of Modern Art since 1949, among the most reproduced American paintings; its critical standing fell for decades while its public presence did not, and the image has outlived the dismissal of its maker by the critics of abstraction. Fame and price are presence and lift the figure only a little; the widest presence is not claimed. Fabric: egg tempera on a prepared panel is among the most stable of painting’s means, nothing is charged, and the surface is fixed to no fashion of its year. The usual figure for a span of seventy years to two centuries, at the foot of the row, since the span is short within it.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: whole, legible and unchanged in its governing idea; the composition stands as built, and the silhouette has outlived the state and the leader that produced it, adopted after 1991 as an emblem of Moscow and of the university. Use: unbroken since 1953, in its own purpose, a university teaching and housing its students, survival of use of the strongest kind. Fabric: a steel frame and ceramic facing kept in repair, the spire and star restored; the charge is small. Seventy-three years of survival with form and use intact carry it to 9.0. Its presence is wide in Russia and the former bloc, real but not of the widest across the world. The axis penalises a surface fixed to its moment, and this surface is among the most period-bound of styles; but it has already outlived the conditions that made it, which is what the axis asks.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a century, in the row of seventy years to two centuries. Form: whole. It is one canvas, the image the painter made, and nothing that carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: in a public collection in Buffalo, widely reproduced, one of the images by which Miró is known. Fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little, and its presence is narrower than that of the most visited canvases in the largest museums, so the widest-presence figure of its row is not given. Fabric: oil thinly painted on a prepared ground; no conservation history is charged beyond the ordinary risk of an oil of its age. The usual figure for its row.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-one years. Form: the image stands as the painter made it, and no loss or repainting that takes from it is known. Presence: in the national collection in New Delhi, and among the painter’s most reproduced canvases; in India its presence is continuous and central, outside India narrower, known to specialists and through recent exhibitions. Fame lifts the figure at most a tenth, and the narrower presence abroad keeps it from the figure that the widest presence earns. Fabric: an oil of ninety-one years in a hot climate carries the ordinary risks, and no particular charge is known. The usual figure for an age of seventy years to two centuries with form whole, set at the foot of its band.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Survival over 101 years, weighed in order. Form: one canvas, whole, with no later hand known on it, in the span of seventy years to two centuries whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: the canvas stayed with the painter, through his leaving Germany in 1933, and then with his widow, Nina Kandinsky, so that it stood outside the German museums from which modern pictures were confiscated. For decades it was a private picture, shown at times; since it entered the national collection in Paris it has been continuously present and very widely reproduced. The private years are a small charge, taken by withholding the upper figure, and fame lifts it only a little. Fabric: its condition is not established here and is charged no more than the general risk. Nothing on the surface has dated. Set at the foot of the usual figure.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 114 years. Form: the image is the image the painter made, and no loss, overpaint or replacement is recorded that takes anything from it. Presence: in private hands for most of its life, in Rudolf Leopold’s collection for decades and lent to exhibitions, on public view in Vienna since 2001, and among the most reproduced of the painter’s oils. That is solid presence, short of the widest, and fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a small wood panel; wood moves, and paint on it can be fragile, but no damage is charged. The usual figure for a work of its span with its form whole, held at the foot of that row because its condition and early history are less fully known than its image.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print without a break since 1926, in English and in a very large number of translations; Christie is among the most widely translated and sold authors in any language, and this is among her most read books. Presence is continuous and of the widest kind among readers. Two charges keep the axis at the usual figure for its span rather than above it. The presence is mostly sales and popular reading, which earn at most a tenth and do not prove permanence, and its place in teaching is narrower, largely confined to the history of the genre and the theory of narration. And its surface is in part fixed to its moment: the village of the 1920s, with its servants and its dictaphone, is read now partly as period. The text, and the trick that makes it, have plainly outlived their conditions.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at a hundred and six years. Form: whole. One sheet, never cut, its figure and ground legible, with no loss known. Its survival through exile and war, left in Paris in 1940 and carried at last to Jerusalem, is part of its record. Presence: as an image, very wide, reproduced without end on the covers of books of philosophy across the world; but that presence is largely Benjamin’s, and fame is presence, not proof. As an object it is seldom seen, since watercolour on paper is sensitive to light. Fabric: oil transfer and watercolour on paper, the most fragile of the usual supports, charged lightly since its condition is not known to be poor. The usual figure for its span, not the widest.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible, the design entire in its governing idea, some 122 years after completion. The use is unbroken in its own purpose: the building has housed the legislature since 1902 through the fall of the kingdom, war, siege, a communist state and the return of a republic. One of its two chambers lost its legislative use when the upper house was abolished in 1945, and that takes from use a part the plan was built to hold. The fabric carries the rest: damage in the siege repaired, and a soft limestone facing that weathered badly and has been in continuous replacement for decades, so that much of the surface is renewed stone. Presence is as wide as any building in Central Europe and earns at most a tenth. The charges to use and fabric hold the figure at 9.0.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-two years. The text of 1934 survives whole, with no question of recension, and has been continuously in print, read, translated and adapted since publication. Its presence is wide, and wide among ordinary readers rather than mainly in the academy, which is a strength. Two charges hold it at the bottom of the figure usual for its span. Its presence is partly the presence of the series and the name, of which this book is one of the most read but not the only bearer, and fame is given nothing here. And its surface is period, spats, clubs, aunts and a valet; but it was already a fantasy of a vanished Edwardian world when it was written, and it has outlived that world without loss, which is evidence of survival rather than against it.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about 132 years. Form: whole, in many original impressions; it is an edition, and no single loss touches it. Presence: continuous since 1895, from the collectors who took it from the hoardings to its place in every history of the poster and in exhibitions of the maker; his imagery as a whole is more widely present than this sheet, which sits below that ceiling. Fabric: lithographs on paper fade and fox, and a poster was made to be pasted up and thrown away; its first state is carried by surviving impressions, legible in good ones. It has outlived the play, now seldom performed, and the production it advertised, which is the axis’s chief test.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half millennia. Form: substantially whole. The figure, the pose, both arms, the bangles, the head and the raised face survive; the feet are reported broken away, a loss at the extremity that would take little from what makes the work. Presence: charged. Buried for about 3,800 years, it has been in view only since 1926, though continuously since then and as widely as any object of its civilization; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: corroded bronze, durable. The span and the near-whole form lift it; the losses, the corrosion and the short presence hold it at 9.0. It has outlived its civilization, its script and its meaning.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-one years. Form: whole. The image as published survives entire in the magazine’s printing, and the photographer’s later prints carry the same frame. Presence: as wide as any photograph’s, reproduced continuously since 1945; but much of it is fame and sale, posters and signed prints, which lift the figure a tenth at most, and the presence has turned: it is now shown as often as a question as a celebration. The axis penalises a surface fixed to its moment, and this surface is of a single afternoon; yet it has plainly outlived the war, the magazine and the generation that made it. Fabric: a silver negative and its prints, at no particular risk. The usual figure for its span, not the widest.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a span of 62 to 95 years, about 78 at mid-span. Form: whole; the image has never been lost. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind; but fame is not proof, and presence lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no loss recorded here. One charge holds the axis at 9.0: these images are tied to a brand and to the bottle and the magazine of their decade, and their survival is partly kept up by the company that uses them. The type has outlived those conditions; the advertising surface has not wholly.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival of the text, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about two hundred and twenty years. The charge is heavy and is taken. Presence: the body was largely unprinted and unread from 1806 to about 1913, and the Gedichte of 1826 left most of the late work out; it was read as a body only from Hellingrath’s edition of 1916. Form: the late hymns survive as drafts in layers, “Friedensfeier” was known only in drafts until a fair copy turned up in London in 1954, and what is read as “Mnemosyne” or “Der Ister” is an editor’s construction, on which the editions differ. Since 1916 presence is continuous and wide in German, in schools, editions, philosophy and settings, and narrower in other languages. The figure stands in the lower range for a long-neglected text, a step above its floor for that century of presence.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-nine years since the première of 1957, with no discount for age and no credit for time not yet elapsed. Presence has been wide and continuous: the play has been staged in every decade since, in many languages, by major companies and by small ones, and it is read and taught in both of its languages. What makes the work survives whole, in two authorial texts, with a later revision by its author for performance. Nothing in its surface is fixed to its moment; the reading of it as the aftermath of a particular catastrophe belongs to its readers, not to the text. Held a tenth below the widest presence because its life on the stage, though continuous, is narrower than Godot’s and leans more on the academy.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The work survives whole: the composer’s scores of 1869 and 1872 exist, are published and are performed, and it has been continuously present since 1908 at the latest, at the centre of the Russian repertory and of every major house, with a recorded tradition from Chaliapin to the present. The charge is that its presence was long another man’s text. From 1896 until about the 1970s it lived chiefly in Rimsky-Korsakov’s re-harmonised and reordered edition, ending on Boris’s death, and Mussorgsky’s own sound was little heard for most of a century. The presence of the work is wide; the presence of the work as made is about fifty years old. A tenth is charged for the displaced text.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The span is some ninety to a hundred and ten years from composition and some eighty from the publication of the body. The presence is wide: in print in Portugal and Brazil without a break since the 1940s, taught in schools across the Portuguese-speaking world, translated into the major languages, with “Tabacaria” and the poems of Caeiro among the most read poems of the century in Portuguese. Pessoa’s face on an escudo note and his statue at the Brasileira café are fame, which is presence and not proof. The charge is on the form of the text: this is a body assembled after its maker’s death, whose text is still contested, with variants Pessoa left unresolved and editions that disagree on readings and on what belongs to which heteronym. That costs about two tenths, set against a presence that would earn the top of its step.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The case for survival at fifty-nine years, past the line of about fifty, is made all the same, since it stands near that line. The text survives whole, as the author published it in 1967, with nothing lost or reassembled. The presence is among the widest of any novel of its half-century: in print without a break, translated into dozens of languages, read in schools across the Spanish-speaking world and taught well beyond it; fame and sales are presence, not proof. Its surface is not fixed to 1967: the matter is the Colombia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the strike behind the massacre is history the novel has helped to keep. What holds the axis there is the span. Fifty-nine years cannot show that the book outlasts the readers and the fashion that raised it, and a mode that was a world fashion in the 1970s and 1980s can date as a fashion. The axis stands in the upper part of what six decades can show, not at its top.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over sixty-one years. The form is whole: a single session, issued complete, and in print continuously since 1965. Presence is continuous and wide, within jazz and beyond it, in sales sustained over six decades and in versions made by musicians born long after the session. The fabric is sound. Van Gelder’s recording carries its year in its room and its piano, but nothing on the record is topical, and the faith it serves is not fixed to 1964. Its public presence is wide but narrower than that of the most heard records of its decade, so it stands level with The Velvet Underground & Nico and a tenth below Highway 61 Revisited and Revolver.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed as form, presence and fabric. The form is legible and whole: every figure, the circle, the table, the cup and the three emblems stand. Charged for what the losses take: the gold of the ground and the haloes that gave the image its light, and large losses in the garments and the architecture. Presence: about six centuries of continuous veneration, but for some three of them the image was covered by metal and repainted, with only faces and hands to be seen; the icon was present, the image much less. The fabric is an old and fragile panel, cleaned rather than reconstructed. The double charge of loss and long concealment holds the axis here; the image uncovered in 1918 to 1919 has since been continuously in view and is the one the world knows, and that keeps it from falling lower.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty years on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record is in print as issued, in both mixes. Presence is continuous and wide: Just Like a Woman, I Want You and Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 are in common use, Visions of Johanna is in the working repertoire of other musicians, and the album is heard whole. The fabric is sound: the Nashville sessions carry little of the bright studio of the mid-1960s, and the playing does not date. Charged: the drug joke of the opener belongs to its year, and a double album is heard whole less widely than the most present records of its decade. It stands a tenth below Highway 61 Revisited and Revolver.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is safe: the 1805 text survives whole in fair-copy manuscripts, with the usual editorial questions and nothing lost. Presence carries the charges. The span since composition is two hundred and twenty years, but the poem was printed only in 1850 and this text only in 1926, so the presence shown is a century and three quarters for the work and a century for the 1805 text. It is continuously read, edited and taught, but mainly in the academy and in excerpt, the boat, the skating, the Simplon, the dawn of the Revolution, with no wide life outside literary study to match the most read works of its century. Both charges apply, the late printing in part. The surface has outlived its conditions: the Revolution is history, and the poem is read for the mind that lived it.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Form: the text is whole, and its survival is part of its meaning. For most of two decades it was not kept on paper; lines were written, memorised by a small circle, and burned, as Lydia Chukovskaya’s notes record. A poem kept through the 1940s and 1950s in a few memories is the plainest proof the axis can ask that a work outlives the conditions that produced it. Presence: completed in 1961 and printed in 1963, some sixty-five years, charged a little for the twenty-four years in which it could not be printed in its own country and credited for what has followed, continuous reading, teaching and translation since 1987, into most of the major languages. Fabric: nothing in it is fixed to a surface of its moment; the boots and the black vans are the furniture of an age it has outlived. Placed high and not at the top.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-eight years since the premiere. The text survives whole, printed in the author’s English and in his French, with his own production notebook beside it; nothing is charged on form. Presence is continuous and wide: staged every year somewhere, in many languages, taught wherever modern drama is taught, recorded and filmed. Its surface was fixed to a technology, the reel-to-reel recorder, now itself antique, and the play has outlived the dependency: “A late evening in the future” has become a late evening in the past without loss, and the machine reads now as memory’s own furniture. Held a tenth below the widest figure because its presence runs mainly through the theatre and the academy, and less across the culture than Godot’s.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, and the songs have survived the loss of their scandal, the hardest test for transgressive work. The fabric holds: the record has outlived the Factory, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the mono LP, and the Factory circle of Nico’s songs is its period matter. Presence is what holds it. It began narrow, in poor sales, a delayed release and radio silence; it has grown since, in print, in many covers, in the National Recording Registry in 2006; and it remains wider among musicians than among the public. That places it level with Breathless, likewise strongest among practitioners, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years. The form is whole: thirteen tracks, the sleeve, the run-out. Presence is as wide as any record’s: continuously in print, on compact disc from 1987, remixed in 2017, its songs in daily broadcast and in other musicians’ hands. The fabric is sound. The charge is the surface fixed to its moment, which the axis names: the record is the emblem of 1967, its uniforms, its Indian borrowing, its psychedelic colour, and its standing among critics has fallen as that year receded. On that surface it stands a tenth below Revolver and Highway 61 Revisited at 9.0, level with The Velvet Underground & Nico at 8.9, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence and use, then fabric, over a span of millennia. The form is legible from the standing half: the ring, the lintels over it, the horseshoe, the axis and the enclosure round it, outliving by more than four thousand years the society, the rite and the beliefs that produced it. But about half the circle and two of the trilithons are down or gone, the south-west is broken, and the closed horizon is no longer whole. Presence has been continuous, the monument named as a wonder since the twelfth century. The first use is lost and was taken up by no other; the solstice gatherings are modern presence, not survival of use. The standing stones are the builders’, but many were taken away and several re-erected in concrete.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: plan, elevation, vaults, buttresses, façade and towers are legible as built, and the design outlived the monarchy that made it its church. The use is a cathedral’s, continuous save for the Revolution and the closing of the nave from 1914 to 1938; its defining use, the coronation, ended in 1825, and that is charged. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: the timber roof burned in 1914 and remade on concrete; most of the medieval glass lost; much exterior sculpture calcined, many originals now in the Palais du Tau with copies in their places; the labyrinth gone. The vaults, which held under fire, keep the figure high.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: published, performed and recorded in the version first given, with no textual doubt. Presence is continuous and wide for a work of its age: sung at anniversaries and in the ordinary concert season, in Britain, Germany and across the world, and recorded many times, first under Britten for Decca in 1963. Its span is 64 years. The surface fixed to its moment is real but light: a consecration of 1962, the casting of soloists from three nations once at war, the two world wars themselves. The text is not charged; Owen’s poems have survived a century. It is not the widest presence of its decade’s concert music, and it is held a tenth below the top of its step for that.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-one years. The form is whole: the recording as released is the record still sold and played. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, several of its songs among the most covered of their decade, and the record ranked high whenever its years are counted. It is not quite of the widest presence, since the album is heard less than its songs and less than the best known records of its age, and that holds it a tenth from the top of its span. The fabric is mixed. Side two, voice, guitar and harmonica, carries almost no date; side one’s band is of its year and loosely recorded, the false start kept. Little is topical. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Sixty-one years have passed since publication, and survival across them is demonstrated. Presence is among the widest for any book of poems of its century: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities, widely translated, its poems among the most anthologised in English. The upper part of the range is earned on that presence, and it is presence among readers of the poems, taken poem by poem in classrooms and anthologies, not only among readers of the life. Two charges keep the axis from 9.0. The text is in some measure contested: there are two orders, the author’s and the editor’s, and each is read. And part of the presence is carried by the life rather than the poems, which is fame, not proof.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two centuries, from 1820 to 2026. The text has been in print without break, is complete, and has been edited with care from Mary Shelley’s edition of 1839 to the modern critical editions. It is taught in every course in English Romanticism and anthologised in its great passages: the Furies’ four lines, Asia’s song, Demogorgon’s last stanzas. It has outlived its conditions: the Holy Alliance, Peterloo and the politics of 1819 are history, and the poem is read for what it says of tyranny and the mind. Charged: it is read whole mainly in the academy, it is seldom staged, since it was not written for the stage, and its common reader meets it in extracts. A span of just over two centuries sets the figure at the join: high for its span, lower for its presence.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over some sixty-one years since completion. The form is whole: plan, section, court and studies are Kahn’s and in place, legible as on completion, and the building has outlived the postwar optimism about science that produced it, as a model copied and answered. The use is continuous and its own: a working research institute throughout, its laboratories refitted as intended without loss of the form. The fabric is sound: the concrete has held on a marine site, and the teak weathered, its window walls needing restoration, the smallest charge. The presence is wide among architects and in pictures, short of the widest public presence; fame is presence, not proof.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the composition, the figures and the method are whole and legible, and nothing of the image is lost. Presence: unsold in Seurat’s short life (he died in 1891), then in private hands, then continuously on view in Chicago since 1926. Fabric: here is the charge. The method is colour, its contrasts calculated, and part of the calculation is reported to have failed: a yellow in the sunlit grass and the lights is reported to have darkened toward olive and brown. The finding is given as reported. The form stays legible, so the charge falls on the fabric, the smallest kind, but it falls on what the method made the substance of the work. The surface is fixed to its year in fashion, and the crowd outlives it. The span, 140 years, sets the ceiling, and the colour takes a tenth or two from it.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over 113 years, weighed in order. Form: the image is legible whole, and no later hand that can be named has changed it. The canvas has outlived the conditions that made it, a Munich circle, a theosophical vocabulary, a pre-war apocalyptic mood, and does not need them to be seen; three of the Compositions before it did not survive the Second World War. Presence is charged. The canvas went to Russia and into Soviet collections, under a state that turned against the avant-garde, and its reach abroad was borrowed from the name rather than carried by the object; how long it was kept from public view is not settled here, and no span is given. Fabric: no charge can be stated. Fame earns nothing. Set a tenth below the usual figure for a painting of its age.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over centuries, some nine of them. The form is whole and legible in its one manuscript of this version, with some lines lost or damaged and supplied by editors from the other versions; the charge on form is small, a tenth or so for the single witness and its gaps. Presence is the main charge. In the later Middle Ages the Oxford text was superseded by rhymed reworkings and prose, and it then went unread for some five or six centuries until its recovery and edition in 1837, though its legend stayed present across Europe without a break. Since then it has been edited, taught in French schools as the national epic and translated without interruption, but its reading leans toward school and academy. That places it in the band for a text long neglected, toward its upper edge, since the neglect ended long ago.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eighty-five years. Presence: the book has been in print continuously since 1941, read and taught throughout, and translated widely. A span of that length on the modern step stands a little below the upper figures. Form: the text survives whole as published, but what survives is a text its author had not finally revised and had said was not ready, so the work as it would have been made is not quite what is read, and that is charged by a tenth. Presence is wide among readers of Woolf and in the academy, narrower in common reading than her three central novels. Its period surface, the village of 1939, the gramophone, the fashion for pageants, has already outlived its moment and become part of what the book is about, not a cost.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some fifty-two centuries. The form survives and is legible: cairn, kerb, passage, chamber, vault and roof-box stand on their axis, and the alignment still works, the strongest proof of survival a building of its age can give. The vault is the builders’ own and has stood dry without repair. The use is lost: the burials and their rites ended in the Neolithic, and the building became a mound in a field, a quarry for stone, an antiquarian curiosity and now a visited monument; its presence in story is continuous, but not in its own purpose. The fabric is charged for the reconstruction: the front stands as O’Kelly’s reading of the evidence, contested, on a modern structure. The chamber lifts what lost use and rebuilding hold down.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over nearly fifty-five years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has never been re-sequenced. Presence is among the widest of any album of its age: continuously in print, Stairway to Heaven and Black Dog continuously in broadcast, the symbols and the hermit known beyond the record’s listeners; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is sound: the room recordings at Headley Grange carry little period gloss. What holds the figure a tenth below the widest: the ubiquity of Stairway has turned to parody in some quarters, and the Tolkien costume of two songs is fixed to its moment.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: the plan, the stagger, the circuit and the station buildings stand as built, and the design has outlived the house that made it, the court culture it served and the Tokugawa order it answered, and has been copied and answered as a model, chiefly in its last century. The use survives in part: the garden is still strolled and viewed as it was made to be, but no one dwells in the house, and visitors come by appointment. The fabric is renewed — paper, mats, thatch, shingle, plaster and planting on cycles, the medium’s own condition, as at Ise — and the shoin were dismantled and re-erected in 1976–1982. The loss of dwelling holds the axis below the top. Its allusions need a note; its form does not.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: all 2,530 lines survive, with only scribal damage and a few uncertain readings, and the fitts, the stanza and the frame are entirely legible. But the poem rests on a single witness that came near to destruction in the fire of 1731, and nothing of it would be known otherwise. The charge on presence is heavy: so far as is known the poem was unread from about 1400 until 1839, four centuries of silence, a text recovered after long loss. Since then its presence has been continuous and wide: edited many times, translated into modern English by Tolkien, Borroff, Armitage and many others and into other languages, set in every survey of English literature, and filmed. The manuscript stands. The silence holds the axis low among the centuries-old; the wide presence since its recovery lifts it a step.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Sixty-five years are weighed as sixty-five years, and presence is about as wide as any American novel of its decade can claim: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities in English, widely translated, and its title in the common language, which counts as presence, for no more than a tenth, and not as proof. The surface is fixed to a moment in two places. The satire of the McCarthy years, loyalty oaths and an interrogation by men who will not say what the charge is, has outlived its occasion, because oaths and charges without content have not ended. The Second World War hardware is setting, not argument. What holds the axis a tenth below the top of its step is that some of the comic set pieces, the parade chapters and the sex comedy, already read as period.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over about two hundred years. The form survives legibly: Lawn, terraces, ten pavilions, colonnades, rooms, Ranges, hotels and gardens are in place, and the Rotunda’s exterior closes the axis as designed. The use has been continuous in its own purpose since 1825, the rarest survival for an institution’s buildings: professors still live in the pavilions and students on the Lawn. Charged: the south end, open as built and closed in 1898, which turned a plan that faced the mountains into a court; the Rotunda’s interior, burnt in 1895, rebuilt otherwise and then restored, so that what stands inside dates from the 1970s; and fabric much renewed, the serpentine walls among it. The losses fall at the head and the end, not the body, so the charge is real and moderate.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across seventy-four years. The form survives whole: pilotis, frame, the two faces of loggias, the mid-height band, the roof and its sculpture are legible as built, and have outlived the Reconstruction, the ministry and the doctrine that made them, the type copied and answered round the world. The use is charged. The building has been lived in as dwellings without a break since 1952, the purpose that matters most; but its social purpose did not last, the flats passing early into private ownership and later to a different class of resident, the shopping street never living as a street, the gymnasium now a gallery. The fabric has held with repair: the concrete restored, the apartments damaged by fire in 2012 made good. The use and the fire hold it just below 9.0.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form survives whole: the rotunda, the ramp, the void, the dome and the small rotunda are Wright’s and in place, and the building has outlived the conditions that made it, a collector’s patronage of non-objective painting and an architect’s late manner. The tower of 1992 changes what survives: the silhouette from the park now has a grid behind it, though the rotunda stands free in front. The use has been continuous since 1959, interrupted by the renovation of 1990 to 1992. The fabric has needed repair: the concrete cracked, and the exterior was restored in 2005 to 2008. Presence is wide, World Heritage listing among it, and earns at most a tenth. Sixty-seven years on, the figure is held a step short of the top of its range by the tower and the repaired fabric.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: six tracks in their order, the record as it was issued. Presence is continuous and strong within jazz: the record is taught and studied, and “Lonely Woman” is played by musicians born half a century after the session. It is narrower than the widest presence of its year; it is not a record heard by people who hear no other jazz, as Kind of Blue is, and it stands a tenth below that record’s 9.0. The fabric is sound. An acoustic quartet, clearly recorded, carries little date, and what once sounded raw now sounds like itself. Sixty-seven years of strong but not widest presence place it here, well below what has lasted for centuries.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years. The form is whole: the record survives as released, continuously in print and reissued. Presence is continuous and of the widest kind. The title song and Inner City Blues have never left broadcast, the album is heard whole and not only through its singles, it is played again at every return of its subjects, and it stands at or near the head of most retrospective lists of popular albums, which is presence, not proof. The fabric bears some date: the string writing and the gloss of the Motown mix are of their years, and a few lines name the moment. The subjects have not dated, and the hand-played sound carries little of the era’s technology. A tenth below Kind of Blue at 9.0, twelve years older.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 170 years. Form: whole. The image is the one Courbet left, with its unfinished passages, which are not damage. Presence: little shown after 1855, in private hands and the painter’s estate until 1920, then in the Louvre and since 1986 at the centre of the Musée d’Orsay; it has outlived the Second Empire, its jury and the quarrel over Realism. Fabric is charged: the dark grounds and bituminous passages have darkened, the upper half reads as a dim brown, and the canvas needed the large restoration of recent years, which recovered its legibility. The coded portraits of 1855 stand somewhat between the work and a viewer who does not know them. One tenth below the usual figure for its span, for the fabric and the darkening.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print continuously. Presence is among the widest of any American novel of its decade: it is taught in schools and universities, translated widely, filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972, and repeatedly challenged and banned, which is presence of a contested kind, not absence. The surface is partly fixed to its moment: the closing chapter’s 1968, the assassinations and the body counts from Vietnam, and the pulp texture of Tralfamadore belong to their years, though the first is the book’s occasion and the second is meant to be cheap. That partial fixing holds the axis a tenth below the widest figure for its span, and fifty-seven years demonstrate less than centuries.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eighty-six years. Form: the text survives whole as published, and has been in print without break, in the Library of America and in the Vintage edition, taught and translated. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the matter is a crossroads hamlet and its trades, and the voice is timeless in its vernacular. Presence is the charge. The book is read less widely than the four great novels of 1929 to 1936, and more often in the academy and through the trilogy than on its own, and that holds it a tenth under the usual figure for its span. Lower would treat an unbroken, taught book in print as neglected.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over three hundred and fifty-five years. The text survives whole: printed in 1671, reprinted in 1680 and in every collected Milton since, stable, with no question of loss or fragment. Form is untouched, and fabric is not at issue. The charge is on presence: continuously in print and taught, but read mainly in the academy and in the shadow of Paradise Lost; outside the study of Milton it is little read, and it has been translated far less than its predecessor. It is not long neglected: it has had readers in every century since it appeared, and its surface is not fixed to its moment, since its post-Restoration politics have become a way of reading it, not a reason it dates.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the square, the nine terraces, the four stairs, the serpent heads and the temple stand as one idea, and the equinox figure still forms, so the building’s most particular act survives. The use is lost with the cult; the crowds at the equinox and the visitors of every day are presence, which earns at most a tenth, and earns it here. The fabric carries a charge: the plaster and paint are gone, and the faces were restored and in part rebuilt in the twentieth century, so that much of what is seen is reset stone. The survival is about a thousand years, through abandonment and forest, and the form has outlived the conditions that made it; the whole form lifts the axis, and use and fabric hold it.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two and a half millennia. Form: the defining scenes survive legibly, the great slabs whole or nearly so; but the cycle is not whole. Slabs are broken and reassembled, the sequences have gaps, some fragments are dispersed, and whatever colour there may have been is gone. Presence: none for about 2,465 years, buried and unknown after the sack of 612 BCE; continuous and wide since the 1850s, in one of the most visited museums in the world. The fame of the dying lioness is presence and lifts the figure at most a tenth. Fabric: alabaster, fire marked in places, cracked and joined. A survival of millennia, charged for loss and for the long absence, and placed in the middle of its band.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is shown. The cycle has stayed in place since 1927, never dispersed. Its standing has risen from near-dismissal to the first rank. Its surface carries nothing fixed to its moment: no figure, no fashion, no sign of 1918. What makes the work is the image and its enclosure in daylight, and both are whole now. Two facts stand against it. For some twenty-five years after 1927 the rooms were thinly visited and the work discounted. And from the 1960s, for about four decades, a floor built over the rooms took away the daylight, and the cycle was seen under artificial light. The image was never lost; the enclosure was recoverable, and in 2006 it was recovered. The oil has proved sound.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: music and text survive complete, and the variants between the print and the manuscripts do not touch the work’s form. Presence is the cost. Sung, copied and printed through the sixteenth century, the mass fell silent with its style, and for about three centuries it lived in libraries and in theory. It returned in the nineteenth-century revival and, in performance, in the twentieth, and it is now among the most performed and recorded masses before Palestrina, though in the narrower world of early-music choirs. This is a long silence with a strong return. The fabric costs nothing: the Latin rite that fixed its surface has outlived the conditions that produced it.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in the author’s own final form, and has been in print continuously since 1951 and in the revised text since 1966: seventy-five years for the book, sixty for the text scored. Form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide and continuous: the book is kept in print, translated, read beside the novels, taught in courses on the memoir, and quoted far beyond them, the opening sentence above all. Its surface is not fixed to a moment; its world, the Russian estate before 1917 and the Berlin of the émigrés, is the past it sets out to hold, not a dated present. The charge is presence narrower than that of Lolita, leaning on its author’s fame.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-three years. The form is whole: the stereo master of 1973 is still the record sold. Presence is as wide as any album’s of its age, in continuous sale and broadcast and a sleeve known to people who have not heard the record; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric has aged better than most of its year’s, but the synthesiser tones of On the Run and Any Colour You Like, the saxophone breaks and the boogie of Money’s middle are of 1973, and the speaking voices are the London of 1972. It stands at the head of the records of its age, a tenth below Revolver at 9.0, seven years older, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
One principle: survival of what makes the work, the image on the rock in the cave it is seen in. The form is near whole, and the demonstrated survival is about seventeen thousand years, through the end of a glacial period and the extinction of its fauna; no work on the desk has outlived its world so completely. But for those millennia the cave was out of all sight; it was known for twenty-three years before its closure in 1963, and since then its image has been seen at scale only in replicas. The losses: algae and a calcite veil from the years of visiting; fungus and black stains in the Passage, the Nave and the Apse; the floor deposits. They are small in proportion to the image, and the cave survives only under permanent management.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole: platform, plan, halls, sanctum, ambulatory, roofs and spire stand as built, and the governing idea is legible from the field and from the door. It has outlived the dynasty, the city and the age of temple building that made it. The use is charged: since the nineteenth century the temple has been a protected monument and a place of visitors, walked through rather than serving the rite it was built to stage, and for centuries before that Khajuraho lay outside wider attention. The fabric is largely the makers’, weathered, with figures lost or damaged and some stone repaired or replaced in the Survey’s campaigns. Wide presence adds at most a tenth.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the work is whole in every lifetime cast, and an edition cannot lose its form by the damage or loss of one object. Presence: continuously in view since 1960, in a museum courtyard since 1964, shown and lent across the world, among the most recognised sculptures of its century, and in the record of the 2010 sale; that is wide presence, and fame earns at most a tenth. Fabric: bronze is the most durable medium short of stone, and its patinas weather in the open air without loss of form. The surface carries nothing fixed to 1960. Against it: 66 years is the shorter span, and an edition invites the posthumous cast and the question of what is authentic. Held a tenth below the top of the usual figure for its age.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on span, form and presence. Span: seventy-seven years since 1949. Form: whole, as published, in print without break in Spanish and translated into the major languages. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the prologue’s polemic against surrealism is dated, and the novel is not. Presence: taught across the Americas and in the study of the Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution and the Boom. Charged on presence by a tenth: the book lives mainly in the classroom and among readers of Latin American literature, it is read far less widely than One Hundred Years of Solitude or Pedro Páramo, and the common reader knows its idea better than the book. It is the book’s highest axis even so.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form: the Gothic fronts on the Molo and the Piazzetta stand as completed by the 1440s, legible whole, and have outlived the Republic that made them; the courtyard and the stair stand as rebuilt after 1483. The use: the governing use ended with the state in 1797, and the palace has been a museum since 1923, entered daily but as a monument, not as a seat of government; that loss is charged. The fabric: fire took the interiors twice, and the Gothic programme of the great hall and the paintings of its first two centuries are gone, but for the remains of Guariento’s fresco; the rooms are the rebuilding after 1577 inside the old walls; and the lagoon and its floods keep working on the base.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Three centuries, weighed on form, presence and surface. Form: survival of the text is complete. Printed in 1704 and revised in 1710, it has been in print in Swift’s works and singly since, and has a standard scholarly edition by Guthkelch and Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1920, revised 1958). The form is whole and legible; nothing of the work is lost but the gaps it put there itself. Presence is continuous and narrow: taught in every survey of the period and read by writers, but read mainly in the academy and with notes. The surface the axis penalises is here, a topical satire on a quarrel of the 1690s and on the dissenting sects of the century before, which a modern reader cannot follow unaided. The charge is lightened because the madness digression and the will have outlived their occasion entirely.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in the order Cernuda gave it, with a critical edition; nothing of the work is lost. Fabric: nothing in its surface is fixed to a moment beyond the war and the exile it is about. The span is some ninety years from the first gathering and sixty from the last edition, in the row whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. The charge is on presence. In Spain the book’s presence was interrupted: its author was an exile, and the frank poems of desire and the attacks on Spain made it awkward under the dictatorship, so that it reached its readers there chiefly from the late 1950s. It is now taught and read across the Spanish-speaking world; outside Spanish it lives among poets and in the academy. Charged below the row’s usual figure, to 8.9.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Ninety-six years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, as Crane saw it into print; nothing is lost, and the two editions of 1930 differ little. Presence has been continuous since publication: in print, anthologized, the Proem and parts of Atlantis and The River above all, taught, reread by poets and championed in the criticism. But it has never been a book of general readers, and that narrowness is charged. Its surface is fixed to its moment in places: the Wright brothers and early aviation of Cape Hatteras, the subway and advertising, the jazz-age burlesque of National Winter Garden. Most of the book has outlived the conditions that produced it, and the bridge itself still stands. A tenth comes off the step for its age for a presence that is narrow and largely academic.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is legible whole: house, axis and garden as one, outliving Fouquet, the monarchy and the fashion it began, and still read as a model. The first use, a minister’s seat of reception, lasted weeks; the house was then private through three families, and is now privately owned, open to visitors and used for events, which keeps a version of its purpose of being seen. The masonry, roofs and painted rooms are largely the makers’; the contents were taken after 1661. The garden is charged more heavily: it decayed, and its parterres and much of its planting and water are a restoration on the old lines. Half the unit is substantially re-made.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Sixty-eight years have passed since completion. The form is whole and legible: the plaza intact, the tower unaltered in elevation, and the form has outlived the conditions that produced it, copied so widely that the original is now the measure by which the copies are seen as debased. The use is continuous, as offices, since 1958; the restaurant rooms changed operators in 2016 and kept their architecture, a change of tenant, not of use. No loss of fabric is charged, and the building has been a New York City landmark since 1989. Presence is wide in architecture and in the city, narrower with the general public than the great tourist towers, and is not credited at the widest.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form stands whole as the rebuilding made it, on the founders’ site and in the founders’ pool: the island shrine, the causeway, the four doors and the square of water, a model copied across a faith. Use is the strongest part: worship of the Granth in its own house, now daily and unbroken, its singing and its nightly procession kept. But the use was broken by desecration in 1757 and destruction in 1762, when the shrine was blown up and its pool filled, and the building was struck by gunfire in 1984. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: nothing of Guru Arjan’s building stands as fabric, and what is seen is the rebuilding begun in 1764 and finished in marble and gold in the nineteenth century.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. About eighty-seven years for the Administration Building and seventy-six for the tower. The form is whole and legible in both buildings, the Wright furniture largely kept in the workroom. The use: the Administration Building has remained the company’s offices since it opened, its own purpose unbroken. The tower has lost its laboratory use and is now seen rather than worked in; the loss is real, but it takes one part of the unit and not its governing room. The fabric: the glass tubing leaked from the first and has had to be resealed and repaired, a charge on a material that was the building’s own invention. Presence is steady, if less wide than that of Wright’s houses and museum. Held a little below the row for its age by the tower’s lost use and the tubing.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over about fifty-five years, on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole as released, in print since 1971, and it is heard as an album rather than as two hits; it has no hit single of its own to outlive it. Presence is continuous and wide and has grown: the record is ranked higher now than on release, its songs are sung by singers born decades after it, and River has entered the Christmas repertoire. That presence earns one tenth for its width and is not taken as proof. The fabric carries almost no date: voice, piano, dulcimer and guitar, recorded close and dry, and nothing on it depends on the studio sound of its year. It stands a tenth below Kind of Blue at 9.0, older and as present, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, at seventy years. The form is whole and legible, unaltered in its governing idea, and it has outlived the conditions that made it, the postwar campus and the faith in steel. The use is continuous: the hall has been the school of architecture since it opened and still is, a rare survival of first use among the canonical modern pavilions. The fabric carries the charge. The restoration of 2005 replaced the glass and repainted the steel; the steel structure, the travertine and the plan are original. That is a replacement of fabric where the form stays wholly legible, the smallest charge, but the glass is half of what one sees, and it is not the glass Mies installed. Presence is wide among architects and earns nothing beyond the usual figure.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. Use is as strong as any building’s: a church entered and served since 335, its pilgrimage unbroken through Persian, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule, its liturgy daily. Form is partly whole: the rotunda stands on its Constantinian plan and the Crusader church in most of its twelfth-century fabric. The charges are heavy: the basilica and atrium lost since 1009; the tomb largely hacked away then and known now through an encasement; the rotunda rebuilt about 1048 and again in 1810, its dome remade; the Edicule a work of 1810, held upright by girders for seventy years before its restoration in 2016 to 2017. Unbroken use lifts it; the losses hold it.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival of what makes the work, the image, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole and legible; the fading of the right panel is the work’s own and is not decay. The subject, which might have fixed it to 1962, has outlived its moment: Monroe is more an emblem now than then, and the painting’s sense of the image outliving the person has been confirmed by its own survival. Presence: at Tate since 1980, and among the most reproduced paintings of the century. Fabric: acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, young materials whose long behaviour is not shown, and the matte, unvarnished ink is vulnerable to abrasion and cleaning. Over sixty-four years the form is whole and the presence wide; the untested fabric holds the figure a step below the widest.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, in mono and stereo. Presence is continuous and wide: in print throughout, its songs in broadcast and the common repertoire, several known to people who do not know the album. One charge falls on presence: for over twenty years American listeners knew Capitol’s different album under the name, and the UK sequence became the standard edition only on compact disc. The fabric is of its year in the early stereo, voices and instruments split between the speakers, and the possessive threat of Run for Your Life reads as a surface fixed to its moment. These hold it a tenth under 9.0.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 112 years. Form: one canvas, whole; no cut or alteration is known, and the image is the image made. Presence: as an image, very wide, reproduced in every account of modern painting and of Surrealism, never eclipsed; as an object, narrower, since the canvas is not known to be on continuous public view, and presence is charged a tenth for that. Fame lifts nothing beyond presence. Fabric: oil on canvas, thinly painted in the manner of the period; no damage is known, and none is charged beyond the ordinary. A further small charge: the painter’s later copying and backdating of his own metaphysical works has clouded the field of his early images, and this canvas stands in that field.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Sixty-one years are weighed as sixty-one years, and the presence is very wide: continuously in print, among the most read science fiction novels in English, translated into many languages, filmed in full by David Lynch (1984) and by Denis Villeneuve (in two films, 2021 and 2024), taught in courses on science fiction and the environment, and outliving the counterculture that first adopted it. The text survives whole and authorial. What holds the axis below 9.0 is twofold. Its teaching is concentrated in genre and environmental courses rather than in the general syllabus of the century’s fiction. And some of its surface is fixed to its moment: the Baron’s coding as a predatory homosexual, the drug visions of the 1960s, a sexual politics in which women are breeders and concubines. The fame of the films is presence, not proof, and is counted for no more than a tenth.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about 4,270 years. Form: largely legible. The defining design, the ascent to the king and the stars and the fall of the defeated, survives whole; the bottom is broken away and the surface worn, so part of the lowest ranks is lost and much detail of faces and dress is softened. The loss takes something from the work but not its argument. Presence: in view in Mesopotamia for perhaps a millennium; seized and inscribed at Susa, presence of the most telling kind; then buried for something like three thousand years, recovered in 1898, and on public view in the Louvre since. Fabric: stone, chipped and weathered, the Elamite inscription legible as an addition of its life. The strongest of the twelve.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-nine years in print, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as Pasternak finished it. The thirty years of suppression in the Soviet Union are charged lightly, since the Russian text circulated abroad from 1958 and in samizdat, and was published at home in 1988. Presence: wide and continuous, in print in many languages since 1957, translated afresh into English twice, by Pevear and Volokhonsky in 2010 and by Marian Schwartz in 2011, and carried by Lean’s film and by later adaptations for television. Fabric: the Cold War cause that first carried it has passed, and the book is still read; its surface is not fixed to its moment. The figure sits at the top of the usual band for its span and a tenth below the widest, because much of its presence runs through the film and the affair rather than through the reading of the novel.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One hundred and fifty-two years since 1874. The text survives whole, in Flaubert’s final revision, with nothing lost, and the two earlier versions survive besides, adding to what is known rather than taking from it. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: its matter is late antiquity, and the learning of the nineteenth century behind it dates only in detail. Presence is continuous but narrow: in print in French throughout, translated into English more than once and into the main languages, taught in French studies and studied by specialists, kept in view by Redon and Foucault, and little read beyond them beside the novels. A text read mainly in the academy is charged for it, here by a tenth below what its span would otherwise bring.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form of the eleventh century survives and is legible inside: its aisles, vaults, galleries, domes and apses as built. The stepped pyramid survives within the Baroque exterior, which hides the first face of stone and brick but follows its massing, and the form outlived the state that made it and was copied across the Rus lands. Use is charged: worship broken by the sack of 1240, centuries of decay, the Uniate period and the museum since 1934, though presence has been continuous. The fabric carries the rest: about two thirds of the mosaic lost, the frescoes overpainted and cleaned, the exterior rebuilt, the galleries raised a storey. Nearly a millennium of legible form sets it high; lost use and the rebuilt face keep it below 9.0.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The nave was never built, so it is not a loss of what survives and is not charged here; it is a fact of form, weighed under The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law. The form of the choir and transept is legible and whole in its governing idea, after nearly eight centuries for the choir and nearly five for the transept, and the hemicycle is the thirteenth-century builders’ own. The use is continuous: a cathedral, entered and served for worship through its whole life. The charges: the straight bays fell in 1284 and were rebuilt with doubled piers and new vaults, a heavy rebuilding that changed the vessel’s rhythm; the crossing tower is lost; and the fabric stands on iron, the transept on internal bracing, a building still in danger from its own structure.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the field and the five zips survive as made, uncut, and the canvas carries nothing fixed to 1951, no gesture of a period, no image, no topical sign. Presence is charged: shown once in 1951 to little attention, then out of public view for most of a decade while Newman withdrew, and then in a private collection, it has been continuously in view only since its gift to the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, and widely seen since. The fabric is the least forgiving surface in painting, a large unmodulated field on which any abrasion, stain or retouching shows, and large fields of Newman’s elsewhere have been attacked and hard to restore. Nothing is known against this canvas and nothing is charged. The first decade out of view holds it.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years and seven months. The form is whole: the record survives as released, in both its mono and its stereo mixes. Presence is continuous and wide: “Respect” is among the most heard recordings in American music, the title track and “Do Right Woman” remain in broadcast and use, and the album is heard whole by a wide public, not only by musicians. The charge is that the album as a whole is less present than its two most famous tracks, which carry much of its presence. The fabric bears its year lightly, a band playing in a room and recorded clearly, with little that dates but the length of the tracks and a few horn charts. It stands a tenth below Kind of Blue, which has eight years more.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: fronts, hall, glass ceiling and floor and fittings all survive, and the hall has been restored. The building has outlived the empire that built it, two wars, the change of states and of money and the institution’s own transformation, and it has been copied and answered as a model of the modern office and banking hall. One hundred and fourteen years is a long span, and its presence is wide among architects and in Vienna, though not of the widest. The charge is to use: by report the bank has left the building and the hall serves other purposes, a change whose terms are not settled here. The building is still entered and used, and the hall still reads as a counter hall; the change is not ruin, and the charge is small.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Nine centuries, weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the plan, the platform, the walls and their friezes survive and are legible whole; but the governing form was never completed or does not survive, so the work stands as it was left, and the sacks of the fourteenth century took heads and hands from many figures, a charge on the zone that carries much of the meaning. Use: the temple is now visited as a monument, its life as a temple largely gone. Fabric: the soapstone has held its detail remarkably, and the carving is the best preserved part of the work. It is not a ruin and has not been heavily rebuilt; use largely lost and wide defacement set it where it stands.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and nearly whole in the parts that carry it: church, cloister, east range and lavabo stand in their twelfth-century form. The refectory and service ranges are lost, a real charge to the cloister’s circuit. The use it was built for ended in 1791 after a long decline; the church still hears liturgy and music on occasion, and the abbey is entered daily as a monument, so the use is reduced and changed. The fabric is largely the original stone, cut and laid with unusual care, and it has weathered well. Over eight centuries, with form nearly whole and use lost, the figure stands high.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eighty-five years. Form: whole. All sixty panels survive with their captions, and nothing that carries the meaning is lost; the painter’s revision of the captions in 1993 changed wording rather than sense, and both texts stand on record. Presence: continuous since 1941, in two major public collections and in schools, and its standing has risen. But the unit is divided: since 1942 each museum holds half, and the sixty have been seen together only on occasions, among them the tour of the 1940s and the exhibitions of 1993 and 2015. A series whose argument is its sequence is usually seen as half of itself. Fabric: casein tempera on hardboard is brittle, prone to flaking, and the panels travel seldom.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
About 130 years, and the canvases survive; the defining form of each is fully legible. Presence is wide and continuous, in major public collections since the early and middle twentieth century, and the image is among the most reproduced of its period, which is credited at most a tenth. The charge falls on the unit. The series as a series has not been held in one place since it was first shown; it is dispersed across many collections and countries and gathered only in partial reassemblies, so the set is legible through record and exhibition rather than continuously present. That is a loss of presence and assembly, not of fabric. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment: light on stone has outlived the 1890s.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over about fifty-seven years. The form is whole: nothing of the governing idea has been lost, and the design has outlived the conditions of its making as a model copied and answered. The use is unbroken and in its original kinds, offices, apartments, shops and the observatory all in use. The fabric of steel, skin and glass stands with ordinary renewal, and the plaza at the foot was rebuilt in the 1990s, an addition at the margin. Its presence is wide in its field and in Chicago, below the widest of buildings of its age.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is wholly legible: every part of the sequence stands from pylon to sanctuary, the processional axis is walked as it was walked, and the colonnade’s fourteen columns stand to their architraves. The use is lost: the temple’s cult ended in late antiquity, and though the site has been used ever since, by the Roman cult, by churches and by the mosque still in use above the court, it has not been used as this work. The fabric is heavily spent: the roofs of the colonnade and hypostyle gone, the paint surviving in patches, one obelisk removed to Paris, colossi damaged, the whole buried for centuries and then cleared. Some three thousand three hundred years with the form whole is a strong survival.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The span is five centuries. The form survives in its governing idea, a water-centred world of named views and withheld depth, though the Ming garden as Wen Zhengming drew it, sparser and more open, is largely lost under Qing building, and the eastern part was relaid in the 1950s. Use has changed: a private retreat for one family became a divided property, a prince’s residence and, since the 1950s, a public garden, entered daily and in great numbers, but not in its first purpose. Fabric is the heaviest charge: almost no Ming building stands, and the pavilions are Qing and modern. The survival of the form and its long, continuous presence set the figure high within a rebuilt work’s range.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Some one hundred and ninety years since its serial and book publication, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. The text is whole, never lost and never in doubt, and the form is legible and intact. Presence is charged. Through the nineteenth century the book was read without a break and very widely, in Britain and America, by readers who reshaped their lives by it. Since about the 1920s, with Carlyle’s reputation damaged by his politics, the hero-worship and the later pamphlets held against him after 1933, it has been read mainly in the academy, and its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the Dandiacal sect with Bulwer’s Pelham as its sacred book, the Saint-Simonians, the July Revolution. It is not neglected; it stays in print and in teaching. One tenth below the step.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some fifteen centuries. The form is legible and close to the seventh-century figure that Xuanzang saw: tower, sanctum and orientation survive. The charges are real. Use as a Buddhist shrine lapsed for centuries after the twelfth, when the region’s Buddhist institutions ended, and the temple stood in Hindu monastic custody and in decay, its towers in ruin by the nineteenth century. The restoration of 1880 to 1884 remade the corner towers and the finial, by the restorers’ account from an old model, and renewed much of the stucco. The tree is a descendant, not the tree. Use has revived, and the temple is the centre of Buddhist pilgrimage across the world. The form was never lost, and the axis stands highest on the page.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The figure as modelled survives in its plaster, and the bronzes carry it entire; no part that carried meaning is lost. Span: 113 years since modelling, 95 since the first cast. Presence: wide but interrupted, almost unseen for eighteen years, the plaster in São Paulo and the work known through its casts; since 2002 it has been on the Italian 20 cent coin. Fabric and the maker’s hand: the plaster is the one object he made, in a fragile material, and the destruction of most of his other plasters after his death shows how near it came to the same fate. The standing form is a set of posthumous casts in a material and finish he did not choose, in an edition whose number and authority are not settled. These charges take it below the usual figure for its span.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-three years. Form: whole; the image is the one the painter made, never cut or reworked by another hand. Presence: in a major public collection and widely reproduced, but for decades less central to the museum’s account than its fame now suggests, so not at the widest. Fabric is the charge that lowers the figure. Gouache on paper is light-sensitive and fragile at any size, and at nearly two and a half metres, mounted on canvas, it is more open than an oil to fading, abrasion and the strains of mounting; its display must be rationed. No damage is known beyond the general risk of the medium, and only that risk is charged.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the composition survives whole and legible, in a marble copy of about two thousand years made from a bronze of about two thousand two hundred. The original is lost, and the loss is charged: what stands is a copyist’s surface, not the maker’s, and the bronze’s colour and finish are gone. The restorations, which by the usual account include the right arm that carries the posture, are charged too, their extent argued. Presence: buried for many centuries, then in view continuously since the seventeenth, among the most visited and reproduced antiquities in Rome, carried off to Paris and returned. Fame lifts it only a little. Fabric: marble, whole but for the restorations. The highest of the twelve, held from the top by the lost original and the restored arm.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, at 112 years. The form is whole and legible as built: nothing that defined the work has been lost. The use intended, a private estate of villas, never came; the use it has had for about a century, as a public park, is continuous and intense, and it is the use the park is known by. The fabric has been charged: the trencadís heavily restored, the salamander repaired after damage, and the monumental zone ticketed and its numbers capped against the wear of its crowds, a charge of fabric and of the conditions of use. The span from completion sets a high figure; the change from the designed use and the extent of restored surface take a tenth or two back, and wide presence earns at most a tenth and does not offset them.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole and legible: octagon, drum, double dome, cruciform chamber and crypt are those of 1404 and the 1420s, and the design outlived the empire, the dynasty and the world that made it, answered as a model for two centuries. The use survives: it has been the tomb of its dead for six centuries and a place of visitation and pilgrimage throughout, though its endowment and the madrasa that served it are gone, the stone was carried off by Nadir Shah in the eighteenth century by tradition, and the crypt was opened in 1941. The fabric carries the largest charge: the tile skin, the drum band and much revetment renewed by Soviet restorers, the interior gilding largely of 1996, the stone broken. Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), renewed on its traces, is held a tenth below on this axis.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and sixty-four years. The text survives whole, as Flaubert published it in 1862, and has been in print in French throughout; it is translated into the major languages, several times into English. The charge is presence alone, a tenth: after its first decades of fashion its readership narrowed, and it is now read chiefly by students of Flaubert and of the nineteenth century, in the academy more than by the common reader. Its surface is in one sense immune to its moment, since it set its world two thousand years back; in another, its Orient is an image of 1860, and that is the surface that has dated most. The form is whole and legible, and nothing of it is lost. A survival under two centuries does not stand with the millennia, and that, with the narrowed presence, holds the figure where it is.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The new cathedral stands sixty-four years from its consecration. Its form is whole, and it has outlived the conditions that made it, the war and the rebuilding, as an answer still visited for what it says. Use is continuous: a working cathedral and a centre of reconciliation, with services in both the nave and the ruin. The ruin’s medieval fabric, five to six centuries old, survives as it was left in 1940 and has stood as a ruin for eighty-six years; that ruin is the unit’s own form, a ruin by design, and is not charged as loss. Its standing walls and spire require conservation, and that keeps the figure off the highest marks. Presence is wide. The axis is the strongest of the twelve.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued: the mono record has been kept in print and reissued, its sequence intact. Presence is continuous: the record is heard whole, the title song is still broadcast and still covered, and the album stands in the lists each generation makes. The charges are small. Presence is wide among listeners of the American song and narrower among the young than that of Kind of Blue, which stands a tenth higher at sixty-seven years; much of this record’s circulation runs through its songs and its singer rather than the record as a unit. The fabric is of its year, the mono strings and the crooner’s microphone audible as 1955, though the restraint of the arrangements dates less than the full orchestras of the time.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across about sixty-one years since completion. The form is whole and wholly legible, nothing lost or altered in the structure. The use is unbroken: the public has ridden to the crown since 1967, and the arch remains in its first purpose, memorial and lookout, with the trams in service. Its presence is about as wide as a building of its age can have: a city’s sign, on its flags and emblems, and a national image. It has outlived the ideology of expansion that commissioned it and the decade’s faith in steel; its meaning has been contested without its standing being diminished. The smallest charge is the fabric: the unpainted stainless skin carries recorded stains and discolouration, studied and not foreseen.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form is whole and legible after nearly seven centuries: both palaces stand, towers, courts, halls and chapel complete in their governing shape, the exterior almost as built. The use that made it, residence and government of the popes, ended in 1403, and a century of barracks and prison followed, inserting floors, whitewashing walls and cutting out frescoes for sale. Now it is museum, congress centre and the Festival’s great stage: continuous presence and vigorous use, though not its own. The stone survives well; the Tinel’s ceiling, the furnishings and much painting are gone, and the interior is largely restoration of a stripped shell. Above a ruin, below a building in its first use.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about 585 years. The form is legible in all three panels: the composition, the construction and the figures stand. Presence is continuous, in three great public collections and in wide reproduction. The charges, in order of weight: the silver leaf on the armour has tarnished nearly to black over most of its area, so the work’s key effect of bright metal against colour is largely lost and the armies read darker and heavier than they were painted; the gold survives better. That loss is more than fabric, since it takes part of the image. And the three are divided among three cities and three countries, so the work as a unit is not seen together. Whether the panels’ shape was altered for a later setting is argued and not charged as certain.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, at about 115 years. The form is whole and legible: the house stands as built, without additions of consequence, and its idea has outlived the conditions that produced it, answered for a century by the geometric and the modern interior. The fabric is reported unusually intact for a house of its date, with the fittings made for it said to remain in place, a survival few total works of art of the period can show, though the condition of each interior cannot be confirmed. Use is charged: a family’s dwelling for most of its life, the house is held by the heirs and its present occupation cannot be stated with confidence. Presence is narrowed by its closure to the public.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over seven to nine centuries. The form survives whole, and that is the castle’s distinction among its kind: both rings, the talus, the ramp, the towers, the hall, loggia and chapel stand legible as built, far more complete than almost any other castle of the Crusades. The use is lost: the castle ceased to be a fortress under the Ottomans, became a village, and has been a monument since its clearing in the twentieth century; its brief return to military use from 2012 to 2014 is what damaged it. The fabric is charged twice, for the clearing and remaking of the restoration and for the war, followed by repair. Form high, use lost, fabric charged.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: plan, elevation, the glazed field and the west front all stand, and the eighteenth-century dome that deformed the crossing is gone. The use has been continuous for about seven centuries, the church a cathedral throughout and still the seat of its diocese, interrupted only by the closure for restoration. The fabric carries the heavy charge. The structure failed repeatedly through its own daring and its poor stone, and in the nineteenth century a large part of the church was taken down and rebuilt; much of the glass is restored and some replaced, modern glass among the medieval. Demonstrated survival, even with heavy repair, outranks predicted failure; the rebuilding restored the medieval form.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed in order: form, use, fabric. The form is very nearly whole: the peristyle, the entablature and both gables stand, and the two-storey inner order survives in large part, so the design can be read in three dimensions without reconstruction to a degree few Greek temples allow. It has outlived its conditions and become a model copied and answered. The use is lost since antiquity: the temple never passed into another use, stood empty for over a thousand years and is now entered as a monument. The fabric has lost its roof, most of the cella walls, its stucco, its colour and its fittings, and the limestone is weathered. The completeness of the form carries the figure high; the lost use and the bare stone hold it below 9.0.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: the two street fronts, the piers, the spandrels, the frieze and the cornice are Sullivan’s and in place, and the idea has outlived its conditions as a model copied and answered for a century. The use survives without a break: an office building since 1891, now for the state. The fabric is charged twice. The floors were rebuilt within the frame for the state, so that what survives of the work is its envelope and frame and not its rooms; the rooms were office floors, which keeps the charge modest. And the building came near to demolition in the 1970s and was saved by a public purchase, its terra cotta and brick repaired or replaced. At 135 years, form whole and use unbroken, the rebuilding and the rescue hold it a tenth below the usual figure.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. A hundred and fifty-three years since 1873 are weighed as such. The text survives whole, in four editions Pater made, continuously in print, edited critically and kept in the standard series. Presence is the charge. The book is read now mainly in the academy and in anthologies, and outside them chiefly as the Mona Lisa passage and the Conclusion. Its connoisseurship, the Giorgione attributions above all, many of them now given to Titian and others, is fixed to the knowledge of the 1860s, and its manner was long a byword for preciousness after Eliot. The surface is partly of its moment, the aesthetic movement of the 1870s to the 1890s, though the Conclusion has outlived that moment. These charges hold the axis a tenth under the figure its span would otherwise carry.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at fifty-four years. Form: whole. The image is reproduced without loss; the crop is a question of which frame, and the published one stands. Presence: as wide as a photograph has had, in view continuously since June 1972 in newspapers, histories, schoolbooks, museums and the prize record; it has outlived the war, the agency’s first hesitation and the press system that carried it. Fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a silver negative is stable in care. Held below the top because a surface fixed to its moment is part of what the axis charges, and the dispute over its making since 2025 is a strain on its record, though not on its image.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over the long span since completion. The form survives whole and legible: the five prangs, the platform, the stairs, the programme of figures and the pinnacle stand as their builders made them, and the building has outlived the court culture, the trade and the state cosmology that raised it. The use has run without a break: a royal temple, worshipped in and circled, the end of the royal barge procession at the Kathin. The fabric carries the charge. The surface is the work’s face, and lime stucco and porcelain on a tropical river bank have been renewed again and again; the latest campaign replaced much of it and changed its colour and tone, to wide objection. Its presence is among the widest of any building of its age.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the walled city of towers stands as a city, its silhouette and plan intact, and it has outlived the conditions that produced it, the tribal raiding and the caravan economy. The use is continuous but charged: inhabited without break, the city has been thinned by emigration, houses stand empty and some have fallen, and since 2015 it has been listed in danger. The fabric carries the heaviest charge. Mud survives only by constant renewal, few houses are older than a few centuries and many are much younger. That renewal is the tradition’s own mode of survival and is not charged as a lost monument’s reconstruction would be, but it is heavy rebuilding, and the present threats are real.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at seventy-three years. Form: whole; the composition stands as it was fixed in 1953, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: on public view in London since 1962, at the centre of every account of the late Matisse, reproduced very widely, one of the best-known works in the Tate; fame is presence, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the charge is real and is laid here. Gouache on paper is the most fragile surface the visual desk scores at this scale: colour sensitive to light, paper that cockles and yellows, pasted sheets that can lift. The work must be shown under low light and handled as a conservation object. The risk is structural to the medium, not a demonstrated loss, and the figure stands a tenth below the step for it.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival over seventy-three years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole as far as is known; no cutting, overpainting or loss is recorded, and none is charged. Presence: held and shown by a public museum in Los Angeles; the format has as wide a presence as any in modern painting, but this canvas is one example of it, not its emblem, and the format’s fame adds nothing here. Fabric: the painter’s classic surfaces are matte and unvarnished, built of thin, lean layers, and his paints are known to be light sensitive and easily marked; his murals for Harvard faded. How far this canvas shows any of it is not known, so only the general risk is charged, a tenth below the usual figure for its age. Nothing on the surface is fixed to its year.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form, the house of the Jowo at the end of an axis inside a ring of chapels inside a circuit, is legible and whole, and it has outlived the kingdom that built it, the fall of the empire in the ninth century, the persecution of Buddhism that followed, and the government of the Dalai Lamas. The use has run for over twelve centuries as Tibet’s chief place of pilgrimage, with one break of some years from 1966, when the temple was sacked and put to other uses; that break is charged. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: the early core survives in its plan and in carved timber of the inner chapels, but most of what stands is of later campaigns, much of it remade in the seventeenth century and restored after the 1960s.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two and a half millennia. Form: legible and largely whole. The couple, the couch, the gesture, the faces and the hands survive; lost are what the hands held, which carried part of the meaning of the gesture, and most of the paint, which carried part of the warmth and the distinctions of skin and cloth. Presence: charged. The object lay buried from its making to its recovery, about twenty-four centuries out of all attention, and has been continuously present only since the late nineteenth century, in Rome, where it has become one of the most reproduced works of the ancient Italian world; fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: found broken and recomposed from fragments, the joins part of what now stands. A work of millennia with legible form, loss and heavy repair sits at 8.7 to 9.2; burial and recomposition place it mid-band.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety years. Form: whole. The image is legible in every print and every faithful reproduction, and nothing that makes it has been lost. Presence: continuous since 1936 and as wide as any photograph of its century, from the weeklies to textbooks and museum walls; but fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: the negative is not known to survive, so the image now stands in prints made from it, the earliest of them vintage, and in reproduction. For a photograph, where the negative is the matrix of every print, that is a real charge, though a small one, since the image is whole. The disputes over staging are not charged here: they bear on what the image claims, not on whether it survives.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at fifty-nine years. Form: whole. The image survives in the negative and in prints in many collections, and no loss of any part is known. Presence: among the widest a photograph has, continuous since 1972 in exhibition, monograph, teaching and reproduction, from the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that year to Diane Arbus: Revelations (2003 to 2006); much of that is fame, which is presence, not proof, and earns little. Fabric: gelatin silver on fibre paper, properly processed, is among the most durable photographic materials. A light charge for the prints made for the estate after the maker’s death, which raise the question of what the work is in a medium of copies; since the unit is the image, the charge is small. The axis stands highest of the twelve, short of the widest.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 106 years. Form: whole; no part of the defining arrangement is known to be lost, and no restoration is assumed. Presence: charged. For about five decades the sheet was seen rarely and discussed little, kept in the maker’s own hands and entering a public collection only late; since the 1970s it has been reproduced very widely, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: cut newsprint and photographic paper are light-sensitive and acidic, so fading and embrittlement are a standing risk, and display is limited by them; the risk is charged lightly, as no specific loss is known. Whole in form, charged on presence and fabric: a tenth below the usual figure for its span.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at fifty-eight years. Form: whole. The image survives in its negative, in its wire distribution and in reproductions beyond counting, and no loss of a print would take it. Presence: continuous since the morning of 2 February 1968, in newspapers, books, schools, museums and the long argument about the war, among the widest of any photograph of its century; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: a silver negative is stable when kept, and an image this reproduced cannot be lost. The surface is fixed to a named war and a named man, which is the charge the axis lays; but the image has outlived the war, both its subjects and its maker, and is read now as a picture of killing, not as news.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The span is some two hundred and twenty years for the house as finished, more for the first campaign. Form: whole and legible; house, dome, terraces, pavilions, lawn and garden terrace are the maker’s plan, and the form has outlived the plantation economy and the man that made it, read and copied. Use: lost. It was a dwelling and a plantation for under sixty years, then a neglected house, then a museum from 1923; the purpose the form was made for, to live a life and work a plantation from it, is gone, and the use it has is display. Fabric: largely original in the house and much repaired; Mulberry Row largely lost above ground and in part reconstructed; the contents dispersed in 1827 and only partly recovered. The widest presence lifts it a tenth.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form of the unit is whole: six halls in their echelon, their rooms, raised floors, decorated doors, carving and gilt fittings, with the gate, the garden and the ramparts, stand some four hundred years after the second campaign, where nearly every comparable timber castle palace in Japan is lost or rebuilt. The use is lost: the shogun’s seat in practice ended in the 1630s; the palace served the regime’s last act in 1867, was an emperor’s detached palace until 1939, and is now a monument. The fabric is charged: many paintings in the rooms are copies, the crests were changed, the garden altered, the keep lost.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: whole; the image is the canvas as painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost, replaced or reworked by another hand. Presence: continuous and very wide in its own country, from the Look spread of January 1964 through schoolbooks and exhibitions to the White House in 2011, held in a museum built around its maker; fame is presence and lifts the figure a little. Abroad its presence is narrower than that of the summit images of painting, and its standing as art has been contested where its standing as image has not. Fabric: an oil of sixty years in a museum, with no known charge.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole and legible: the white block, the corner masses, the laurel dome, the motto and the hall behind. The building has outlived the quarrel that produced it, the splits within the society, two wars and the Empire itself, and is quoted as the emblem of its moment. The use survives in its own purpose: it is still the exhibition house of the same society, showing contemporary art, about a hundred and twenty-eight years on, which few buildings of its period can claim. The fabric is charged: damaged in the war and repaired after it, the interior reworked in the restoration of 1985 to 1986, so that the gilt leaves and much of the inside are later hands making good. That takes two to three tenths.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-six years. Form: whole. The image survives exactly as published, in multiple prints and in the newspaper, and no single loss would take it; the performed act was never meant to survive except as this record, so nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: continuous and wide since 1960, in exhibition, in the histories of performance and of photography, and in reproduction without end; fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: gelatin silver prints are stable when kept well, and the newspaper, an edition on cheap paper, is fragile, but the image depends on no one print. The figure sits in the usual band for its span, a tenth below the widest: form whole, presence continuous, and decades are not centuries.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some 120 years. The form survives nearly whole: the grid, the Chicago windows, the cast iron base and the corner cylinder are in place; the building has outlived the Chicago School, its client and its maker’s practice, and is copied in the histories and answered in the frame tower. The charge on form: the projecting cornice and the original ending of the attic were removed in the middle of the twentieth century, and the top no longer reads as Sullivan built it. The use survives with a break: a department store for over a century, closed in 2007, then offices above and shops below, still entered at the corner door. The fabric decayed and was restored, cast iron and terra cotta repaired and in part replaced. The lost top and the break in use hold it a little below the usual figure for its span.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, frame, the two pavilions, the court, the meadow and the trees, and, rarer in a modern house, the interior that is part of the work, kept as the makers left it. The house has outlived its conditions, the postwar Case Study moment and the dream of the factory house, as a model answered for seventy-seven years. The use survives in part: house and studio for thirty-nine years in the makers’ own hands, then a kept house, no longer lived in as its purpose. The fabric is a light frame of thin steel and glass, kept by care rather than by mass, renewed in upkeep and under a conservation programme; how much of the fabric of 1949 survives cannot be said with certainty. The ended domestic use and a light, maintenance-bound fabric hold the figure a tenth under what so long a survival of form would bear.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Survival of the image, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: both panels whole, the image as made; no loss or replacement is known, and none is invented. Presence: in a national collection since 1966, shown at Tate Modern and reproduced without end; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only so far. Fabric: acrylic and oil on canvas, whose flat colour and unmodulated grounds show damage readily, a general risk charged lightly. Against it stands a surface fixed to its moment: the war comic of 1962 is gone as a popular form, and the painting must stand without the culture it quoted. So far it does, and the image is better known than its source ever was. A tenth below the widest figure for its span.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a hundred and thirty years. Form: whole now, the image as the painter left it, strip and all. But the form was not continuously whole. The strip, the part that carries the meaning, is reported to have been taken from the canvas for a period after the painter’s death and later restored to it; when, and by whom, is not established. It was recovered, which is why the charge is small; it was lost, which is why there is a charge. Presence: on public view in a major collection, its image widely known; fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the joins of the strip are part of the object, and lining and cleaning are the ordinary history of an oil of its age.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-four years. Form: whole. All thirty-two canvases survive and are kept together; none is lost or replaced. The first presentation in Los Angeles is gone, and the hanging since is the museum’s, which takes little. Presence: as wide as any image of its decade, on view at the Museum of Modern Art since 1996 and lent and reproduced before that; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Against it, the image has become a pattern printed on goods, and risks being seen through its copies, though so far the set has outlived them. Fabric: synthetic polymer paint on canvas. The figure stands at the upper end of what its age allows, a tenth below the widest for the lost first showing and the copies.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over sixty-six years. The form is whole and legible: the L, the cantilever and the glass unchanged, and the governing idea has outlived the conditions that produced it; the house is copied and answered. The use is continuous: a house still, in the family it was built for, with a second life as a shown work, by tour and as a location for film, fashion and advertising, that has not displaced the first. The fabric is a largely original steel frame, its glass, finishes and services repaired and replaced over time, as any glass house’s must be, and a light frame on a hillside in a region of earthquake and fire stays exposed. Presence is wide. The figure, 8.9, stops a tenth short of 9.0 for the youth of the house and for a glass skin over a slender frame.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 125 years. Form: whole; one canvas, the image the painter made, with nothing that carries its meaning lost or replaced. Presence: charged. The painter was eclipsed for some decades after his death, and the canvas stood away from the centre of attention through most of the twentieth century, though it has been in a public collection in Copenhagen. Since the 1990s it has been among the most reproduced of his rooms, and fame is presence that lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: an oil of ordinary history, with nothing charged beyond the general risk of its kind. The presence charge takes a tenth from the usual figure for the span, and the axis still stands highest of the twelve.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole as built: gatehouse, courts, Palas and the finished rooms are the makers’ and in place, and the castle has outlived the king, the Bavarian monarchy, ended in 1918, and the Wagnerism that produced it; it is copied and answered. The keep and the unfitted rooms were never built, and nothing is charged for them as loss. The use it was built for, a king’s retreat, lasted a few months of residence and ended with his death; since 1 August 1886 it has been entered without a break as a sight, a presence of the widest kind that earns at most a tenth. The fabric is largely original, and carries the wear of weather and of mass visiting. The lost use holds the figure a little below what form and fabric alone would give: the highest of the twelve.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over two hundred and twenty-seven years. The form survives whole and legible: the street front stands as built, every storey and bay in place, its governing idea known at a glance, and it has outlived the court, the zenana and the purdah that produced it. The use is lost. No women watch from it as its purpose was; it has not been a palace in use for generations, and it is entered daily as a museum and a view. The fabric is charged in part: lime plaster, paint and some lattice renewed in repeated restorations, the pink itself a later wash, the extent of replacement not known. Its presence is among the widest of any building in India, and that earns at most a tenth. Centuries with the form whole and the use lost, at the near edge of that span, with a partial charge on fabric: the highest of the twelve.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
About two hundred years since completion, weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: the exterior and the principal rooms stand as Nash and his decorators left them, legible in every governing idea. The use is lost. The crown left the building in the 1840s, within thirty years of its making, and it has lived since as a municipal and public building, a hospital in war and a museum, entered daily and no longer lived in its purpose. The fabric is charged for the removal of its contents in the 1840s, partly returned and partly replaced since, and for the arson of 1975 and the storm of 1987 in the Music Room, each followed by a long restoration. Presence is continuous and wide in Britain. The highest of the twelve, held a little below the usual figure for its age.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated across fifty-eight years of continuous exhibition and repeated re-release, most visibly an unrestored 70mm print overseen by Christopher Nolan and shown at Cannes in 2018. The effects, made photographically, not by computer, have aged less than almost any of their successors. The cost is a surface fixed to its moment, and the title shows it: the year 2001 is twenty-five years gone. The brands are dead or broken up: Pan Am’s space plane, the Bell System’s picture-phone, a Hilton and a Howard Johnson’s in orbit. The Soviet scientists, the haircuts and Hardy Amies’ costumes date it; HAL’s operational date, 1992, has passed. They read now as a period future, survival by conversion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated across eighty-five years, much of it at the summit of consensus: first in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll from 1962 to 2002, five polls in a row, second in 2012 and third in 2022. The surface most fixed to its moment, the March of Time pastiche, the 1941 newsroom comedy and the campaign rally, has outlived the forms it parodied and is now read as period rather than topical. The Hearst quarrel, which was the film’s first meaning for its first audience, has fallen away and left the film standing. The form is whole in its one cut and the presence unbroken. The standing is a critics’ standing more than a public one: the film is more taught than loved, its coolness keeps audiences at a distance, and the first-place consensus, once unbroken, has given way. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: eighty-five years is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench can make, and where the Parthenon has outlasted the language, faith and state that built it, a film has so far outlasted only the decades of its own medium. With the critics’ standing charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
The evidence is fifty-four years of unbroken standing, and it is evidence, not promise. The film has never left circulation or favour; it is handed down through generations of viewers who meet it before they know its genre, and its gestures and turns of phrase have passed into common speech. It has outlived the conditions that produced it, the new Hollywood of the early 1970s and the gangster cycle it began. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: half a century is a short record beside the elder arts, whose works have stood for centuries, and the axis credits what is shown and no more. The evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. The surface of a period studio picture is fixed to its time: Willis’s amber, Tavoularis’s rooms and the rear projection in Sicily read as the 1970s’ idea of 1945.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Survival is demonstrated, though not continuously: the film was out of circulation for years, and that break in its presence is charged. Received coolly in 1958, it was re-released in 1983, restored in 1996, and placed first in the Sight and Sound critics’ poll of 2012 and second in 2022. Its period surface, 1950s San Francisco and Edith Head’s suits, has partly become its subject, since the film is about the past possessing the present. But the surface fixed to its moment is charged in full: the animated nightmare dates, the rear projection in the driving scenes shows, and the casting of a forty-nine-year-old star against a twenty-five-year-old is now read critically, though the film studies the power it enacts. What it bears is a pattern of desire tied to no decade. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Sixty-eight years of return, with the break charged, would carry more, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form is whole: every figure, the vault, the tomb and the inscription survive and read, and the defining construction is intact. Presence is charged. The fresco was hidden behind an altar for about three centuries, and the skeleton for longer; for decades the two fields were apart, the upper one on another wall of the church. Fabric is charged more than lightly: the detachment, transfer and remounting of the upper field cost surface, left a seam between the parts and losses made good by later hands, and the surface now carries abrasion and retouching whose extent cannot be stated here. Six centuries, the form whole, presence and fabric both charged. None of it is the painter’s; it is what the church’s later history did to the work.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The original negative burned at UFA in Berlin in December 1928, but the film as released survives whole in the Oslo print, a copy of the first cut found in 1981 at the Dikemark psychiatric hospital near Oslo, so the fire has in the end taken almost nothing of what makes the work; the restorations since are repair. The charge falls on presence. For about fifty-three years the film as released was not seen: what circulated were Dreyer’s second assembly, cut and retitled copies, and Lo Duca’s version with Baroque music. Since 1981 its standing near the top of the critics’ polls has held. The surface does not date: no fashion, no technology, almost no décor. The broken presence would hold it at the lower edge for its age, and even there the evidence carries more than the medium allows. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form first, with no discount for age. The form is wholly legible: nothing that carried meaning is lost, and the manuscript survives. Presence is the charge: unseen for thirty-three years, from Melville’s death to 1924, then continuously in print, taught and anthologised for a century, and kept in view by an opera in the international repertoire. It has outlived impressment, the Mutiny Act and the Nore, and is read for what they pressed upon. For thirty-eight years it was read in Weaver’s text, under another title, with the wrong name for the ship, a leaf Melville had set aside printed as a preface, and words misread; since 1962 the text has been sound. Britten’s opera keeps Weaver’s name for the ship, so the restoration has not reached all the work became. Held below the top for the absence and the long corruption.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across seventy-two years: continuous exhibition, the full version restored and in distribution, and a steady place in teaching and in repertory screening. The surface is unusually resistant to dating. A period film set in the sixteenth century has no furniture of 1954 to age: no brands, no fashions, no technology that will look quaint. The cost lies in the physical object. The recorded sound is muddy and has always been hard to hear in places, and the elements are seventy years old. These are losses to the fabric in proportion to what they take, and they take little of what makes the work: the image is intact, and the dialogue is muddied, not lost. Form whole, presence unbroken and a surface that cannot date would carry it higher, level with the works of its decade that have lasted best on the other desks, Waiting for Godot among them; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-two years, however steady, is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench can offer: the Parthenon, its form still legible after nearly twenty-five centuries, has outlasted the language and order that made it, and a film has had time to outlast only the decades of its own medium. Tokyo Story, on this desk, stands at the same figure.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across seventy-three years: continuous exhibition, the restoration of 2013, a remake, and a standing in the Sight and Sound critics’ polls that has risen rather than fallen, third in 2012, fourth in 2022, and first in the directors’ poll of 2012. The surface fixed to its moment is part of the subject: the postwar city, the war dead, the tour bus and the beauty parlour are 1953, and the film is about what 1953 did to a family, so they age as history, not as fashion. The condition it treats has not changed. The cost is physical: the image as it survives is softer and grainier than other Shochiku films of its year. That is a loss to the fabric, and it takes little of what makes the work. With its form whole and its presence unbroken, the evidence would have carried it level with the works of its decade that have lasted best on other desks, Waiting for Godot, its exact contemporary, among them, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-three years is a shorter and narrower demonstration than the oldest works on the bench have made: the Parthenon, its form still legible after nearly twenty-five centuries, has come through changes of language, faith and state, and a film has so far come through only its own decades and the changes of its own medium.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-four years. The text survives whole, as published. The book has been in print continuously since 1962, is taught as a central text of postwar fiction and of metafiction, and has been translated widely. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the college and the Cold War kingdom are setting, not dependence. Charged against it: its presence is narrower than that of the widest-read novels of its decades, Nabokov’s own most famous book among them, and it lives among serious readers and in the academy more than across the culture. Sixty-four years show survival without showing the centuries behind the summit, and a presence of this width sets the axis at the foot of what that span can carry.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-six years: continuous exhibition, restoration, issue on every home format, an American remake in 1983 and a steady place in critics’ polls. Images from it have outlived the film as currency: Seberg’s cropped hair and Herald Tribune T-shirt, Belmondo’s thumb at his lip. The film has outlived the movement it began. The surface fixed to its moment is charged in full: the cigarettes, the slang, the American cars and B-pictures are of 1959 exactly, and once every film could jump-cut, these jump cuts became period. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-three years: continuous revival, restorations, a fixed place in the critics’ and directors’ lists, a stage afterlife. The black-and-white image has aged better than most colour of its decade. The surface fixed to its moment is larger than the image: the spa’s bourgeoisie of the economic miracle, the press conference’s journalists, the harem’s sexual politics, which the film half-indicts and which now read as the 1960s more than as Guido, Mastroianni’s tired charm, and the atomic dread behind the spaceship, a dated pretext. What survives is the form and the ending, which have outlived the conditions that made them. Sixty-three years is long in film, and short beside the centuries.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in its one version, at its full 88 minutes, and nothing of what makes the film is lost. The presence is seventy-six years of continuous exhibition, in repertory, in film courses and on home video, and a reach beyond cinema as wide as any film’s, its title a word in common use. The fabric is the one doubt: how near the surviving image stands to what was shot is not established, a small charge, since the form is legible throughout. The Heian surface was historical in 1950 and does not date further. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: decades are not centuries, and the film stands well below the Parthenon. With the fabric charged, form and presence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, level with Seven Samurai and Tokyo Story on this desk.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Eighty-seven years of survival, and the evidence is uneven. The defining form is whole in the reconstruction of 1959, made with Renoir’s approval; the loss of the original negative is a charge to the fabric, and the repair has made it good. Presence was broken for twenty years, while the film stood banned and existed only in mutilated versions; since 1959 it has been continuous and very wide. The surface fixed to its moment, the aviator as national hero, the radio reporter, the marquis’s estate, is part of the subject and has aged as history rather than as fashion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With the two broken decades and the lost negative charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole, in its one version, with nothing known to be lost. The presence is seventy-three years of exhibition, restoration and circulation on home video, continuous but narrower than that of the most widely shown films of its decade: it lives in repertory and film study, not in common speech; Rashomon has the wider presence. No charge to the fabric is known. The surface, the civil wars of the sixteenth century and a tale of 1776, was already historical in 1953 and does not date. The evidence would carry more, but film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, well below the Parthenon.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. For eighty years the film circulated altered: cut by censors abroad and banned for years in Britain and elsewhere, its opening epigraph from Trotsky removed at home, its titles changed, its copies shortened and re-scored. The reconstruction of 2005 reassembled it from scattered copies, and what the alteration took was small, some shots, an epigraph, a few titles, so the form is whole and the restoration is repair. Presence has been as wide and continuous as that of any film of its decade, in cinemas, classrooms, histories and polls, through every ban and every regime. The charge is on the surface: the film is fixed to its moment more than most, a commission for an anniversary and a party’s argument, and part of its survival is as a document of Soviet art rather than as a living work. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With that charge laid, a form recovered whole and a presence unbroken through every ban would still carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: plan, section, structure and the glazed cage are the 1240s’, and the programme survives in its frame. The form has lost its focus: the shrine was melted at the Revolution, and the tribune stands empty. The presence has been continuous since 1248, as royal chapel and then as monument. The fabric carries the largest charge: the interior repainted in the nineteenth century on its traces, about a third of the glass, the spire and much of the sculpture renewed. The west rose of the fifteenth century is the work’s own and is weighed with it; the first rose it replaced is lost. The design outlived its conditions, copied by name.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in order, and the first two carry it. The form is whole: plan, vaults, fronts and flyers stand, roof and spire are returned to their known form, and the stone vaults held the burning roof and the falling spire but for the breaches. The presence is continuous over eight centuries as the cathedral of Paris, broken only from 1793 to 1802 and for 2,063 days after the fire, its focus and its use kept. What holds the axis is the fabric, renewed more than the building’s fame suggests: the medieval frame gone, the spire lost twice, kings and jamb statues replaced, nearly all the glass of the main windows removed by the eighteenth-century chapter, the rood screen destroyed. Credited: the stone body, the north rose’s glass, the St Anne tympanum, the choir enclosure.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, with no discount for age. The form is whole: sectors, halves, terraces, the stair of fountains, the temples on their outcrops and the setting of peaks and river are as legible as when built, and the ridge carries nothing modern. It has outlived the Inca state, its religion and its conquerors, and three centuries unfound spared it what Cusco’s temples suffered. The use is lost: it has not served its purpose for some 450 years, and since 1912 it has been entered only as a monument, now by more than a million a year; the water runs again, the fields do not. The fabric: stone largely original, roofs wholly gone, walls re-laid since 1934, some conjecturally, the Intihuatana chipped in 2000, the slope and the visitors pressing. A form that survives whole is not charged for ruin as a text is for a missing part; the loss of use holds the axis here.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about two centuries. The form is legible and whole in everything that makes the image: the figure, the eyes, the act, the black. Its first form, a mural in a room among other murals, is lost; the wall and the room are gone, and the picture is a canvas in a gallery, charged in proportion to what the room was to the work, which was something, though the image carries the work. Presence: none in public for some fifty years, and wide since 1881; fame counts as presence, not proof. Fabric: the transfer of the 1870s took the paint off its plaster, with losses and the retouching of another hand. That is heavy repair, and it holds the axis a step below a whole form of its age.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 207 years. Form: the composition, every figure and every gesture are legible, and the structure of two pyramids and a horizon stands whole. Presence: continuous in the Louvre since 1824, among the most seen pictures in the most visited museum, it has outlived the ministry it accused, the Restoration and the academic genre it turned. Fabric, which here bears on form: by the common account the painter’s bitumen has darkened and cracked the shadows, the dark middle has sunk, and the modelling of the darker figures is lost. The tonal range that carried part of the drama has narrowed, and the painting looks less like itself than it did in 1819. That is more than surface decay and less than a lost figure, and it holds the axis three to four tenths below what two centuries of the widest presence would give.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-two years. The form survives whole, in the one version released. The presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching, the first list of the National Film Registry in 1989, and lines passed into common speech; the film has not fallen from attention in any decade. The surface is the kind the axis charges, a topical satire of a named crisis, a hotline and a Soviet premier. The charge is small because the condition has not passed: the arsenals and the doctrines of retaliation remain, and Kissoff and the Coke machine now read as history rather than headline. The image as seen is sound. Held at the figure usual for its span, not the widest, for the topical surface.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across nearly seventy years of continuous exhibition, teaching and re-release on every format. The form is wholly legible and the presence continuous; nothing that makes the work is lost. The medieval setting shelters it from the dating that fixes most films of 1957 to their year. What makes the work, the game and the dance, has outlived its moment, and Death at chess is known to people who have never seen the film. The surface that is fixed is slight: the earnest manner of the 1950s art film, the existentialist register of Jöns, the high-contrast style and the holy family’s sweetness can read as of their time. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With that surface charged, the evidence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole, and no later cut has displaced it. Presence has been continuous for seventy-eight years, in exhibition, in the histories of cinema and in teaching; its fall in the critics’ polls, from first in 1952 to well down the list in recent decades, tempers the presence without breaking it. Postwar Rome, the housing estate and the poster of Gilda are 1948, and the film is about what 1948 did to a family, so they age as history, not as fashion; the condition it treats has not passed. A period print is the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty years: continuous screening, restoration, issue on every home format, and a place high in critics’ polls across decades. The surface fixed to its moment is modest but present. The reflexive gestures, film burning in the gate and the crew on camera, were the advanced idiom of the mid-1960s and are now convention, so they can read as period. The Saigon footage dates the film to a precise year, and the work leans on it. Against that, the faces, the stone path and the summer light have not aged. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown, and sixty years are not two centuries. The bar is cleared with little room.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixty years. The form survives whole: there is one version, and the restorations in circulation are repair, not revision. Presence is continuous in repertory and art cinema, with a long life on home video in good editions and a standing among critics that has held for decades. That presence is wide within its field and narrow outside it; this is not a film the general audience knows. The surface fixed to its moment is small. The gang’s leather jackets, transistor and dance music are 1966, but they are the world’s noise against which the film sets its silence, and they age as record. The rural economy and the beast have not dated. The figure stands at the usual mark for its age, not the widest.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, and so does the longer version made before it; nothing that made the work is lost, and restoration is repair. Presence: about sixty years from completion, with continuous exhibition, issue and teaching since it was let out, wide within art cinema and narrower outside it; the five years it was withheld are charged a little. Fabric: a fifteenth-century world made in 1966 does not date as a contemporary setting does, though its post-synchronised sound belongs to its studio. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8, below every work that has lasted centuries and below the Parthenon (9.2).
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years. The form is whole: the recordings survive as issued. Presence is wide and continuous: in print throughout, the songs heard on broadcast and in film, the album ranked high whenever its decade is counted. But the unit scored is the British edition, and its sequence has been less present than the American one and than the later issues that combine both; three of its tracks are heard far less than the singles it left off. That holds it at the foot of its span. The fabric is of its year and has held: the guitar tones, made in small London studios, still sound like a discovery, though some mixes are thin and the bass is low. Little is topical. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-six years. The form is whole, with no lost reels and no recut of consequence. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and in teaching, and the shower and the house on the hill are among the most widely known images in film, recognised by people who have never seen it. The fabric is preserved and restored, with no physical loss. The twist has been common knowledge for decades and the film survives without its surprise, which is itself evidence. The surface is fixed in places to its moment: the courthouse psychiatry reads now as period theory, and its conflation of madness with a man dressing as a woman is dated. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence here would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The crypt and apse have stood some 140 years and the Nativity façade a century and more, a span at which a building whole and in use would stand at 9.0 or 9.1; the widest presence of any building earns at most a tenth, and fame is not proof of permanence. The charges outweigh it. The form as Gaudí held it survives in fragments: his drawings burned and his models were broken in 1936, so what has been built since is a reconstruction of intention, and most of the fabric is under thirty years old, the interior finished in 2010 and the central towers in the 2020s, a short demonstration. Use is continuous, the crypt a parish church and the temple in worship since 2010. The crypt’s burning and the Nativity’s weathered stone are fabric.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole as released, and its restorations for home video and exhibition repair it without altering it. Presence across seventy years is wide: exhibition, television and home release, a standing that has risen throughout, and a place in teaching and argument. The surface is charged. The Comanche are played largely by Navajo extras and Scar by a white actor; the stock company’s broad comedy and the slapstick around Look have dated. Part of that surface is the subject, since the film is about racism, and survives as such; part is plainly the fashion of its year. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. With the dated surface charged, seventy years of so wide a presence would carry more; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as released, with no lost version or missing reel known, and restoration has been repair. Presence is sixty-six years of continuous exhibition, teaching and circulation on every format. One charge is laid on presence: the film’s manner is at times taken as the type of art cinema’s solemnity, and that charge, not the form, keeps the figure where it stands. The surface is fixed in part to 1960, the yacht, the clothes, the hotel, but that surface is half the subject, so it ages as history and not as fashion, and the condition it treats has not dated. Below The Parthenon at 9.2 by the whole difference between decades and millennia.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over fifty-one years. The form is whole and continuously in print. Presence is among the widest of its decade: the title track and Thunder Road in continuous broadcast and in the working repertoire of their maker’s concerts for five decades, and the album played whole on stage. The fabric: the production was retro on arrival, Spector’s sound of a decade before, so it is less fixed to 1975 than most records of that year, though its density is a period mix and its cars and boardwalk were already the imagery of the 1950s. It stands a tenth above The Joshua Tree, younger by twelve years, and two below Highway 61 Revisited, which has lasted a decade longer.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on form, presence and fabric. The form is legible from the opening through the river, the bridge and the gate and well into the city. The painting stops in mid street, cut by the edge, and a final stretch has probably been lost or trimmed; its extent is unknown, every structural turn survives, and a trimmed end where the form stays whole is a modest charge. Presence: recorded, colophoned and sought by emperors and collectors for eight centuries, though rarely in view, moved under duress in the twentieth century and shown rarely now. Fabric, the smallest charge: the silk darkened and worn, the colour faded. The image has outlived by nine centuries the city it shows. The charges together hold it below the top.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across fifty years, and the standing has risen across them. The form survives whole: the film as released is the film now seen, and its restorations are repair, a small credit to survival. A commercial disappointment in 1975, it has gained in presence since rather than lost. Its surface is less fixed to its production era than most films of its year, because its look is the eighteenth century’s and not the 1970s’: the light, the clothes and the compositions carry no date of their making. The chief period mark is Ryan O’Neal’s casting, which divides viewers and will go on dividing them. Held below the top by that element, and by a presence interrupted after release, a rise rather than a continuous standing.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-six years of exhibition, restoration and re-release. Nothing that makes the work is lost: the form is wholly legible and the presence continuous. The Trevi Fountain has outlived the film as an image in the common mind, and the film’s subject, celebrity as a system that consumes what it photographs, is more present now than in 1960. The cost is the surface, which is more fixed to its moment than the subject: the Via Veneto of 1959, the clothes, the rock and roll at Caracalla, the cars, the manners of a Rome that has gone. These read now as period, and the film is partly watched as the document of a season. It survives, with some conversion.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Ninety-five years of survival. The defining form is whole in the restored German version; prints were shortened for decades, and a few minutes of the version first shown are reported lost, a loss small in proportion to what makes the work. Presence has been wide, long and internationally continuous, though, by report, not unbroken in Germany. The surface fixed to its moment, Weimar Berlin, its beggars’ guild and its police methods, has aged as history; the condition the film treats, a city’s fear and its appetite for a culprit, has not. The shortened prints, the lost minutes and the broken presence are charged, and the evidence would still carry more. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole outside: the platform, the stair, the three groups of shells from one sphere, on the point. It has outlived the lottery-funded wager and the postwar modernism that produced it, and the roof does not read as a period piece. The interior idea never existed in fabric and is not charged as a loss, but the form as built is the exterior’s more than the whole’s. The use has been continuous and intensive since 1973. The concrete and the tile lids have held in a marine site for over half a century, while the interiors needed renewal within fifty years, the smaller hall’s machinery in 2017 and the Concert Hall’s acoustics in 2022. Fifty-three years is a short demonstration.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-five years. The pop-art design, the Moog synthesizer, the bowlers and the sixties flesh all date the film to the moment of its making, and the surface is charged in full: the Korova and the Cat Lady’s house are 1971 as surely as the hair. What has outlived the surface is the question. The debate about whether a state may condition a man, and whether a conditioned man is a man, has not aged, and each decade’s reading finds the film current. Its presence was broken where it was made: withdrawn from British distribution at its maker’s request, it was not shown there again until 2000. Held below the top because so much of what the film is lies in a style fixed to its decade.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years and nine months. The form is whole: the album as issued in 1975 is still the record sold, in print throughout. Presence is continuous and wide: the album is heard whole, its songs are sung by other singers, Tangled Up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm are in common circulation, and the record is placed high whenever its decade or its maker’s work is counted. That presence is credited as presence, not proof, and it is wide without being the widest of its age. The fabric carries almost no date: voice, acoustic guitar and a small band, recorded plainly, with nothing tied to a studio fashion of 1974 and nothing topical in the words. It stands far below what has lasted centuries.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival weighed in order. Form: the film as released survives whole in the Movietone version, and nothing in the action is missing. Presence: not continuous. The film was largely out of view for decades after the coming of sound, then restored to the centre of film culture, and it now stands near the top of the critics’ polls; its presence is within film culture rather than general. Surface: the silent idiom is fixed to its moment as a medium, and the fable has outlived it. Ninety-nine years of survival weigh heavily, and with the break in presence and the surface charged they would carry more; film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over fifty-four years since completion. The form is whole: plan, section, vault, slot, reflector, court and porch are Kahn’s and in place, and the governing idea has outlived the conditions that made it, the foundation’s oil money and the crisis of late modernism, to be copied and answered. The use is continuous and its own: a museum since 1972. The fabric of concrete, travertine, lead and oak has held, with no loss of what makes the work. The pavilion of 2013 takes part of the lawn and leaves the building and its west front untouched. The figure sits at the top of the usual step for its age: presence is deep within architecture and narrower among the public.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: one version, no loss, its restorations repair only. Presence across fifty-two years is continuous and wide: revivals, television, home video in every format, the National Film Registry, teaching in film and screenwriting programmes. The surface ages little, since a film of 1937 made in 1974 does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its gloss, Faye Dunaway’s styling and John A. Alonzo’s colour, now reads as the seventies as well as the thirties. The director’s later crime has narrowed some exhibition and colours reception; it has not removed the film from view. Held short of the widest figure because its presence, wide in cinema, has not passed far beyond it.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole as issued, with no lost part and no disputed text; later editions band side two as a single track, the same music. Presence is continuous but not the widest: the record has stayed in print and in circulation since 1963, it is a fixed point of jazz listening and of the large-ensemble repertoire, and it reaches listeners outside jazz, without the mass presence of Kind of Blue. The fabric is sound: an acoustic band closely recorded, whose dense, hot mix and audible joins mark its date a little, and the surface carries its period less than most records of 1963. Sixty-three years sit where survival of this span usually sits, two tenths below Kind of Blue, which has lasted a little longer with the widest presence.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a span of sixty-five years. Form: the text survives whole, a single book in fourteen chapters with no versions to choose between and nothing lost. Presence is wide: translated many times, taught in Poland’s schools and in courses on science fiction and philosophy elsewhere, and carried by two famous films and an opera. Two charges hold it at the foot of its band. For half a century the English-speaking world read it in a second-hand version made through French, so its presence in English was partly the presence of a lesser text. And the station’s technology, the tape recorders, the paper library, the X-ray apparatus, is a surface fixed to 1961, though the book’s matter does not depend on it.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-seven years. The text survives whole and unaltered and has never been out of print, in many editions and translations, and it stands in the Library of America’s Hainish volumes. Presence is continuous and wide: it is taught in university courses in English, in science fiction and in gender studies, reread, argued with, and named in every history of the genre. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, and in the place the book cares most about: the generic “he” and Ai’s assumptions read now as of 1969, and Le Guin’s own revisions of her view are part of the book’s afterlife. That does not threaten survival, since the debate keeps the book read, but it is a dated surface, and it holds the axis below the widest figure for its span.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Eighty-nine years from 1937, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole and was never in doubt. Presence is charged: the book was out of print and little read from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, nearly half its life. Since the reissue of 1978 its presence has been very wide, on reading lists from school to graduate seminar and in translation; a television film of 2005 counts as presence only. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the dialect, which once seemed to date it, is now read as its art. Held below the usual figure for its age by the neglect, as against Go Tell It on the Mountain’s 9.0 for a younger book that did not suffer it, and above the floor for neglect by fifty years of return.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seventy-six years. Form: the film as released survives whole, in its one cut; the morgue prologue removed before release was never part of it, and restorations of the released cut repair it. Presence: continuous and of the widest kind, in repertory, on television, in every home format and in teaching; Norma Desmond and her close-up are common reference among people who have not seen the film, and the stage musical has carried the story to new audiences. Fabric: the Hollywood of 1950 is the subject, so its surfaces age as history rather than as fashion, and the silent era it mourns was already history when it was made. A span of seventy-six years with the widest presence earns the figure, and a film’s span earns no more.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, at seventy-five years. The form survives whole: frame, planes, glass, core, terrace and ascent are Mies’s and in place, and the house has outlived its conditions, a single woman’s postwar weekend retreat, as a type copied and answered. The use survives in part: a weekend house for half a century under two owners, then a museum entered by visitors, not lived in. The fabric is charged. The floods the house was raised to stand above have entered it several times, so the siting failed to secure it and the interior has been restored more than once; the steel needs constant care; the client’s screens and furnishings are gone; and the setting has changed, with a road bridge near the site and trees lost. Presence within architecture is wide and beyond it narrower, and it earns nothing here. Use and fabric hold it below the usual figure for its age.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across fifty-three years: selection for the National Film Registry in 1993, twenty years after the premiere; continuous exhibition and restoration; and a standing that has risen with Malick’s later work rather than been eclipsed by it. The surface fixed to a moment is well guarded. The film was set in 1959 and made in 1973, so its period surface was period on the day it opened and ages as history, not as fashion: the cars, the radios and the records are the furniture of an elsewhere. Its condition, the celebrity of the killer and a self made of images, has grown more legible, not less. Held below the top by the span, decades rather than centuries, and by a standing a step below the medium’s oldest touchstones.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives legible: the Salian plan, the bay system and vaults of the nave, the crypt, transept, east end and towers are the makers’, and a vaulted imperial basilica over its graves reads from the door. The use survives, a cathedral still with its graves in place, but interrupted: the church burned in 1689, its graves plundered, its western nave a ruin for some eight decades, its use broken again in the revolutionary years. The fabric carries a heavy charge: the western bays are eighteenth-century reconstruction, faithful in form; the west front is Hübsch’s design, not the Salian one; the medieval furnishing is almost wholly gone; two interior finishes have been lost in turn.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: plan, section, massing, roofs, cantilevers, chimney, stair, fixed interior and the pattern of the glass are in place and as legible as on completion, and the form has outlived the conditions that made it, one family’s life in the city before the Great War, as a model copied and answered. The use is lost in its own purpose: a private house for about sixteen years and not one since 1926, it has been a seminary’s dormitory, University offices and now a house museum, still entered and walked as a house. The fabric largely survives but was worn and renewed: twice near demolition, years of institutional wear, sagging eaves and decay made good in a long restoration; part of the movable furniture and some glass have left the house.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives complete in its one version. Presence across seventy-four years is continuous: repertory, retrospectives, home video, teaching, and a remake for the cinema seventy years on that sent new audiences back to it. The surface fixed to its moment is the subject itself: a city office of 1952, a postwar night city, a slum’s drainage ditch, aging as history rather than as fashion; the condition, a life lost to routine and faced with death, has not aged. The fabric is the one doubt: the state of the surviving elements is not established here, though any loss would be to the surface and take little of the work. Presence is wide in cinema and narrower than that of Kurosawa’s period films. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it: seventy-odd years of its own decades are the whole of what a film can show. A whole form and continuous presence would have carried more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, and the text is whole. Presence is wide: the bog poems and “Punishment” are set texts in Irish and British schools and universities, the book is translated and continuously discussed, and Heaney, Nobel laureate in 1995, is among the most read poets in English of his century. The surface of Part II is fixed to its moment, the Belfast of 1969 to 1974 carried closely: “Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up / In Ballymurphy”. But the conflict has outlived its moment as a subject, and Part I has none of that fixity. Presence is wide but not the widest a book of poems can have: it is not The Waste Land or Ariel. The figure is the top of the usual span for its age, not above it.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. Nearly two centuries have passed since the opening. The form is whole and legible: the front, the block, the attic, the courts and the rotunda stand as designed, and the form has been copied and answered for two centuries. The use survives: a museum from 1830 and a museum now, interrupted from the war to 1966. The fabric bears a heavy charge. The building was gutted by fire at the end of the Second World War and its interiors were rebuilt by later hands; the fresco cycle of the colonnade and the stair hall is lost; and how far the rebuilt interiors reproduce Schinkel’s finish and the openness of his stair hall is not settled here. Losses of fabric and finish take less than a loss of form would, but more than restoration alone, and the axis stands lower for them than its span and its whole form would put it.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The British release survives complete, and the shorter American version prepared for Selznick is a variant that takes nothing from it. Presence has been continuous for seventy-seven years, in repertory and in teaching, and beyond the cinema: the zither theme is still known to people who have not seen the film. Four-power Vienna and its black market are 1949, and the film is about what 1949 had done to Europe, so they age as history, not as fashion; the moral question has not aged. The print and the mono sound are of their period, the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-seven years of continuous presence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over 384 years: against the trimming of 1715, which took strips from all four sides, most from the left; varnish and grime that hid the painting’s daylight for about two centuries; the war years, rolled and stored away; knife attacks in 1911 and 1975, the second deep, and acid in 1990; linings, retouchings and the treatment now under way. The surface is fixed to its moment in costume and arms, but reads now as a crowd stepping into light. The company is gone, the hall is gone, and the painting is the national picture. Held below the top by the trimming: the attacks were repaired; the loss was not.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across ninety-five years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, picture and synchronised score together, in its one version, and the restorations repair it. Presence has been continuous and wide, on the widest scale a silent film has had: revival and reissue from 1950, television, every home format, teaching, live screenings with orchestra, and the Tramp as one of the most recognised figures of the century. The surface of 1931 is a city of the Depression, and the film is about that city, so it ages as period rather than as fashion. The fabric is the monochrome and synchronised sound of its year, the smallest charge. Survival on film can stand no higher than 8.8, and the evidence reaches it.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version. An ending in the gas chamber was shot and cut before release; it was never part of the work, and nothing of the work is lost with it. Restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and among the widest a film of its decade has had: in repertory, on television and every home format, in teaching, in genre criticism, and in lines that passed into common speech. The surface of Los Angeles offices and a supermarket ages as period, not as fashion, since nothing turns on a dated reference, and the hard-boiled idiom is now a style recognised in its own right. The fabric, monochrome photography and mono sound of the period, is the smallest charge.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: masts, cables, saddle roof, crescent plan, spiral, and the pair on their podium, in the shape Tange built; it has outlived the Olympic occasion and reads as a monument, not a period piece. The use has been continuous since 1964, national sports halls in their own purpose, used again for handball at the Tokyo Games of 2021; the large hall’s pool has given way to multipurpose and ice use, a modest charge. The fabric is steel and concrete in a seismic country, and the roof’s steel is bound to repair and maintenance in a way stone is not. Sixty-two years stand behind it, and the figure sits low in its band for the change of use and the fabric’s dependence on repair.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, in the band for ruin and lost use. The form is legible and whole in its governing idea: pyramid, temple and section stand, and the crypt, the lid and the conduit survive in place, which few ancient tombs can claim. The use is lost: the city was abandoned in the ninth century, no cult has been performed here for over a thousand years, the forest covered it for centuries, and the tomb is reported closed to visitors. The fabric is charged: the roof comb largely gone, the stucco of the piers eroded and its paint lost, the facings consolidated and in part rebuilt, the jade mask and grave goods taken from the tomb. The whole form lifts the axis; use and fabric hold it in the lower half of its band.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print continuously. Presence is wide and steady through teaching and translation: it is a set text in many university courses and the usual first Pynchon, though its presence among general readers is narrower than that of the most widely read American novels of its decade. Its surface is fixed hard to its moment: Tupperware, a disc jockey’s station called KCUF, experiments with LSD, a parody of a British Invasion band, a defence contractor named Yoyodyne. That surface is the subject, the culture of signals the book anatomises, and it has dated into period rather than into irrelevance; the book reads more pertinently in an age of networks than in its own. It stands at the foot of the usual figure for its span, and sixty years demonstrate less than centuries.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Published in 1957: sixty-nine years. Form: the text survives whole, in the author’s own settled form, with his note. Presence: in print in Spanish since 1957, in Paz’s collected poetry and in anthologies, taught in Mexico, Spain and across Latin America, and translated widely. Fabric: the surface is not fixed to a moment, and its one dated passage, Madrid in 1937, has become its most lasting, not its most dated. The figure stands below the top of the range for works of this age because its presence outside the Spanish-speaking world lies chiefly among readers of poetry and in the academy, and it has not the general readership that the great novels of its age have.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years: form first, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, remastered and reissued. Presence has grown: a record that sold poorly in 1968 is now heard whole, placed high in every count of the century’s albums, and was performed whole by its maker forty years on. That presence is wider among critics and musicians than among the public, and the songs are known through the album more than through broadcast, which holds it from the top of its row. The fabric carries little date: acoustic instruments, no period drum or guitar sound, only the strings marking the late sixties. It stands two tenths below Kind of Blue, which has lasted longer and is heard more widely.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over fifty-five years since opening. The form survives whole: plan, section, rings, hall, circles, beams, stair and carrels are Kahn’s and in place, legible as built, and have outlived the conditions of their making, a boarding school’s wager in the 1960s on the printed book, to be studied and answered for half a century. The use survives in its own purpose: it is the school’s library still, entered daily by those it was built for, though what a library holds and how it is used have changed round it. The fabric of brick, concrete, wood and travertine stands, and the brick ages into its campus. Whole form and continuous use set the figure at the usual step for its age, without credit for the widest presence.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival weighed in order. Form: the film survives whole in its released version; no reel is lost, and restorations are repair. Presence: out of view for some two decades after release, then continuously exhibited from the revival on, and widely. Surface: physical comedy and real machines have aged less than most of their decade’s surfaces; what is fixed to its moment is the Lost Cause romance of the Confederate uniform, which reads now as a period attitude and costs the film with some viewers. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Close to a hundred years of survival, with a presence as wide as this, would carry more even with the early eclipse and the dated surface charged; the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives in three legible acts, but the text is doubtful and partly lost. No score in Purcell’s hand survives; the earliest score was copied decades after his death in 1695; the prologue’s music is gone, and so is the witches’ scene that ended Act II. The losses take a framing allegory and a scene, not the centre. Presence came late: a long silence from about 1700 to the later nineteenth century, then revival, and since the mid-twentieth century continuous presence in houses, schools and colleges, recorded from Kirsten Flagstad and Janet Baker onward. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and both charges, lost text and long silence, hold the figure low.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the record as released is in print in its original sequence. Presence has been continuous since 1971 among critics, musicians and listeners; Family Affair is a standard of radio and of sampling, and the album has been reissued many times and stands on the long critical lists, which is presence and not proof. The span is a little under fifty-five years. Presence is wide among critics and musicians and narrower with the general public than that of Kind of Blue, and the murky surface can be heard as fixed to its moment; the figure is held below the widest. The hiss and dullness of the tape are part of the record as released, not decay.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the composition is whole and legible, no part lost and no later hand in it, and the span is about 120 years. Presence is charged. For some ninety years the canvas was held by a private foundation at Merion that did not lend; it stayed present to scholarship and to those who went there, and since the move to Philadelphia in 2012 it has been more fully in view, but its presence has been narrower than that of a museum canvas of its fame. Fabric is charged too, and more than lightly, because the work is its colour: the yellows are reported to have degraded in places, and how far is not settled here.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a century. Form: the scheme survives in Sander’s hand, and its best known images survive in negatives and vintage prints; but the work was never completed, its one published form was suppressed by the state, and a large share of the negatives is reported lost. What now stands is a posthumous edition of about six hundred images built from his plan, and the losses fall on the body’s fullness rather than on its principal images. Presence: continuous since the 1950s in museums, books and teaching, interrupted in the 1930s and 1940s. Fabric: glass negatives and silver prints, stable where kept. The charge for loss and for an unfinished, reconstructed whole takes the figure below the usual step for its age; the presence of its central images holds it at 8.8.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, continuously in print, remastered and expanded around an intact original. Presence is continuous and wide for a jazz record: it is the best known of Davis’s electric records, heard whole and not only in excerpt, and placed high wherever the century’s records are counted. Two charges hold it to the usual figure for its span. Its presence is narrower than the widest, and part of it is reputation more than listening: a double album of long improvisations is admired more often than played through. And the fabric bears its moment, the electric piano timbres and the tape echo sounds of 1969, though the record never chased a period production sound and the playing does not date. A tenth above Low.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives: the notes are in the three central sources of the repertory, in substantial agreement, and the work opens the most important of them. The cost is twofold. Modal notation gives rhythm by convention, not by sign, so the rhythmic reading is a reconstruction, sound for the upper voices but not certain everywhere, and tempo, pitch, accidentals and forces are not recorded. And the silence was long: the work fell out of use as the repertory was superseded in the fourteenth century and was not heard again until the twentieth, a gap of about six centuries. Presence since about 1930 is continuous. Held below the Goldberg Variations (9.2), whose gap of hearing was a century and a half.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Fifty-six years have passed since the inauguration and sixty-eight since the cornerstone. The form is whole and legible, and nothing is lost. The use is continuous: the cathedral of the archdiocese since 1970. The presence is wide, a national image, at the centre of a planned capital inscribed as a World Heritage site. The fabric carries the charge. The clear glazing of the inauguration gave way to Peretti’s coloured glass, an addition that is part of the work, and her glass has since been remade; the glazing, the waterproofing and the surface of the concrete needed renewal within decades. That is the smallest charge, on a fabric whose form stays legible, but it shows a fabric less durable than its form.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-four years, and on the text. Form: the work survives whole, but for twenty-three years the American public read a truncated text that lacked the chapter which turns the book’s argument, a real charge on the form as it was present, lifted since the full text was restored in 1986 and became the standard one. Presence: continuous and wide; in print throughout, translated widely, taught, and adapted for the stage by Burgess himself. Part of that presence is the film’s, and popularity is presence, not proof. Fabric: Nadsat was made so that the book would not date, and it has not; the slang of 1962 would have aged, and the invented argot has not. The figure stands above the usual for presence, and below the widest, held there by the history of the text and by how much of its presence the film carries.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, each loss in proportion to what it takes. The form survives whole and as its maker left it: the street front, the sequence, the rooms, the stair, the garden and the roof are his. The house has outlived the conditions that made it, a solitary devout life in a Tacubaya that has since changed around it, and has been answered and copied across the world. Use survives in part: a dwelling for forty years and a house museum for about thirty, entered and walked by the route it was built for, but no longer lived in. The fabric is original and maintained, and repainting the colours is the house’s own practice. What is charged is the change from dwelling to museum and the narrowness of its presence, private until 1976 and still a place of pilgrimage for architects more than a public building.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over ninety-three years. The form survives whole and legible: the parti, the patient wing, the terraces, the hub and the wings stand, and the building has outlived the conditions that produced it as a model studied and answered. The use is charged. The cure it was made for ended within a few decades, as the disease was brought under control by drugs; it lived on as a general hospital, which altered rooms and fittings, and that use too ended, in the 2010s. Its present use, for visits, events and lodging, is partial and in transition. The concrete frame stands; the interiors were changed in the hospital decades. Wide presence is not taken.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one cut, and restorations are repair. Its presence is among the widest any film has: from the 1970s it was shown on many stations each December, and it has been broadcast and screened every year since, a fixture of the season beyond the cinema. Fame is presence, not proof, and earns little on its own. Colorized versions circulate beside the original without replacing it, a small charge. The surface, postwar sentiment and the small-town Christmas, is of its period, but it ages as period, and the subject has not aged. Eighty years of demonstrated survival at the widest presence carry the axis to the highest figure on this page.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the package has been reissued complete, with the four tracks of the extra disc folded onto later editions. Presence is continuous and among the widest of its decade: “Sir Duke”, “I Wish”, “Isn’t She Lovely” and “As” have stayed in broadcast, in performance and at weddings and funerals, and the record is played whole and studied. The charge: it is heard more as songs than as an album of over a hundred minutes, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is partly of its year: the synthesiser strings, some patches and the dense, boxy mixes of the longer tracks date it, though the band and the voice do not. It stands a tenth above Low.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across seventy-two years. The form survives whole, in its one version. Presence is wide and popular as well as critical: the film is loved by audiences who do not read criticism, shown in repertory, broadcast and sold in every home format, taught in film courses, remade and parodied, and it entered the National Film Registry in 1997. The charge on presence is a gap. Hitchcock held the rights and withheld it with four other titles, so that for some years it could be seen neither in theatres nor on television, until Universal brought it back. The loss was of access, not of the work, and its return was an event. The surface, Manhattan in a heat wave with no air conditioning and a fashion editor’s wardrobe, ages as period rather than as fashion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. The evidence, with the gap charged, would carry more, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives: courts, gates, chambers, terraces and Harem stand legible and entered, and Mehmed’s plan still governs the whole after five and a half centuries. The use is lost, and that is the main charge: the palace ceased to be the residence and seat of government in 1856 and has been a museum since 1924, so the purpose its form exists to stage is now shown, not lived. The fabric is much renewed by earthquake and fire, above all those of 1574 and 1665; rebuilding in the court’s own life is part of the work, and the restorations since 1924 have made good the form.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, form first, at fifty-eight years. The form is whole, copied and answered as a model. The use is continuous: the national gallery of twentieth-century art since 1968, apart from the closure of 2015 to 2021, and still in its own purpose. The fabric survives in large part: the original steel, stone and fittings were taken out in the renovation, repaired and returned to their places. The glass has been replaced, because the original single panes cracked repeatedly from the start, a failure of the first making, and the services are new. The renovation’s discipline in returning the original parts is why the charge on fabric is small rather than heavy. Presence is wide among architects but not the widest, and the figure sits at the centre for the building’s age.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as Viking published it and has been in print continuously for sixty-nine years; form and fabric take no charge, and the scroll edition of 2007 adds to the work’s presence without altering its text. Presence is wide: read in many languages, filmed by Walter Salles in 2012, and still a book the young find for themselves. Charged in part: much of its slang and posture is fixed to its moment; its place in teaching has been contested over race and the treatment of women; and its reputation has always been split between the cult and the critics. The charges do not reach far enough to discount the presence, and they hold the axis at the foot of what sixty-nine years of wide presence can earn.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is the Italian release, and its post-synchronised soundtrack is the original, not a loss. Presence has been continuous for seventy-two years, in repertory, on television, in teaching and on home video, and the theme is heard outside the cinema. The surface is of 1954, the postwar countryside, the travelling strongman and the itinerant circus, but the film is partly about a world already passing then, so they age as history. Masina’s mime-clown manner can read as dated to some viewers, a small charge; the black-and-white image and mono sound are of their period, the smallest. Seventy years of wide presence would carry more, but film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seventy-eight years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory, on television, on every home format and in teaching, and the line about badges is known to people who have never seen the picture. The surface fixed to its making takes little: Steiner’s score and some studio inserts and back projection now read as period, while the subject, men and money, has no date. A span of more than fifty-five years, with whole form and wide presence, takes the highest figure the desk allows a film, 8.8.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives complete, in one version, and restorations are repair. The presence is sixty-nine years of continuous exhibition, in repertory and on home video, and constant use in the teaching of Shakespeare and of Japanese cinema: wide, but narrower than that of Seven Samurai or Rashomon, and not the widest of its span. The surface is a war-torn medieval Japan fixed to no fashion of 1957; the stylization that was strange then is strange now in the same way, which is a kind of survival. The fabric, the photography of fog and black and the mono track, is of its period, the smallest charge. Presence wide but not widest sets it at the foot of the step for its age.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-nine years. The form survives whole: the film as released in 1967 is the one cut in circulation, the American release of 1968 and the restored reissue of 1995 carry the same film, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: a wide first release, the reissue’s wide circulation, home video, repertory and teaching, and Deneuve’s image held in common reference beyond the film’s audience. The surface most fixed to its moment, Saint Laurent’s clothes of 1967 and the décor, now reads as period and style rather than fashion, and the bourgeois Paris it shows has dated into the setting of a fable. Part of the presence rests on one image of its star rather than on the film’s standing.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. Four and a half centuries on, the form survives remarkably whole: the mosque, the great gates, the tomb and the principal palace buildings stand with their plans, sections and much of their carving, legible as built, a capital that outlived its court by centuries. The use is split. The mosque and the saint’s tomb have been in use without a break since the 1570s, a living pilgrimage, and that is the strongest evidence of survival the work has. The palace lost its use within fourteen years and has been a monument since, and that is charged. The sandstone has held, with weathering and repair. The losses are the painted and textile interiors, the lake and the water system, the town that made the palace a city, and the Ibadat Khana.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: the half cube, the four fronts, the grid, the marble and the hall under glass block all stand, legible in their governing idea, and the building has outlived the regime that commissioned it by eighty years and been copied and answered as a model. The use is charged. The purpose it was built for, the party’s house and its rallies, ended in 1943 to 1945, and rightly; since then it has served as offices, for decades those of the Guardia di Finanza, a use that occupies the building without living its form. Of the fabric, the insignia and inscriptions have been removed and the furnishings and photomontages dispersed or lost. At about ninety years the lost use takes the figure two or three tenths below the usual.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across ninety years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and reissues and restorations have repaired it without altering it. Its presence is as wide as a film’s can be: continuous in repertory, on television, on every home format and in teaching, and beyond the cinema in the gears and the song, known to many who have not seen the film. The surface belongs to its moment, the Depression, the line and the strike, and the late silent form was already of an earlier day at release; but the film is about its moment and the industrial body has not aged, so the surface ages as history, not as fashion. The fabric, monochrome photography and a mono track of its period, is the smallest charge.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, kept in print, remastered and reissued, heard as an album and in its tracks. Presence is wide and continuous: Whole Lotta Love has been in broadcast for over five decades, and the album has sold steadily and is heard whole; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric bears its moment less than many records of 1969. Two charges hold it below the widest figure: the sexual swagger of The Lemon Song and Living Loving Maid is of its era and has aged against the record, and the credit owed to its blues sources, settled only later, is a fact about the work as it was issued.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-four years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print in Italian and in Weaver’s English throughout. Presence is wide and continuous, and unusual in that it crosses disciplines: read and taught in literature, assigned in schools of architecture and planning, translated very widely, and used again and again by composers, artists and designers. Its surface is fixed to no moment: there is no period furniture, and the cities of waste read as more pertinent now than when they were written. It falls short of the widest presence because its readership, though broad, is not the mass readership of the most widely read novels of its age, and five decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over about fifty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, eleven tracks in order, reissued and remastered. Presence is charged. For nearly two decades after release the record was out of wide hearing, a long near-silence, and its later presence, now wide and continuous, is in part the presence of a legend about its maker and of the title song’s use in advertising; popularity is not proof. The fabric is the record’s strength: a voice and a guitar recorded plainly carry almost no date, with none of the production of 1972 to fix them to their year. The silence now lies more than thirty years behind it, a gap in presence rather than a loss. Form whole and fabric undated outweigh it, and give a figure level with Songs of Leonard Cohen and above Nebraska, a record ten years younger.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over some sixty-six years. The form is whole and legible, with nothing added that alters it. The use is continuous: a parish church since 1960, in its own purpose. The fabric is the original brick, exposed. A thin shell of fired brick has proved more durable than many concrete shells of its years. Presence is narrower than the widest of its span: the church is known well to engineers and architects, made more visible by the World Heritage inscription in 2021, and little known to a general public. Whole form and continuous use carry the figure; narrow presence holds it where it is. Fame is not proof of permanence, and obscurity is not proof of its absence.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over seventy-four years. The form is whole and legible: the court, the chamber, the stairs and the ranges stand as built. Use is charged. The building’s defining purpose was to seat an independent council, and that council ended when Säynätsalo merged into Jyväskylä in 1993. What survives is use in kind rather than in its first office: the court and chamber are a public place still, though the present pattern of use and the extent of any restoration are not established here and are not credited. The fabric of brick and timber is not charged with any loss that can be verified. Presence is steady but specialised, and the lost council holds the axis two to three tenths below its usual figure.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible in its governing idea: the axis, the moats, the water and boulder gardens, the gallery, the paws and the summit plan all read, and the whole sequence can still be walked from the western gate to the top. The losses are grave: the lion’s body and head, the palace above its footings, most of the plaster and brick, the painted cycle almost entirely, the pavilions. Use was lost as a palace within a generation, held by monks for some centuries, then abandoned; it is now entered and climbed continuously, which is presence. Rock-cut and stone work survives well. The verses show it visited and read long after the court had gone. A ruin whose idea stands, in the lower half of what a ruin can hold.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: the block, the section, the Raumplan and the sequence of rooms are the makers’ and legible, and the house has outlived the class and the regime that produced it, and the regime that took it, as a model answered by critics and architects. Use is charged: the family’s life in the house ended with the seizure of 1948, Milada Müllerová keeping part of it until 1968; decades of institutional use altered the interiors; and since 2000 it is a museum, walked in the sequence it was built for and lived in by no one. Fabric is charged: the restoration of 1997 to 2000 remade or returned much of the finish and furniture, and how much is original cannot be said. Lost use and heavy restoration hold it below the usual figure for its age.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over sixty-nine years. The form survives whole as issued, the splice included, which is part of the work. Presence is continuous: the record has stayed in print since its release, it is studied, and its tunes are played by musicians born long after the sessions. That presence is wide among musicians and the jazz public, and narrower than that of Kind of Blue, which reaches listeners of no other jazz. The fabric carries little date: an acoustic group in mono, recorded plainly, the bass recessed in places, small charges against a surface that otherwise does not age. The figure stands two tenths below Kind of Blue at 9.0, at the low end of what works of its years have earned.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over sixty-five years. The form survives whole as issued: the record has stayed in print in mono and stereo, and reissues keep the original sequence. Presence is continuous among musicians and jazz listeners, in teaching, in reissue, in the standard accounts of the music. It is narrower than that of Kind of Blue, at 9.0 over sixty-seven years, which many hear who hear no other jazz, and narrower than that of its own companion. The fabric is a club recording with the room in it: the sound is clear and the bass well caught for its date, and the audience noise is the record’s documentary truth, not decay. The figure stands at the foot of what records of its years have earned.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: text and melodies in one manuscript, the Riesencodex, with the pitches legible on staff lines; the rhythm was never notated, which leaves the performed form partly in doubt. Presence is the charge. No performance is recorded for about eight centuries, until the late twentieth, and the work’s living presence, on recordings and in festival and university stagings, is some fifty years old, real but specialist. The fabric holds: the manuscript survives, and nothing is lost to decay. Centuries of age with long silence fall on the desk’s step at 8.7 to 9.2. The whole survival of the form lifts the work off that floor; the length of the silence holds it near it, at 8.8.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two thousand and seventy years. Form: the sequence is legible from end to end. The loss of the upper part of the central pair is the one loss that touches meaning, and it falls at the key, the consort the room turns on; elsewhere the losses are of plaster and surface. Presence: none for some eighteen centuries under the ash of AD 79; continuous since excavation, about a century, and very wide as an image. Fabric: in situ, open to air, visitors and light, darkened by early wax coatings that a recent cleaning took off, with retouching of uncertain extent. Its survival is a fact of geology rather than of attention, and the axis credits the fact and charges the absence: millennia with loss at the centre, in the lower part of that range.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
A hundred and sixty-nine years. The text survives whole as published, and its form takes no charge. Two charges fall on its life. The book was out of mind for some sixty years after 1857, and since its recovery it has been read mainly in the academy: taught in courses on American literature and in graduate study, kept in print in scholarly and classic editions, but read by general readers far less than Moby-Dick or “Bartleby”. And part of its surface is topical satire: the patent medicines and coal companies of the 1850s, Hall’s frontier sketches, the transcendentalists in Winsome and Egbert. The second charge is lightened because what the satire pressed upon, credit, salesmanship and the philosophy of self-help, has not dated. The figure stands at the foot of its step, the place for a text long neglected and read mainly in the academy.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some nine to eleven centuries. The form is whole and legible: the D, the plaza wall, the great kivas and the room ranks read clearly in plan, and walls still stand in places several storeys high. The use as a great house was lost by the late twelfth or thirteenth century, but the place was not: descendant Pueblo peoples keep it in tradition and come to it, and it has been in continuous view as a site since the nineteenth century. The fabric carries the charge: roofs gone over most of the house, a section of the back rooms destroyed by Threatening Rock in 1941, walls emptied and exposed by excavation, then re-pointed and capped.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Fifty-seven years are weighed as fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been continuously in print in English and widely translated. Its presence is wide and not confined to the genre: it is read and taught as literature, and its reputation has risen, not faded, since Dick’s death. A survival of that length with that presence stands in its step, and the axis sits at the foot of it for the charge the axis names: a surface fixed to a moment, a 1992 imagined from 1966, with coin-operated doors, vidphones and a colony on the Moon, and some of its idiom of its decade. The charge is lightened because the satire has outlived its occasion and is read as forecast: the metered household now looks prescient.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The film as released survives whole; restorations are repair, and no loss of the original version is known. The form is fully legible. Presence is continuous over sixty-nine years: exhibition and circulation, home video in every format, a standing place in film teaching and in the literature on age and memory. It is wide in art cinema, not the widest. Its own director’s later work now draws more of the attention, and that keeps presence from the top. The surface is touched by its decade: the bourgeois manners of 1950s Sweden, the Almans’ theatrical quarrel and the students’ debate about God belong to their moment. The condition the film treats, the reckoning of old age, has not aged. Among works that have survived fifty-five to seventy years it stands at the foot of the usual range, because presence is wide but not widest and a little of the surface is charged.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print, remastered without change of sequence. Presence is continuous and has widened: Suzanne, So Long, Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye and Sisters of Mercy are still sung and broadcast, and the late revival of Cohen’s standing brought listeners back to the first record. Charged: the songs are more present than the album heard whole, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is light, since voice and acoustic guitar carry almost no date, though the female backing parts, some string and jaw-harp colour and the last song’s coda are of 1967. It stands below Kind of Blue at 9.0, which has the widest presence.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, for a ruin whose use is lost. The form survives and is legible: the walls of both complexes stand to great height, and the elliptical enclosure, the passage, the tower and the hill walls are in place after five to seven centuries; the design outlived the state that built it and was answered across the plateau for centuries. The use is lost: the capital was in decline by about the mid-fifteenth century, and the site is now a national monument. The fabric is charged: the daga houses and everything roofed are gone, the clearance of the early 1900s removed much of the record of use, the birds and gold were carried off, and some walling has been rebuilt.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print throughout, remastered and reissued, and is heard as an album as well as in its songs. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any rock record of its year: Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again have stayed in broadcast for five decades, in stadiums, films and television themes, and Behind Blue Eyes has been covered and returned to the charts in later decades. The fabric bears its year in the synthesiser timbres, though those timbres are now heard as the record’s identity rather than its date, and the closing song has outlived its occasion. Much of the presence is of two or three songs, not the whole. It stands under Kind of Blue at 9.0 and above Low and Remain in Light at 8.7.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some seven centuries. The form survives whole in its governing idea: the octagon, the galleries and the makers’ own brick dome still stand, legible from the plain and from the floor, through earthquake and the disappearance of the capital that made them. The use is lost: the building is no longer a tomb shrine in use, the city it centred is gone, and it is a monument entered by visitors, a museum of itself. The fabric carries a heavy charge: the eight minaret shafts lost, most of the dome’s turquoise tile gone, the interior surfaces damaged and much of them obscured, and decades of restoration and scaffolding. The structure being the makers’ own, the figure stands as high as it does; use and skin being lost, no higher.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, after ninety-seven years. The form is whole and legible: the two cylinders, the lattice, the windows and the inscription stand as built, and the form has outlived the conditions that produced it, the brief tolerance of private building in the years of the New Economic Policy, and decades of official disfavour. The use was continuous for seventy-seven years, the architect’s own and then his son’s, a strong record of a house lived in as designed; since 2006 the house has been a museum, still entered. The original walls and floors survive, but the house has been endangered by building nearby, has cracked, and is under conservation. It is known among architects more than among the public.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued: the original sequence is in print and streamed, and the expanded editions have not displaced it. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians and critics, the record standing first whenever live albums are counted. It is less present as listening than Brown’s funk singles, which are sampled and played far more, and that keeps it from the top of its span. The fabric is a live tape of 1962, clear enough to carry the event, and the hall’s noise is part of the work, not a fault of age. It stands level with A Hard Day’s Night and Let It Bleed at 8.8, and below Kind of Blue at 9.0, which has the widest presence of the records of its span.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: shed, deck, undercroft and hotel front stand as Barlow and Scott built them, and the governing idea, a gate building across a single vault, has outlived the Midland Railway, steam and the taste that made it. The station has been in use since 1868, through decline and threatened closure. The hotel lost its use for seventy-six years, from 1935 to 2011, stood largely empty for two decades of them, and came near demolition. The fabric is heavily renewed: the shed reglazed and its ironwork repaired and repainted, the deck pierced, the platforms and tracks replaced, the hotel’s interiors restored and its upper floors converted. The near loss and the long lost use of half the work set it at the lower edge for its span.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The form is whole: the recording as released is the record still sold. Presence is wide and continuous, in print throughout, and two of its songs are among the most played and most used of their decade, in broadcast, film and public occasion. Presence is not proof, and the album is heard much less than its two great tracks; much of what is present is Gimme Shelter, not Let It Bleed, and that holds it at the foot of its span. The fabric has aged well: a band in a room with piano, guitars and voices, little fixed to a studio fashion of 1969, and the choir and the gospel voice have not dated. Midnight Rambler’s subject sits less easily now, a small charge. A survival of decades, far below what has lasted centuries.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over about ninety-five years. The form is whole and legible: every block, bridge and tower and the tearoom survives, and the governing idea has outlived its conditions as a model copied, cited and taught. The use served its first purpose for about sixty-five years, long for a factory, then lost it; converted, the building is entered and used daily, which is survival of use in another purpose. The concrete frame survives. The curtain walls, which make the work, were restored and in part renewed in the conversion, to an extent that cannot be stated here. Its age alone would carry it higher; the lost first use and the renewed façade fabric draw it down to 8.8.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, sixty-six years old; the image that makes the work stands, and no later hand is known in it. Presence: held by a major public museum; the format is among the best-known images of modern painting, but fame is presence, not proof, and this is not among the most famous of Rothko’s canvases by name. Fabric: his media of these years are fragile, the matte surfaces easily marked and some pigments fugitive, as the fading of his Harvard murals of 1962 showed. No damage to this canvas is known, and only that general risk is charged. The figure sits low in what sixty-six years can earn, for presence short of the widest and for that risk.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, after 102 years. The form survives whole and legible: plan, section, planes, colour and the transformable upper floor stand as the makers left them, and the house has outlived the movement and the household that produced it, a model studied and answered for a century. The use survives in part: sixty-one years of dwelling by its own client, an unbroken first life few houses of its period had, and then none; it is now a museum, its partitions worked for visitors, not lived by. The fabric was weak from the start, ordinary materials dressed as planes, and was largely renewed in the restoration finished in 1987, its colours reconstructed. The setting was taken: the open land it faced was cut off by a raised road within forty years.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form, lake, hill, axis, causeways and borrowed view, is Qianlong’s of 1750 and survives whole and legible, and the hydraulic work still holds the lake. The imperial use is gone, but the use as a garden to be walked has been continuous and is now wider than ever, a public park: a change of user, not a loss of purpose. The fabric bears the heaviest charge. Most timber buildings are the rebuilding of 1886 to 1895 or the repairs after 1900; the tower on the main axis is a new design of the 1880s; the back hill and the shopping street are largely reconstructions of the later twentieth century. Two destructions in forty years are endurance that failed. Form and use, which survive, hold it here.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the LP as issued has stayed in print, and the expanded editions add to it without replacing it. Presence is wide and continuous: the album is heard whole as the defining live record of its genre, its title song stays in broadcast, it is on the National Recording Registry, and its occasion is known to people who know little else of country music. Part of that presence is the image of Cash rather than the record, and wide presence earns only so much. The fabric carries its date in sound, but the date is the event, and the band’s plain sound has not dated as a production style dates. It stands level with Live at the Apollo at 8.8 and below Kind of Blue at 9.0, whose survival is wider.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over sixty-six years. The form is whole: all five volumes stand as built, the figure unchanged, and it has outlived the Kubitschek government, the developmentalism that built it and the military regime under which it stood. The use is continuous as the seat of Congress since 1960, charged lightly for the regime’s closures of the legislature, when the building stood and its purpose was suspended, for the loss of the roof terrace as public ground, and for the Annexes that took over much of the working use. The fabric has held; the interiors vandalised in 2023 were restored, a small charge since the form was untouched. Its presence is very wide in Brazil and wide abroad.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-seven years. The form survives whole as released, and its restorations are repair. The one charge is that for some four decades the reissue and television prints replaced the sepia of the Kansas scenes with plain black and white; the alteration of the version in circulation was real, but it did not take the threshold away, since the change from monochrome to colour still read, and the sepia has been restored since 1989. Presence is as wide as any film’s: theatrical reissues, decades of annual broadcast, every home format, the first year of the National Film Registry in 1989, and use far beyond the cinema in song, costume and speech. The surface, a sound-stage musical, does not age as fashion, since it never pretended to the real world.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible and whole: plan, module, double ends, crossings, alternation and massing stand as designed, and the Ottonian design has outlived the empire, the monastery and the Reformation as a model taught and answered. The use is continuous for a thousand years, the abbey dissolved, the church Lutheran since 1542, the crypt still Catholic; it was broken in 1945 by fire and the years of rebuilding. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: altered in the twelfth century, decayed and partly collapsed later, restored in the nineteenth century, burned out in 1945 and rebuilt to an Ottonian image, so that how much original wall stands cannot be said here. The ceiling and the screen survive.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over some 290 years. The form survives: the instruments stand legible and whole in their governing geometry, and the type has outlived the astronomy that produced it. The use was lost within a decade or so of Jai Singh’s death, and the ground was neglected through the nineteenth century; its present use as a monument and a teaching ground is weighed only as survival, and the loss is a charge. The fabric has been heavily restored: in 1901 to 1902 the plaster scales were in large part remade in marble, by the account of scholars with some instruments altered in the making good, and the ground has been restored again since. How much of the surface read today is Jai Singh’s is uncertain. The survival of the form and its continuous presence since 1901 hold the figure; the lost use and the remade surfaces hold it down.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. A hundred and thirty-seven years have passed since the last part, and the text survives whole as Ruskin issued it, in every collected edition; its unfinished state is the state of its first publication and takes nothing from what survives. It has been continuously in print and is taught in Victorian studies. Presence is what holds the axis below its span. Its readers are now largely the academy and readers of Ruskin, whose general readership has fallen sharply since the early twentieth century, and it is little translated and little read outside English. A century and a third of survival does not stand above that charge, and the figure is set below the usual mark for its span on that account.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, one canvas, with no cut, alteration or later hand known, and at 113 years it stands on the step from seventy years to two centuries, where a whole canvas usually holds 9.0 to 9.1. Presence is charged. The canvas has been in Russian museums through the Soviet decades, under a state that turned against the avant-garde, and in those years its reach came by reproduction; how long it was kept from public view is not settled here, and no span is given. It now hangs in the Hermitage, it has outlived the conditions of its making, and nothing on its surface depicts 1913. Fabric: oil on canvas, no damage known, the general risk of its age charged. Held below the step for the absence, as Water Lilies (8.9) is held for its dark decades.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over a span of more than a thousand years. The form is wholly legible: plan, towers, libraries, enclosures and the main pediments all stand, the carving in the hard sandstone still crisp. The use is lost: it is no longer a working temple, its lingas and cult images are gone, and it is entered as a monument. The fabric is largely its own stone, put back in place in 1931 to 1936 after collapse, with some guardians and at least one pediment in museums and copies in their places; the theft of 1923, quickly undone, shows how exposed the relief was. The carved face surviving in its own stone, and continuous attention since its clearing, place it at 8.8.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous for sixty-six years and of the widest kind: television and repertory without a break, every home format, seasonal viewing at Christmas and New Year, teaching in screenwriting above all, and a standing place in the critics’ and the industry’s lists of the century’s films. The surface is of its moment, the office mores of 1959, the switchboard, the bowler hat, the elevator girl; but the film is about those mores and their cost, so they age as subject, not as fashion, and its sexual economy is read now with more recognition, not less. The black-and-white fabric is the smallest charge. Survival is credited as fully as sixty-six years allow a film.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: three madrasas, three portals, one square, the fourth side open. It has outlived the Timurids, the khans who followed them, the Russian conquest of 1868 and the Soviet state. The square’s civic use survives, in ceremony, festival and the crowd, but the use that made the buildings, teaching and lodging students, is lost: the cells are shops and the buildings are monuments. The fabric is heavily restored. Earthquake and neglect brought down domes, upper storeys and parts of minarets; twentieth-century campaigns straightened minarets, rebuilt domes, replaced much tile and regilded the mosque. These are centuries of survival with lost use and heavy rebuilding: form and presence are strong, use and fabric are both charged, and the figure sits low among such survivals.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over eighteen centuries. Form: legible in its governing idea. The axis, the mirrored halves, the circular caldarium and the precinct read from the ground and from the plan, and the walls stand to a height that gives the scale. But the vaults and the dome, which made the interior the work, are gone. Use: lost in 537 and never resumed, three centuries of bathing against fifteen of ruin; the opera, the gymnastics of the 1960 Olympics and the visitors are presence, not survival of purpose, and presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: heavily charged, its columns, revetment, roofs and floors taken as spolia and its sculpture and mosaics carried to Naples and the Vatican.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
One hundred and sixty years have passed, and the text is whole, never lost and never in doubt; the withdrawal of 1866 delayed it by weeks, not more. A span of that length with ordinary presence would stand at 9.0 or a little above. The charge for a book read mainly in the academy applies. After about 1920 its presence fell sharply. It is taught in Victorian surveys and anthologised by five or six poems, “The Garden of Proserpine”, “Hymn to Proserpine”, “The Triumph of Time” and “Itylus” among them, but it is not read continuously as a book by the common reader, as the best of Tennyson and Browning are. Its surface is also partly fixed to its moment, the scandal of a Victorian decorum now gone. The axis stands at the foot of the charged band.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Seven centuries would set the figure higher; two charges lower it. On form, the poems survive but the book does not exist as Dante’s: there was never an authorial collection, the poems are scattered across many manuscripts and early anthologies, attribution is contested at the margin, and the order every reader meets is an editor’s, Michele Barbi’s (1921) or Domenico De Robertis’s (2002). On presence, the poems are read mainly by Italianists and Dantists, with a few, the stony poems, Guido, i’ vorrei and Tre donne, in the anthologies and the schools. Against that, the great canzoni and sonnets have been copied, imitated and commented without a break since the fourteenth century, and the fabric of the text is sound where the poems are secure.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as issued, in print throughout, reissued and remastered. Presence is of the widest kind: the title track, One Love, Three Little Birds, Jamming and Waiting in Vain are heard on every continent, in broadcast and in public use, by listeners born decades after it. Charged: much of that presence travels through the singles and through Legend, not through the album heard whole. The fabric dates little, a live band in a good room with few period timbres beyond some keyboard tones. It stands level with Let It Bleed at 8.8, and a tenth above Low and Remain in Light at 8.7, whose spans are the same or near it and whose presence is narrower.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over about one hundred and sixty years. The form survives whole: the cross, the octagon, the vaults, the fronts and the arch are Mengoni’s in plan and figure, legible from either entrance, and the building has outlived the kingdom whose king it names and the bourgeois city that made it. The use is continuous, a public street and market since 1867, interrupted by the war and more used now than ever. The fabric is charged. The bombing of August 1943 destroyed the glass roof and wrecked much of the vaults and dome, with damage to the fronts and decoration; what is seen overhead is largely a postwar rebuilding, faithful in figure. That rebuilding of the defining element holds the axis below the run of whole buildings of its age; its wide presence earns at most a tenth.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, sixty years, the image whole; nothing is known to have been lost or altered, and nothing is charged. Presence: in a public collection in Cologne, shown and reproduced as a standard image of the painter and of painting after photography, its standing rising with his and never eclipsed. Fame is presence, not proof, and the presence is wide within the field rather than the widest: it is not the public’s idea of a painting. Fabric: oil on canvas, its condition not known in detail, so only the general risk is noted. One charge on form: the surface takes the look of the photography of its decade, its colour cast and soft focus, and a surface tied to a technology is what this axis penalises. So far the image has outlived that look rather than dated with it.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years. The recording as released survives whole, nothing of its form or fabric lost. Presence is continuous and wide: Cinnamon Girl and Down by the River have stayed in radio and in covers, Young has played the long songs with Crazy Horse in every decade since, and the album is a fixture of the canon of rock records, reissued in remastered form. The surface is less fixed to its moment than most records of its year: the plain, roomy production has dated less than the studio fashions of 1969, though the country shuffle and the three-voice folk of Round & Round are of their time. What holds the figure: its presence, continuous as it is, falls short of the widest records of the decade.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: all eight towers stand, the octagon is complete, the rooms keep their vaults, the court is intact, and nearly eight centuries have not blurred the governing idea. The use is lost: whatever it first was, it was brief, and the building is now a monument visited, not a house lived in for that purpose or another. The fabric carries a heavy charge: the marble facings, the marble elements of rooms and court and the sculpture of court and portal were stripped, and the portal stairs and much surface have been restored. The whole form holds the figure up; the lost use and the stripped finish keep it from rising.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-seven years. The form survives whole in its VistaVision negative; restorations are repair, and nothing of the original is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide, on television, in repertory, on every home format, in teaching and in quotation, and the crop duster and Rushmore are images known to people who have not seen the film. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the Cold War spy plot, the Madison Avenue man and the rear projection belong to 1959, and the rear projection shows its age plainly. But the film has outlived those conditions and is watched as it was made, not as a period piece. On this evidence the process work alone would hold it only a step below the widest survival, which is still more than the medium allows. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-eight years. Form: whole; the wall that stands is the wall of 1958, and no loss or replacement of its parts is known; its conservation history is not stated here. The blue light of the first showing is lost as the condition of viewing, a small charge, since the wall was made to stand as an object too. Presence: in a principal public collection since the year it was made, often shown and reproduced, the image of the maker’s achievement; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: painted soft wood and glued, nailed fragments are more exposed than canvas to dust, joint failure and loss of paint in the recesses, charged lightly.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, at one hundred and twenty years. The form survives whole: front, roof, turret, light well, stair and the rooms of the main floor are Gaudí’s and legible, and they have outlived the taste of the next generation, which turned against them: a demonstrated survival. Presence is now the widest a house of its age can have, which earns at most a tenth. Use is charged: the house was a dwelling and no one lives in it; since 2002 it has been a paid attraction and event venue, the main floor walked as a museum without the furniture Gaudí made for it. The fabric has been much restored, the trencadís and the ground floor most of all, and the visitor’s route carries projected media that are not the work.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Sixty-two years. The form survives whole: front, split, chimney, plan and section are Venturi’s and in place, and the form has outlived the polemic that produced it, still read as a model by people who reject the movement it began. The use survives without a break: built as a house and lived in as one by three households in turn, never converted or emptied for long. The fabric, a timber frame in stucco, is ordinary and kept, without the losses Villa Savoye suffered; nothing has been lost or rebuilt. What holds it short of the top of its span: its presence is wide within architecture but is not the widest presence of a building of its age, and it is a small private dwelling, entered by few, whose keeping rests on the care of successive private owners rather than on public use.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-five years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and restorations are repair. A colorized version made for television in the 1980s is an altered copy that never displaced the original, which has stayed the version shown, and it takes nothing from the work. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television from the 1950s, every home format, the National Film Registry in its first year, teaching in film and in the study of genre, and lines from it in common speech. The surface, the San Francisco of 1941 with its hats, offices and telephones, ages as period rather than as fashion, and the talk keeps its snap. The studio artifice of the sets is the smallest charge, a fabric of its time that the film’s method uses.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, one object of three canvases, with no loss, replacement or later hand known, sixty-eight years after it was finished. Presence: steady and wide but not the widest. It hangs in a public museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which shows it often, and it is reproduced widely, though less than Flag; fame and price count for little. Fabric: encaustic is a stable medium, since wax does not yellow as oil does; its main risk is heat, and a relief of stacked canvases has edges and corners to guard. Charged a little for the forty-eight stars, which fix the surface to its moment: the flag changed in 1959 and again in 1960, and the date is legible in the image, though the image is still read as the flag.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across well over a millennium. Form: the opening scenes are lost, by the usual count three of twelve, about a quarter of the sequence and with it the start of the admonition; the nine that remain are legible and keep the end, the Instructress, which carries the form’s meaning. That is a real charge. Presence: continuous in Chinese collections for many centuries, valued and inscribed by emperors, the Qianlong emperor among them, but private and rarely unrolled; in the modern period central to the study of Chinese painting, and still rarely shown. Fame lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: silk worn and abraded, with losses, retouching and a remounting; the smallest charge where the form is legible. The loss of scenes and the fragility of the silk place it in the lower part of the range for centuries with loss.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible in its governing idea, the long curved body unaltered in outline. It has outlived the conditions that produced it, coal and the colonial collecting that filled it, and remains the type of the Victorian palm house, copied and answered. The use is unbroken in its own purpose for some 178 years, still a house of palms entered by the public, closed only for repair. The fabric is heavily charged. The iron corroded in the climate the house exists to make; it was restored in the 1950s, and in the 1980s taken down to its frame, its iron repaired and in part replaced, its glazing bars renewed and every pane replaced in a glass unlike the original. The rebuilding of fabric costs it about three tenths.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-four years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and its restorations are repair. The colorized version made for Turner in 1988 was a variant added beside it and replaced nothing; the black-and-white film has remained the one exhibited, so the charge is nil. Presence has been continuous and as wide as any film’s: repertory revivals on a scale few films have known, television, every home format, teaching, and a reach beyond the cinema in its song and its lines. The surface is fixed to its moment, Vichy, the Free French, December 1941, but it ages as history, since the film is about that moment. The fabric, studio photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, at seventy-seven years. The form survives whole and as it was made: both buildings stand, their plan, section and relation across the court unchanged, and the form has outlived the life that produced it as a model copied, answered and taught. The fabric survives largely as the maker left it, with glass, roofs and the Brick House repaired. The use is charged. The work was a dwelling for fifty-six years, lived in by its maker, and since 2007 it is a museum, entered by visitors and no longer lived in; its own purpose, a man’s daily life inside the landscape, has ended. The charge is lighter than Villa Savoye’s (8.7), whose use ended within a decade and whose fabric was remade: here the form and most of the fabric are the maker’s.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and whole after some thirteen centuries: both towers stand to their crowns, the plan is intact, and the orientation is exactly what was built. The use is the heaviest charge. The temple is reported to have been out of regular worship for centuries; it lay half buried in sand, was recovered, and is kept as a monument. Its presence has been long, a sailors’ mark among the Seven Pagodas, but as a landmark and a ruin to be visited rather than a house of the god in use. The fabric bears the next charge: salt wind and spray have worn much of the carved surface to silhouette, the lingam is broken, and the building is held in place by modern sea defences and consolidation. It withstood the tsunami of December 2004.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole after sixty-five years; no cut, loss, replacement or later intervention is known. Presence: in The Museum of Modern Art, widely shown and reproduced, and steady in accounts of postwar American painting; wide, but not the widest, for the painter’s flags stand ahead of it in fame. Fabric: oil on canvas, thick in places and dripped; no condition problem is known, and none is charged beyond the general risk of the medium. The surface is tied to its moment in one respect only, the political map of 1961, which has not changed, and the schoolroom outline it borrows has not dated. The figure sits near the top of what its span allows and is held a step below the widest for presence.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over sixty-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print, reissued and remastered. Presence is continuous and wide: the record is heard whole, its tracks are used in film and broadcast, and it is among the best-known jazz vocal albums. It is not at the widest presence, for it is heard less, and by a narrower public, than Kind of Blue, which holds 9.0 here over the same span. The fabric is charged a little: the chorus and string writing are the easy listening of 1958 to the ear, a surface fixed to its production era, though the voice at its centre carries no date.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-six years, and presence is as wide as that of any American novel of its century: continuously in print, taught in schools across the English-speaking world for six decades, widely translated, its title and its lawyer proverbial. The film of 1962 extends that presence and is credited no further. The text is whole and unchanged. Two charges keep the axis from the top of its span. Part of the presence is institutional, the book assigned rather than chosen. And it is now contested, and withdrawn from some curricula, for its language and its frame: not a loss of the text, but a sign that its surface is fixed in part to the conscience of 1960.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print without interruption, remastered and reissued. Presence is among the widest of any album of its decade: continuous in broadcast, heard whole as well as in its singles, with Don’t Stop used as a political campaign song in 1992. Sales and affection are presence, and the widest presence earns a tenth above the usual figure for its age, and no more. The fabric is of its moment but lightly: the damped drums and the gloss are of the mid 1970s, but the instruments are played, the voices plain, and little is topical. It stands a tenth above Low, at 8.7 here, of the same year and narrower presence.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across seventy-four years. The form survives whole: one cut, no lost footage, and restorations that repair. Presence has been continuous and as wide as any film of its decade can claim: television in many countries for decades, every home format, revivals and teaching; the title number known to people who have never seen the film; the lamp post a common image; a stage version still performed. The surface most fixed to its moment, the MGM Technicolor gloss and the studio’s idea of itself, is part of the subject, since the film is about Hollywood remaking itself, and its 1927 is costume, which does not date as a contemporary surface would. More than half a century, at the widest presence, clears the bar with room.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Over two thousand years the form survives largely whole: head, torso and drapery in one figure, the turn of the body legible. Charged for loss: both arms, and with them the gesture, the attribute and the certain identity; the left foot; the inscribed plinth, lost after the find. The arms carried the action and much of the meaning, but what makes the work legible as this figure survives. Presence was nil while it lay buried until 1820, then continuous and as wide as any sculpture’s, through both world wars and one loan, to Japan in 1964. The fabric is sound marble with small restorations, never given new arms. Fame is weighed as presence and as nothing more.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, continuously in print and remastered. Presence is continuous and among the widest of any rock album of its decade: Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most heard recordings of its century, number one in Britain on its release and again sixteen years later, and still in heavy use. But popularity is not permanence, and the album is heard less than its song. The fabric dates moderately: an analogue production of 1975, a theatrical manner tied to glam, a grudge against a manager. The record avoided the synthesiser, and so carries fewer period timbres than many of its decade.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: tower, dome, entrance, rear wing and laboratory are Mendelsohn’s and in place, and the building has outlived Weimar, Freundlich’s programme, the Nazi years in which its architect, a Jew, was driven out and his name suppressed, the war and the GDR; it is copied and answered as the image of its movement. The use was kept, which is rare: built as a solar observatory, it is by the usual account a working one still, its instruments renewed. The fabric is the heavy charge. The building was never built as conceived, a cast monolith faked in brick and render, and the fabric failed within years; repairs in 1927, after the war and in 1997 to 1999 mean that much of what is seen is renewed surface over a substitute structure. After a century the fabric takes the figure down, though it stays a tenth above Villa Savoye on this axis, whose use was lost.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across sixty-three years. The film as released survives whole, with nothing lost, and its restorations repair. Presence is continuous: revival, television, home video in every format, a standing among the Japanese and crime films that are returned to, and a remake in 2025. It is not the widest presence of its decade, nor in its director’s work, where the period films are better known, and it stands below Seven Samurai and Rashomon on this desk. The surface is fixed to 1963, the boom city, the express before the bullet train, the drug quarter and the nightclub, but the film is about what that city did to people, so it ages as history and not as fashion, and the moral problem of the first part has not aged at all. The black and white fabric is of its period and survives in good condition. A span of fifty-five to seventy years sets the figure at its usual step.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at seventy-four years, an age whose usual row gives 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole; one canvas, not cut, not altered after the painter, and no loss of a defining part is known. Presence: continuous, on extended loan from the painter’s foundation to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, shown in the surveys of postwar American art and reproduced in every history of it; but lent rather than owned, and not shown as widely as the most travelled canvases of its period. Fabric is charged a step: thinned oil on unprimed cotton is a known vulnerability, the binder spreading beyond the pigment, bare canvas discolouring and weakening with age, and the delicacy limits handling and travel. The risk bears on the ground that carries the light.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nineteen centuries. The form survives better than in most ruins: the hemicycle stands to its upper storey with its windows and brick pediments legible; the Great Hall stands roofed under its six vaults; the street runs between its shops; the terracing holds the hill. The governing idea, the curve answering the forum and the hill made a stacked quarter, is whole. The use is lost: the building lived as fortress and convent and is now a museum, entered daily as an object, not as a market. The fabric is largely Trajanic brick and concrete, but upper storeys and roofs are lost, medieval accretions were stripped in the 1920s and 1930s, and parts were reconstructed then. Form earns the higher figure; use and rebuilding hold it.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at some forty-five centuries. Form: largely legible. Both long sides carry their registers and their argument; the ruler, the chariots, the captives, the feast and the lyre are all there. But the wooden body is wholly lost, the mosaic was found crushed and lifted from the ground, the box’s shape and the placing of some pieces are reconstructions, and the ends are damaged: loss and heavy repair. Presence: none for about forty-five centuries, then continuous and wide since its display in London, weighed after form and lifting the figure a little. Fabric: stone and shell have outlasted the conditions that made them. It has outlived its language, its city, its kingship and its use.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at fifty-nine years. Form: one canvas, whole as made; nothing is known to be lost, cut, altered or replaced, and no restoration is known or claimed. Presence: as wide as a painting of its decade can have, in the national collection at Tate, shown, lent and reproduced without end, and never eclipsed; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: acrylic on canvas of the 1960s, with a border of bare canvas that shows dirt and handling more than paint does; that general risk is charged lightly, and no particular damage is claimed. A small charge too for a surface tied to its moment: a style of house, a style of leisure, a California of the 1960s that the picture now also records.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some 264 years. The form survives and is legible: the quadrangle, the four fronts, the order, the roofline, the Jordan Staircase and the church, all to Rastrelli’s design, though the staircase, the church and most of the visible facade are the reconstruction of 1838 to 1839. The form has outlived the court, the dynasty and the empire that made it. The first use is lost: the palace has not been a residence since the first years of the twentieth century; it became a hospital, a seat of government and then a museum, entered by millions and in continuous public use. The fabric is heavily charged: Rastrelli’s interiors almost wholly burned, the colour changed more than once, the siege damage made good.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric. The form, the square, storeyed, tapering tower of 704, is legible and whole in its governing idea after thirteen centuries; but it has been cut down from its recorded height and its surface is a Ming recasing, so the form that survives is a reduced and reskinned one. The use is the strongest kind of survival: the temple is a working monastery, and the pagoda has been continuously present, climbed and visited since the Tang, its sacred and civic use both alive. The fabric: the Tang brick survives inside the Ming shell, the first pagoda of 652 is wholly lost, and the lean toward the northwest is a continuing charge. The highest of the twelve, and above the bar of the gate.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over sixty-two years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as issued, in mono and stereo. Presence is continuous: in print since 1964, its title song and Can’t Buy Me Love among the most widely known recordings of the decade, And I Love Her and If I Fell much recorded by others. Two charges hold it under 9.0. The album as a whole is less widely present than its best-known songs and than the band’s later records, so that its presence is partly that of two singles and a catalogue; and part of its presence is carried by the film. The fabric is of 1964, the mono beat-group sound and the idiom of the love lyric, and it has outlived its moment.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some fifteen centuries for the tradition of the site. The form, halls hung on a cliff and joined by galleries, has survived whole and legible, and is plainly the founding idea whatever the first halls looked like; it is the strongest of the axes. The use has changed and thinned: the temple stood in religious use for centuries and now stands chiefly as a monument and a visitor site, with entry restricted at times for the fabric’s sake. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: nothing visible can be shown to be Northern Wei, the halls are Ming and Qing rebuildings with later repair, and the timbers have been renewed as a timber building on a cliff must be.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty years. The film as released survives whole: one version, with no loss of substance, and restorations that only repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television, in every home format and in teaching, and poor prints in wide circulation are a charge on the fabric of circulation, not on the work. The surface fixed to its moment is largely its subject: Nazis in Rio, the uranium and the agency are 1946, and they age as history, the dawn of the atomic age, not as fashion. Charged: the back projection in the Rio exteriors and at the race track reads as studio period, and its presence beyond cinema is narrower than the director’s most famous films. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form, a tapering earthen minaret over the town’s mosque, has held on its site for some five centuries; the tower as it stands is the rebuilding of 1844, 182 years old. That rebuilding is heavy, since the minaret is most of the work, and it is charged as such; but what was rebuilt was the same form, not a new one. The use is continuous: the mosque has been the congregational mosque of the town since its founding, through the decline of the caravan trade, colonial rule and independence. Earth renewed by replastering is the mode of such a building, not its decay, and is the smallest charge. The rebuilding and the fabric’s dependence on unbroken care keep the axis from the nines; it is the strongest of the twelve.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the released album has stayed in print with its sequence intact. Presence has been continuous since the middle 1970s and is wide for two songs, I Wanna Be Your Dog and No Fun, which are as present as anything from their year; the album as a whole is less played than its two best songs, and that is what keeps the figure from the top of its row. The fabric is thin and rough, and a mix by the producer now circulates beside the released one; the charge is small, since the roughness is part of the work and has not dated it out of hearing. The surface is fixed to its year by its title, and it has outlived the year as a figure.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over more than a millennium since the last campaign and longer for the earliest. The form is legible and largely whole: the oval mass, both stairways, Temple IV with its mouth and the summit temple stand, and the superimposition can be read where it is exposed; the design has outlived the city, the dynasty and the cult that made it. The use is lost: the rite ended with Uxmal about the 10th century, and for a thousand years the building has been a ruin and then a monument, its presence as the emblem of a visited site not a use. The fabric is charged: facing and stairs were consolidated and in part reconstructed in the twentieth century, and how much of the visible veneer is original cannot be said. Presence earns at most a tenth. The highest of the twelve.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and on every home format, in teaching and in the study of its director; it is steady rather than the widest a film can have. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. A whole form and continuous presence across eighty-three years would have carried more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8. The surface, wartime Santa Rosa with its bank, library and radio, ages as period, not as fashion, since the film is about the American town of its moment, the war barely mentioned and nothing turning on a dated reference. The fabric, monochrome photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film survives complete as released, and no lost version or cut that takes from it is known. Its presence has been continuous for seventy-three years, in repertory, teaching, Fellini retrospectives and home editions, though narrower than that of the widest films of its decade; the Fellini films most people know are later ones. The surface, the dress, the dance hall, the variety theatre and the town, is 1953, but the film is about what that town did to its sons, so it ages as history rather than as fashion, and the condition it shows has not aged. Photography and post-synchronised sound are of their period, the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it. Seventy-three years complete and in view would carry more, even with the narrower presence weighed, and the medium’s span holds the figure at 8.8.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Two survivals are weighed. The image has survived 528 years without leaving attention: it was copied while it decayed and is among the most reproduced images in existence. Its surface is not fixed to its moment; the duke’s arms in the lunettes are its one topical element, and they read as ornament. The object has survived as a ruin. Its own technique, what the work was built to bear, was failing within two decades. Then came the door of 1652, two centuries of overpaint, an attempt to detach it, and the weather after the bombing of 1943. What is seen is a fragmentary original surface, recovered over twenty-one years and filled by a restorer. Survival is strong for the composition and weak for the paint, and the first holds the axis.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated, and no discount is made for age. The form is wholly legible and the text unchanged since 1973; Pynchon has not revised it. Its presence has been continuous: in print, taught, translated and argued over, with no fabric lost. Fifty-three years is a real demonstration, and the book has outlived the Nixon of its last epigraph, the counterculture whose idiom it uses, and the Pulitzer board that refused it. What holds the axis below the top is surface, not age. The comic idiom of the 1960s and 1970s, the dope humour, some of the slang and the vaudeville, is fixed to its moment in a way the setting of 1944 and 1945 is not, and the claim that it will last as the eldest works have is still partly prediction.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-two years of unbroken standing: the film has been in circulation without a gap since its release. The surface is not fixed to its moment. A period film, it was already in costume in 1974, and its look, Willis’s top-lit amber and Tavoularis’s rooms, has not dated into a 1970s style. Two charges hold it back. Demonstrated survival is measured in elapsed time, and fifty-two years is a short span beside the elder arts. And the film’s reputation travels attached to the first film’s: it is not yet clear that it survives alone rather than as the second half of a pair. The axis credits what is shown and no more.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, in that order. The form is whole and legible: nothing of the governing design is lost, and the chapel has outlived the conditions that produced it, the postwar campaign for sacred art and the crisis of the modern movement, as a model copied and answered. The presence is continuous: a pilgrimage chapel in use for its own purpose since 1955, inscribed by UNESCO in 2016. Repair to concrete and render is the smallest charge. The larger charge is to the setting: Renzo Piano’s convent and gatehouse of 2011, outside the work, have changed the approach and the slopes the chapel was composed against, and visitors now enter the hill through a building that is not Le Corbusier’s. Seventy years are scored as what they show.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as Gaddis published it. Fabric: nothing to charge. Presence is where the charge falls. The book’s presence came late and has stayed narrow: it has been kept in print, but it is read by a devoted minority rather than continuously across the culture, and taught chiefly in courses on postwar and postmodern fiction. That presence holds the figure below what seven decades at a usual presence would show. A survival of seven decades does not stand with one of millennia.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over nearly four decades. The form survives whole: the collected volume has been in print continuously since 1987, and the pages stand as drawn and lettered. Presence is as wide as a book of its age can have: taught in courses in literature and in comics, translated widely, and kept before a public by Zack Snyder’s film (2009), by Damon Lindelof’s series for HBO (2019), which took the book as its premise thirty years on, and by DC’s continuations, Before Watchmen (2012) and Doomsday Clock (2017 to 2019), made against Moore’s wishes. Fabric: Higgins’s colours were made for newsprint and its flat processes, and Higgins himself recoloured the book for the Absolute Edition of 2005, the smallest of charges, since the hand is the same. Its surface is fixed to the Cold War of 1985, but that is its matter, and it is read for what the moment disclosed.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across forty-seven years of continuous exhibition and re-release; the form is wholly legible and has never left view. The maker’s later assemblies, Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), are weighed here alone: they did not displace the 1979 film, still the version the culture quotes, and the charge is small. Presence is wide: the film has outlived the war’s politics, and later wars have been read through it. The fabric is fixed to its moment in part: the rock music of the late sixties, the grain of the late seventies. That surface and the span hold it level with Taxi Driver, three years older, and Gravity’s Rainbow, whose longer span its wider presence matches, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole; the footage lost in 1977 was never part of it. Presence: forty-seven years of continuous exhibition, restoration and issue, and an unusually wide life outside cinema, in games, in common speech and in the vocabulary of the Chernobyl zone. Fabric: the surface is fixed to a moment only in a way that has become meaning; Soviet industrial ruin was its setting, the world has since produced the places it imagined, and it ages as prophecy rather than as fashion. That presence earns the most forty-seven years can show, level with Apocalypse Now of the same year (8.7). Decades do not outscore centuries: far below the Parthenon (9.2).
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across forty-six years: continuous exhibition, home editions in every format, a restoration, and selection for the National Film Registry in 1990. Form and fabric are unusually strong. A period film on release, set from 1941 to 1964, it has no 1980 surface to date, no fashion, slang or technology of its year, and black and white removes the colour stock that dates most American films of its decade. The one surface exposed to time is the subject: a film so far inside a man’s violence against women can come to be read as complicity rather than exposure. What holds the figure is the span itself, level with Joy Division’s Closer, of the same year, and Taxi Driver, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years. The form is whole, the record as issued. Presence is the widest of any record of its decade: continuous sale, broadcast and streaming, the opening riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” known to generations born after Cobain’s death, the songs learned by beginners, the album in the National Recording Registry. Popularity is credited as presence, not as proof of permanence: it sets the record a step above novels of its years that have lasted among readers, such as Blood Meridian, and no higher. The fabric carries 1991 in the generational branding and the polished mix Cobain disowned. What holds the figure is the span: thirty-five years, far short of what has lasted centuries.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, past the Cold War, the juntas it named and the strike it sang. Presence is among the widest of its decade: the songs stay in broadcast, and the album was played whole in stadiums thirty years on. The fabric aged better than most of 1987’s, avoiding the decade’s gated drums and bright synthesisers, but El Salvador in 1986 and the miners’ strike date Bullet the Blue Sky and Red Hill Mining Town, and the reverb is period colour. Popularity counts as presence, not proof of permanence: the record stands a tenth above Blue Velvet, level with Gravity’s Rainbow, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives complete and has been restored; the aspect ratio in which it is shown varies, which is variance, not loss. Presence has been continuous for seventy-two years: repertory, television, teaching, and lines that have passed into common speech among people who have not seen the film. The surface carries a charge. The Catholic social mission, the shape-up and the crime commission are of their moment and age as history, the smaller charge; the larger is that the film’s moral argument is tied to the blacklist and read through it, and the piety of the end has dated more than the brothers in the taxi. That holds it a tenth below the film cap.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about seven centuries. Form: the front’s central image survives whole and legible, and most of the back’s scenes survive, reassembled in Siena; but the work as made, a double-sided object on an altar, no longer exists. It was sawn apart in 1771, its frame and crowning are lost, panels are lost, and others hang in London, Washington, New York, Fort Worth and Madrid. Its meaning as one object, the faces turned to nave and choir, is now a reconstruction on paper. Presence: on the high altar until 1506, then moved within the cathedral, shown continuously in Siena, and long recognised. Fabric: the losses and wear of old tempera, the sawing, cleaning and repair. The dismemberment holds the figure at the foot of its band.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across thirty-six years and through a change of medium, since the film’s influence was carried into television. It lost the Academy Award for Best Picture to Dances with Wolves and has outlived that verdict completely; its standing has risen without interruption. The period surface is not a liability because it is the subject: the suits, the cars and the songs date the life year by year. Charged: the violence that shocked in 1990 is now the genre’s baseline, and the narrated, song-driven rise and fall has been copied so widely that its devices can read as familiar. The span holds it level with Raging Bull, a decade older, and Nirvana’s Nevermind, a year younger and as widely present, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The defining form survives whole: the plaster stands in Paris, and the composition exists in bronze in several cities on more than one continent, protected against any single loss as few monuments are. Presence: since the casts of 1926 to 1928 the whole has been continuously in view in museum gardens and courts open to the public, and its figures have been present since the 1880s in their separate lives; The Thinker is among the most reproduced images in the world. Fabric: the plaster is fragile and outdoor bronze needs patina care: small charges. Held below the top: what survives is a state, fixed for casting, of a form its maker never closed, and the whole was not in view complete until the casts.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Forty five years since publication, on the step for thirty five to forty seven years, and a tenth above that step for the widest presence. The presence is as wide as that of any novel of its decade in English: in print without a break, taught across the English-speaking world and in India, translated widely, given the Booker Prize in 1981 and named the best of the Booker winners twice, in 1993 and 2008, adapted for the stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003 and for the screen by Deepa Mehta in 2012. Presence earns the tenth and no more. The surface fixed to its moment is a real charge, the Emergency as a near-present grievance and references that need notes for a reader born after 1980; but the book has already outlived the regime it attacked and the readers who lived under it.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Forty-nine years, and the text is whole. On the desk’s table for modern books that span stands at the seam between the band for thirty-five to forty-seven years and the band from fifty, and the figure is taken there. The presence is of the widest: continuously in print since 1977, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, carried to a mass readership by Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, and sustained by Morrison’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The book has already outlived the 1970s and the Black Arts debates that framed its reception, and it is not fixed to a surface of its moment; the Seven Days are the one element that dates. Presence of that width earns a tenth at most, and the tenth is given; more would be scoring fame.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-six years. Form: the film survives whole in both of Kubrick’s cuts, the US cut in wide circulation and the international cut intact. The hospital scene withdrawn in the first days of release was the director’s own removal, not a loss, and takes nothing that makes the work. Presence: continuous and as wide as any film of its year, in revival, on television, in every home format and in restoration, and a standing that has risen from divided first reviews to a central place. The surface is little fixed to 1980: the ballroom of the 1920s and the family’s plain clothes date lightly. The span sets the figure. Forty-six years is a short demonstration beside centuries, and the widest presence earns the most such a span allows, and no more.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-nine years. The form is whole, and the fabric, synthetic polymer on canvas, is in a national collection’s care. Presence is uneven, and that is the charge: for some twenty years after it was made the canvas was out of public sight. Since 2007 it has been shown continuously in Canberra and widely reproduced, which is the credit. The tradition it draws on is living and has outlasted the conditions of 1977, which keeps the image legible. The absence holds the figure at the lower end for its span, a tenth short of what the widest presence would earn.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, each loss in proportion to what it takes from the work. What made this house is its form, and the form survives whole: plan, section, frame and route are the makers’ and in place, as legible as on the day they were finished, and the house has outlived its conditions, machine-age leisure for one family, as a model copied and answered for ninety-five years. The use survives in part: lived in for less than a decade and never since, it is still entered and walked by the route it was built for. The fabric was lost and renewed: neglect, wartime occupation, the threat of demolition in 1958, render, glazing, waterproofing and colour remade, the meadow largely gone. Built to bear badly, it stands by the state’s intervention.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole from its original camera negative, seized in 1940, recovered and restored; restoration is repair. The charge on form is for history: the versions differ, and for a long span the work as released was partly replaced by shortened, altered versions whose full history is not settled. Presence: continuous since 1937 in repertory, in teaching and in critical lists, wide but not of the widest, known to film audiences more than to the public at large. Fabric: the optical sound and lenses of 1937, small charges. A span of eighty-nine years would carry the medium’s ceiling of 8.8; the long life of the altered versions holds it a tenth below.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty years. The form survives whole: the full-length version exists and circulates in restoration, and the shorter and dubbed prints of the first years are variants that take nothing from it. Presence has been continuous but not unbroken. The film was kept from French cinemas until 1971, and in the English-speaking world it passed from political screenings and repertory to a wide revival in 2004; since then it has been constant in teaching, on television and on home formats. The surface ages little, since the film was made to look like record and record ages as history, and its subject has not aged at all. The fabric is coarse monochrome by design. The narrowed presence holds it under the widest.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across fifty years of continuous exhibition, restoration and re-release. The surface is fixed to its moment more than most: Times Square and 42nd Street before their clearance, the porno theatres, the Checker cab, the campaign of 1972 in all but name. That surface is now a period document, and part of the survival is by conversion, since the city of the film is gone and is watched as a record. But what makes the work is not the city. It is the man in the room, and he has outlived it: the film reads now as a portrait of a figure later decades named and feared. Herrmann’s score and De Niro’s performance have not dated.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: the plan, the trays, the core, the hearth and the stair stand as built, the falls still run under the house, and it has outlived the fortune, the family and the weekend culture that made it. The use survived as a dwelling for twenty-six years, by the family who built it, and since 1964 as a house museum, the thinner kind; but it is shown with its own furniture and fittings in place, still recognisably a home. The fabric is largely original in stone, concrete, steel and glass, and the forest round it is protected. Against that, it was built to bear badly: its main cantilever crept for some sixty years and keeps its form because steel tendons were threaded into it in 2001–2002. It leaks, and it stands on a stream.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-seven years on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, reissued and remastered, its sequence unchanged. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians and listeners of rock, narrower among the public. Part of it is the sleeve, worn and copied by people who have not heard the record, which is the presence of an image and is not credited in full; part is carried by the group’s story and the films about it, which is discounted. The fabric has aged better than most of its year’s: Hannett’s dry space was unlike the sound of 1979 and dates little, though the synthesiser effects on Insight and the period drum treatments are of their moment. So weighed, it stands level with Low, and with Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull of the same years.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seventy-seven years. The form survives whole: the film exists in one version, restorations repair that version rather than alter it, and nothing of it has been lost or replaced. Presence is continuous in Japan, and in the West since the 1970s the film has been a fixture of critics’ lists and of repertory and home video circulation, standing among the most admired films in the international critics’ polls of recent decades. That presence is wide among those who care for cinema and narrower than the widest; the film is not a common reference as a few films are, and that holds it a tenth below the medium’s ceiling of 8.8. The surface fixed to its moment, the occupation, is made part of the subject, and nothing in the film’s grammar is bound to its year.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixty-seven years. The form survives whole, in one cut. Presence is continuous within art cinema: repertory exhibition, home video, teaching, and a steady place in the polls of critics and directors. That presence is narrower than the widest. The film is known to cinephiles and filmmakers, much less to the public, and its standing is a critics’ standing. The surface fixed to its moment is the Paris of 1959, its trains and its racecourse, and it ages as place, not as fashion; the condition the film treats does not date. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the figure is held a tenth below that for the narrowness of the presence.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form and fabric hold over forty-six years: continuously available and remastered, the record carries no topical reference, and its austerity leaves little to date; the synthesizer sounds of “Isolation” and Hannett’s digital delay are fixed to their moment without becoming dead matter. Presence is continuous but held within a following, with much of the attention drawn to the singer. That holds it level with Raging Bull of the same year, a tenth above Blood Meridian, five years younger and grown the same way, and well below what has lasted for centuries. The exposure is that it may survive as a relic of its singer rather than as itself.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric together, and form, which is weighed first, survives at the core. The rock-cut city, the core of the work, is legible and whole in its governing idea after some two thousand years: al-Khazneh, sheltered by the cleft, keeps its carving sharp, ad-Deir stands entire, and the Royal Tombs and the theatre keep their forms. Presence never lapsed among the people of the place. What holds the axis is loss around that core: the masonry city fell, chiefly in the earthquake of 363, and survives as footings, the shell of Qasr al-Bint and columns set up again; the wider world lost the site from the Crusades to 1812, and its own uses ended long ago; the sandstone weathers into honeycomb, and the Corinthian and Palace Tombs have lost their lower orders.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Sixty-three years is a real demonstration, and form and fabric are whole: the text survives as published, has never been out of print and is translated into the main European languages. Presence is continuous but narrower than its author’s other early books: it is read mainly by Pynchon’s readers and in the academy, and outside courses on postmodern fiction it is less taught than The Crying of Lot 49. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the Crew’s jazz and slang of 1956. The historical chapters have outlived their conditions, and the chapter of the Herero reads more pertinently now than in 1963. The figure sits between the usual and the charged because presence is charged in part, not throughout.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-four years. The form is whole: one cut survives as released, the two soundtracks are variants that take nothing from the picture, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory and teaching, on every home format, in the study of its director, and in the circulation of its opening and closing shots far beyond the art house; it is steady rather than the widest a film can have, broad within the cinema and narrower outside it. The surface is not fixed to 1972: set in 1560, the film has almost no period effects to date it. The fabric, grainy and unevenly exposed 35mm colour and a post-synchronised soundtrack, is the smallest charge.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is legible: the mountain of face towers at the centre of the city reads as it was built, and its defining idea, the faces, has outlived the king, his religion and his state. The use is largely lost: the Mahayana state cult ended with the reign or soon after, the Buddha images were cut from the stone and the central Buddha thrown into the shaft, later Hindu and Theravada use followed, and the building is now chiefly a monument. Presence was broken: it was overgrown before it was cleared. The fabric is heavily charged: towers fallen, the outer gallery roofless, dry jointing that keeps failing, much consolidation and some anastylosis. Each charge applies in part, which sets the figure below Angkor Wat (9.0), whose form is whole and whose use never broke.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the film as released stands, and no lost or altered version replaces it. Its presence over seventy-eight years is continuous, in repertory, on television, on every home format and in the teaching of film and of dance, renewed as Powell’s standing was restored and again by the restoration of 2009. The fabric was damaged: the Technicolor negatives suffered shrinkage and mould, and the restoration repaired them; repair is not loss, and the charge is small. The surface is more fixed to 1948 than the myth is, in the company’s manners and the stage diction, and some of the acting reads as period. The bar is cleared by two tenths.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form survives whole as released, and the restoration is repair. Presence is continuous in repertory, film schools, criticism and home release, a fixture of the art cinema of the 1960s, but narrower than the widest presence: the film is less seen than L’Avventura (8.8) and far less than the popular canon, and that holds the figure where it stands. The fabric carries no charge. The surface is fixed in parts to its year, the open outcry of the Borsa, EUR under construction, the twist, and the racial masquerade of the Kenya scene, which now plays against the film and is weighed as surface, not loss. The moment it is fixed to is its subject, and it has outlived it.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across seventy-one years. The form is whole: the film survives as released in one version, and its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive is repair. Presence is charged for the first two decades: a failure on release, seen on television and in repertory but not held in view as its peers were. Since then presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory, on every home format, in teaching and in critics’ polls. The surface is the Depression river seen through 1955 eyes and through the silent cinema, so it ages as fable, not as fashion; a studio river was artifice from the start and cannot date as realism does. The fabric, monochrome photography of its period, is the smallest charge.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over forty-one years. The text survives whole as published and has been in print without a break; form and fabric take no charge. The presence is the widest a novel of its age can show: translated widely, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, set for national examinations, carried by Volker Schlöndorff’s film of 1990 from Harold Pinter’s screenplay, by Poul Ruders’s opera, by a television series from 2017 and by a graphic novel, followed by a sequel, The Testaments (2019), that won the Booker Prize, and adopted as a political emblem. Charged: much of the recent presence comes through the series and through topical politics, which are presence, not proof; the surface, its televangelists and its Compubank, is partly fixed to the American 1980s, though the book reads as more pertinent now than in 1985; and four decades demonstrate far less than centuries.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over about thirty-nine and a half years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print, remastered in 2020 and heard as an album. Presence is real and wide among musicians and critics, and the title track, U Got the Look and If I Was Your Girlfriend are known beyond the album; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The charge is that the album as a whole is heard less widely than the singles of its maker’s best-selling record. The fabric weighs for it more than against: the drum machine and some synthesiser tones bear their year, but the drum machine is used dry, as an instrument rather than a sheen, and the title track’s topical list has aged toward the present more than away from it. A surface that might have fixed the record to its moment has instead outlived the conditions that produced it, and the record clears the bar by two tenths.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, remastered and reissued. Presence is continuous: in print throughout, Sound and Vision in broadcast, the album heard whole and reworked for orchestra. That presence is wider among musicians and critics than among the public, and the charge stands. The fabric bears its moment: the synthesiser timbres and the harmonised snare are sounds of their year, and the drum sound became a sound of the 1980s, so part of the surface now dates to a decade later than the record. Little else is topical. It stands level with Taxi Driver and Closer, and below what has lasted longer.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixty-three years. The form survives whole: the Italian version has been restored from the original elements, and the film as released is complete and legible. The charge is an altered version. For years English-speaking audiences saw a cut, dubbed film of about 161 minutes in poorer colour, which stood in for the original in their circulation until the Italian version was restored and widely issued. That replacement was regional, is now repaired, and costs a tenth. Presence is continuous: repertory, television, home video, teaching, the restoration’s return to festivals and cinemas, a Criterion edition, and beyond cinema the political use of its title, though much of that presence belongs to the novel. The surface is the 1860s, made with archival care, and it ages as period rather than as fashion.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole and legible: both façades, the axes, the halls and sanctuaries, and the sun still runs the length of the Great Temple twice a year, as the makers set it. It has outlived the kingship, the cult, the language and the frontier that produced it. The use is lost: the cult ended in antiquity, sand closed the temples for centuries, and presence was broken until 1813 to 1817; it is a monument now, entered in great numbers but not in its purpose. The fabric is the makers’ stone, but cut into blocks and remounted over concrete domes: the rock-cut temple is no longer in its rock, nor on its river, and that is the heaviest charge. The paint is nearly gone, and one colossus fell in antiquity, a failure of the first making.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Forty-five years are weighed as forty-five years. The text survives whole as published in 1981, with nothing lost and no variant to charge. The presence is as wide as that span allows: in print in Spanish without a break since publication, translated into dozens of languages, among the most taught novels in the schools and universities of the Spanish-speaking world, widely set in English-language secondary and international curricula, and with a title that has entered common speech; fame and sales are presence, not proof. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the Caribbean coast of the 1950s is a setting, and the subject has not dated. What holds the axis there is the span itself. A survival of four decades shows presence and a sound text; it cannot show what a survival of centuries shows.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, as a work of millennia with ruin, lost use and heavy rebuilding. The form is legible and whole as a figure: terraces, ramps and porticoes on one axis against the cliff, seen from the plain as they were meant to be seen. But the valley temple and the causeway are largely gone; the king’s names and figures were hacked out across the programme and her statues broken; much colour is lost; and the upper terrace one sees is substantially a modern reconstruction. The cult ended in antiquity; the Ptolemaic healing cult and the Coptic monastery were reuses, and the temple is now a monument, entered and seen. Rockfall, quarrying and long burial wore the fabric. All three charges apply, so the figure sits at the foot of its step.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years. The form is whole: the stereo master of 1971 is the record still sold, and the sequence is intact. Presence is continuous and wide: the album has been in print throughout, Brown Sugar and Wild Horses are in broadcast, and the sleeve is known beyond the record’s listeners; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric, a warm, dry rock sound of the early 1970s, has aged well. What holds the figure: part of the surface is fixed to its moment, as Brown Sugar’s words have become harder to hear, and the album’s presence runs partly through its two famous songs rather than through the whole.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Forty-one years since publication, and presence of the widest kind. The novel has been continuously in print since 1985 in Spanish and since 1988 in Edith Grossman’s English, is taught, was filmed in 2007 (a weak film, which is presence only), and is among the most read novels in Spanish of its decade; fame and sales are presence, not proof. Its surface is not fixed to its moment. It was already a period book when written, set in a past the author cast in the manner of an older novel, and nothing topical dates it. What holds the axis there is the span: forty-one years is not survival in the sense the elder books have it, and the case rests on presence that is continuous and international rather than on outlasting the conditions that raised it. The axis stands where four decades of the widest presence can put it, and no higher.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored without an age discount, on survival shown and on what the work is built to bear. What makes the work is the field as laid, every skein in place and legible, and it is whole: sixty-nine years in one museum, lent rarely, never cut or dispersed; a standing with no eclipse, risen through the forgeries, the Cold War uses and the biography without loss; a surface with no topical sign and no figure that dates. Against this: house enamel on raw cotton duck was a wager on substances not made to last; the unprimed ground warms as it ages, the thick pools crack, and the surface can be neither varnished nor cleaned as an oil can. And no style of the century is more fixed to its three years: “looks like a Pollock” is a phrase. The painting has so far outlived its imitation, and has not yet had to outlive its paint. Held above the Rothko Chapel and well below Guernica.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival weighed in order. Form: the camera negative survives, with losses made good from release prints, and the 2014 restoration recovers the release version complete with its tinting; restoration is repair. Presence: continuous across a hundred and six years, in repertory, in teaching, in every history of the medium and on every home format, and in the public domain in many countries, so that it has circulated more widely than almost any silent feature, and its images are known beyond those who have seen it. The charge: for most of the century that presence was of cut, duped, untinted prints at the wrong speeds, and the silent medium narrows its living audience. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, and the damaged surface of its long presence holds it a tenth below.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and surface across sixty-four years. The form survives whole: one version, the colour prologue intact, restored by Ciné-Tamaris, its own production house, with nothing lost or replaced. Presence has been continuous in France and in teaching, thinner in English-language circulation through the 1970s to the 1990s than that of the most famous films of its decade, and much wider since the restoration and Varda’s late standing. The surface is the pop-music milieu and the fashions of 1961, but the film made them its subject, a woman built of a period’s surfaces, rather than leaning on them, and they have not dated its meaning. Credited at the usual figure for that span, not the widest.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the defining form, the multitude in formation facing east, is legible in the first pit as it stands, but by reassembly: nearly every standing figure was rebuilt from fragments after the roofs collapsed and the pit burned; the colour, which individuated the figures, is almost all gone; the timber and the chariots rotted; the weapons were largely taken. Presence: none for some twenty-two centuries. The work was buried by design and has been present to attention only since 1974, though since then on the widest scale, at the site, on tour and on the World Heritage List. Fabric: the fired clay has lasted twenty-two centuries in the ground. The work sits at the foot of the row for millennia with loss, because presence is charged for two thousand years and the colour, part of the form, is lost.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued in both editions, remastered and reissued. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians, producers and critics, kept in performance by the band itself into the 2010s and 2020s, sampled, litigated and taught; among the general public it is narrower than its reach. The fabric: the synthesiser and vocoder timbres are of their decade, but the record was made to sound retro-futurist from the start, a train of the 1950s seen from 1977, and it has dated less than most electronic records of its years. It stands level with Low, from the same year, and below what has lasted longer.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the full release survives whole and restored; the shortened American release of the 1970s was a variant and took nothing from the work. Presence: fifty-four years of continuous life in repertory, on television and on every home format, taught wherever cinema is taught, with a remake that kept its title in circulation. Wide, but within the cinema; it has not passed into common culture as a line or a tune has. Fabric: the station’s design, the commission’s furniture and a Tokyo expressway offered as the future are of 1971 and read so, though the Earth sequences and the ocean do not date, and the Sovcolor image is of its stock. The usual figure for its age, short of the widest. Decades do not outscore centuries.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over sixty-six years. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as Borges left it, and has been in print in Spanish throughout. Presence is real and continuous: the book is taught wherever Borges is, translated with his complete works, and two of its pieces are among the most anthologised short texts of the century, read as from El hacedor, by that name. The charge is that presence belongs more to the pieces than to the book. In English the unit is split, the prose carried in Hurley’s Collected Fictions and the poems in the Selected Poems, and few readers meet the book as a book. That is not the charge of a neglected text, and it is taken at a step.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form, a colossal Buddha under a great timber roof at the end of an axis entered through a great gate, has survived two total burnings of its hall and is legible today; but it was changed, the hall narrowed from eleven bays to seven, the two pagodas never replaced, the image remade in head and hands. The use is worship since 752, broken in the hall’s case by the century and more after 1567 when the image sat in the open; the Shuni-e carries it without a break by the temple’s own account. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: of the eighth century the axis keeps the lantern and parts of the bronze; the gate is of 1199, the hall of 1709, its roof held by steel since 1913. Altered form and replaced fabric hold it where it is.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-six years. The form is whole, in print since release. Presence is continuous and wider than first sales: Once in a Lifetime has stayed in broadcast and in common speech, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. The fabric is little fixed to 1980: the record avoided the period’s drum machines and gated sound, and its grooves are played by hand, though the synthesiser tones and some treated guitar are of their year. Charged: the album is heard less than its one song, and much of its presence is among musicians and critics. It stands in the upper part of the records of its age, level with Closer at 8.7, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, as a ruin whose use is long lost. Form: the exterior composition, the work’s defining invention, is legible; the three porches, the two levels and the main block stand, and the design has outlived its cult and its city as a model copied. But the interior, the arrangement of the cults within, is lost and recoverable only by argument, and the roof is gone. Use: lost since late antiquity; church, dwelling and ruin followed, and the building is now seen, not entered. Fabric: the west front Roman and restored, casts on the parapet, a column of the east porch in London, the frieze in fragments, much of the north porch rebuilt after 1827, the colour gone. The figure is held where a ruin’s survival begins, because form survives at the exterior only.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the twelve performances exist as issued. Presence is continuous in Brazil, where the record is a national reference and its songs are sung by every generation since, and real but narrower abroad, where the songs and Getz/Gilberto are better known than this LP. The presence of the album as released is charged: Gilberto contested EMI’s remixed and reordered compilation of the three Odeon albums in 1988, and the dispute kept the records out of authorised circulation in their original form for long stretches. The fabric is a clean, close mono studio recording of the 1950s; the string writing carries its date, the voice and guitar almost none. Sixty-seven years: below Kind of Blue (9.0), as old and more widely present.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across sixty-four years. The film as released survives whole; it has been restored and is in continuous circulation in repertory, on home video and in teaching, which is repair and presence. Presence is steady and international among the audiences of art cinema, though narrower than that of the decade’s most-seen films. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the Paris of 1962, the jukebox and the cafés, but it ages as document rather than as fashion, and the film’s thought is not topical. Neither charge is heavy. The figure is what that span of survival usually earns when presence is not the widest, and it stands a tenth under the 8.8 at which survival in a medium this young is held.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, and all three are charged. The form: the governing idea, a line of wall and tower on the crests from sea to desert, is legible wherever the wall stands, and it has outlived the dynasty, the frontier and the threat that produced it. But the form is broken: by the surveys’ reports about a third of the Ming wall has gone, and in the west the line is often a worn ridge of earth. The use: defence ended in 1644 and has not returned; the visited monument on a few restored sections is a second life. The fabric: the restored sections are partly rebuilt, Laolongtou wholly, and the unrestored crest is breaking up.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across about twelve and a half centuries. Form: the defining scenes are legible, the arraignment wall best of all, but much of the surface lies under a crust of calcite laid by water through the vault, colour has faded and flaked, caption glyphs and whole figures are lost or recoverable only by reconstruction and infrared imaging, and early cleaning did harm. Presence: none for about eleven centuries outside the forest and the Lacandón Maya who knew the building; continuous attention only since 1946, and since then largely at a remove, through copies, because the rooms are small and access is controlled. Fabric: in place and original where it survives. Centuries with loss and heavy repair, at the foot of their range for the long absence and the share of the image now held by reconstruction.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over one and a quarter to two centuries. Form: the defining form of the large figures survives, the carved body with its iron, and the type is legible. But parts that carried the meaning are often lost: the weapon in the raised hand, medicine packs and their mirrors broken or emptied, feathers and bindings, and above all the figure’s life as an nkisi, its use, which ended with its removal. The work was an accumulating practice and stands now as a closed record, and that loss takes from it what the nails were for. Presence: continuous in museum view for over a century and widely shown, which lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: wood with insect damage, iron with corrosion, the smallest charge.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nineteen centuries. The form survives in part: the plan is legible on the ground and on paper, and the governing idea of separate worlds on turning axes has outlived the empire as a model studied and answered. But the form of each building is partly lost: roofs, vaults, upper storeys, the colonnades that walled the gardens, the interiors that made the rooms. The use is lost entirely; the villa was abandoned within a few centuries and is now visited, not lived in. The concrete cores are the makers’; the marble, sculpture, mosaics, stucco and paint were stripped, burned for lime or dispersed, and the Canopus as seen is in part re-erected with copies.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival over 111 years, weighed in order. Form: legible and whole; the square on its white field is there to be seen, and the image has outlived Suprematism, the Soviet avant-garde and the state that turned against it. Presence: charged, on the evidence that its reach abroad ran through reproduction and the idea rather than the object; how long it was kept from view at home is not settled here, and no span is given. Fabric: charged more than for most paintings. The black is crazed across its whole extent, with earlier paint showing in the cracks, and for a work whose content is an unbroken black field the craquelure takes more than surface: the absolute reads now as an aged object. Fame is presence, not proof. Set two to four tenths below the usual figure for a painting of its age.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The Italian release is the work, and the American release of 1946 was a variant that did not replace it. Presence has been continuous for eighty-one years in film teaching, film history and repertory, and the film stands in every account of postwar cinema; its presence beyond those circles is narrower than that of the most famous films of its decade, and that is charged a little. Its surface is fixed to its moment, an occupied Rome of 1944, but fixed as history, not as fashion, and the condition it shows has not aged. The fabric was rough from the start, grainy and on mixed stock with imperfect sound, the smallest charge. Wide but not the widest presence sets the figure.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print, reissued and remastered. Presence is continuous but narrower than the record’s fame. It sold modestly on release; Gloria and Land are known, and the album is heard whole chiefly by musicians, critics and devoted listeners, so that its place on every list is reputation more than presence. The fabric dates less than most records of its year, because Cale’s plain production and a garage band ask for no period technology. Nothing draws it toward the widest presence, and nothing charges it below the usual figure for its span. It stands level with Low and Remain in Light at 8.7.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years, on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print without a break; nothing is charged on it. Presence: continuous and international, the book widely translated and taught as a central book of postwar American fiction; Ernest Lehman’s film of 1972 failed and did not carry it. The charge falls on presence and fabric, a tenth below the usual figure for its span. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the analyst’s couch and the Freudian vocabulary as a culture’s common speech, the sexual revolution as news, the shock that was much of its first force. That shock is spent, and the book’s place in Roth’s reputation has moved toward the novels of the 1990s. It is read now as a classic of its decade more than as a living provocation, and decades demonstrate less than centuries.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form survives whole: the film as released is intact, an English version is an alternate soundtrack over the same images rather than a replacement, and restorations repair the image without revision. Presence has been continuous for six decades, in repertory, in teaching and on every home-video format, and it reaches beyond cinema into art and into science fiction through its adaptation. That presence is wide for a short film, though narrower in the public than the most circulated features of its decade. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the war is imagined, the past undated, and the stills age only as photographs do, which is their subject. The bar is cleared by two tenths.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the plan, the volumes, the bridge, the row of hall, stage and canteen and the studio block are the maker’s and legible, and the building has outlived its conditions as a model answered for a century. But its defining element, the glass wall of the workshop wing, was destroyed in 1945 and stands as a reconstruction, restored again since, and form carried by fabric is charged with it. Use: the school it was built for used it six years; it passed to other uses through the Nazi years and the war, and only since the 1970s and 1990s has it returned to teaching, design and exhibition, a use akin to its own, not its own. Fabric: bomb damage, provisional repair, the rebuilding of 1976 and the later restoration replaced much of what is seen.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across sixty-seven years. The form survives whole, and the restorations on video repair the same film. Presence has been continuous since 1959, in exhibition, in schools and film courses, in repertory and on home video in restored editions, and the film has stood in the critics’ polls of Sight and Sound in every decade. That presence is wide but not the widest: it is a canonical film for those who study cinema rather than one every audience knows, as it knows Psycho (8.8) or Citizen Kane (8.8). The surface is 1950s Paris, its school and its reform institution, and the film is about them, so they age as record rather than as fashion; the condition it treats has not aged.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Thirty-eight years, and the film as released survives whole: one cut, the Japanese original, with restorations for home video and theatrical revival counted as repair. The English dubs of 1989 and 2005 are added soundtracks laid on the same picture; the original remains in circulation, and nothing is charged to them. Presence is of the widest kind: continuous television broadcast in Japan, home video and streaming across the world, and a creature known far beyond the film. Box office and merchandise are evidence of presence only. The surface is set deliberately in a past period and depends on no technology of its moment, so nothing in it has dated against its year. Survival is credited at the widest figure for its span.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 145 years. Form: whole and legible. The figure stands; the pose, the face, the dress and the idea of the case are all present, and nothing that carried meaning is lost. Presence: interrupted for the unit. The wax was in view for weeks in 1881, then in the studio and, after Degas’s death, out of public view until it came to Paul Mellon in the 1950s and then to the National Gallery, where it is shown. The image was present far more widely through the bronzes, and presence earns a tenth at most. Fabric: the most perishable on the visual desk at its age. The wax has darkened and cracked, the ribbon has faded, and how much of the gauze is original cannot be stated. These change the surface the uncanny depends on.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole and legible: the levelled summit, the plaza, its closing platforms, the axis and the central spine can be read from any platform, some twenty-five centuries after the first works and some twelve after the city emptied. The use is lost: the city had ceased to be a capital by about 800, Mixtec people later buried their dead in it, and it is now a site entered by many and used as built by none. The fabric carries the heaviest charge. The stucco, the colour and the temple superstructures are gone, and what stands was excavated from mounds and in large part rebuilt or consolidated from the 1930s on. What survives intact is what the work most is: the plaza and its enclosure.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Sixty years since release, and presence of the widest kind: continuous exhibition, broadcast, home video in every format, and constant quotation of image and score. The form survives whole: the international cut exists complete. The charge is to surface and version. The extended restoration of 2003, with new English dubbing and a remixed track, became for some years the version most often seen, displacing the cut as released. The film was always a post-synchronised object, so this is the alteration of a surface already provisional, not the loss of the work, and it is charged lightly: a tenth below what the widest presence would carry, and well clear of the bar of 8.5.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. About fifty years. The form is whole and its governing idea entirely legible, and it has outlived the conditions that produced it, as a model copied and answered. The use survives: it is still a private house, in use, which is a strong form of survival for a house attacked as unliveable. The fabric is concrete, and its later history of repair is thinly recorded, so the figure takes the low end of its row. Presence is wide in architectural culture, but the house is private, unvisited and small, and does not earn the widest presence; fame is presence, not proof of permanence, and lends nothing here. Fifty years are scored as what they show.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over fifty years. The form is whole and legible, unaltered in its governing idea. The use is continuous: it is the parish church it was built to be, used every week since 1976. The fabric is the concrete, tile and glass of the 1970s, which have needed and received care, and nothing known has taken from the form. Presence is steady in the profession and moderate with the public; it is not at the widest, and fame would lend no more than a tenth in any case. Nothing is charged against form or use. What holds the figure where it is is the span: fifty years is a short demonstration, and the building has only just crossed it.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-six years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, and the eleven-track sequence stands. Presence is continuous: in print throughout, Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Southern Man in broadcast, the title song sung by others. The fabric is little fixed to its moment, an intimate, close-miked sound that has not dated, though the title song names its decade in so many words, “the nineteen seventies”, and singers since have had to change it. What holds the figure: the presence is narrower than the widest of its age, and runs largely through the artist’s catalogue and through musicians.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: published and performed as written, with nothing lost. Presence covers forty-nine years, continuous in concert, on record, in dance and in film since the 1980s, among the widest of any concert work of its decade. At that age and that breadth the survival table stands at 8.7 to 8.8. The figure is held at the lower step because the surface carries a little of its moment: the prepared piano’s bells and the slow sacred stillness are the signature of a taste that peaked in the 1990s, and part of the work’s presence is the use of Silentium as an atmosphere, which is presence and not proof. The concert and recording record alone would carry the work most of the way.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across eleven and a half centuries. The form is legible again only because the centre was rebuilt from its fallen stone, from 1918 on; the second court, the extent of the mandala, remains a field of ruin, so the plan reads as a diagram on the ground more than as built rings. The use was lost for about a thousand years after the court left; Hindu ceremonies are held there on occasion, but it is a monument, not a temple in daily worship. The fabric is largely the original andesite re-set, with new stone where pieces were missing and fresh repair after 2006. The presence is real: a World Heritage site among the most visited in Indonesia.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, unaltered in sequence, in print throughout and remastered. Presence is continuous and wide: Peg, Deacon Blues and Josie have stayed in broadcast for four decades, and the album is heard whole and not only through its singles. Part of that presence is narrower in kind, among musicians, engineers and the audiophile trade, and part of its later currency came through a retrospective fashion for the polished soft rock of its years, which is charged. The fabric is the record’s strength: acoustic and electric instruments recorded with great fidelity, almost no synthesiser, nothing that dates as the drum machines of a few years later would, though the sheen is plainly of its place and decade. It stands level with Low, of the same year.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric, over fifty years from the first performance. The form survives whole, and it has passed from its maker’s ensemble to many others, which is the strongest evidence a score can give that it lives apart from the players it was made with. Presence is continuous and, for a concert work of its years, wide: it is among the most performed and recorded concert works of the 1970s. It is not the widest presence of its age, being heard by a smaller public than the records and films of the same decades that have survived best. The fabric carries little of its date: acoustic instruments and voices, with nothing electronic beyond amplification. For fifty years the evidence is strong, and the figure stands at the foot of what fifty years can show.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-four years. Form: the film as released survives whole, in one version, and its restorations are repair. Presence: continuous since 1962, in Soviet and later Russian exhibition, in festival and repertory retrospectives of the director, on home video in restored editions and in teaching; but narrower than the widest of its span, the least circulated of the director’s major films, more often met as the beginning of Tarkovsky than for itself, with a small public beyond art cinema. Fabric: the surface fixed to its moment is the Great Patriotic War, and the film is about what that war did to a child, so it ages as history, not fashion; the newsreel coda is a document by design. Decades do not outscore centuries.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty years, from 1976 to 2026. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued many times, though later issues have added tracks to the sequence and the two-sided original is less often heard as such, a small charge to the unit. Presence is continuous and wide in West Africa and real abroad: the title track remains the best known of Fela’s songs, central to his catalogue, to the revival and to the stage musical. But the album lives in the shadow of its first side, and outside Africa its presence is narrower. The fabric is little fixed: an acoustic band, recorded with little studio effect, and a subject, obedience under command, that has outlived the government it mocked. It stands level with Low and Remain in Light.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole as released: one version exists and has been restored, with no lost or altered cut to charge. Presence across eighty-six years is wide: continuous exhibition, television, schools and courses in American history and literature, a place in the National Film Registry’s first year, 1989, and the standing reference for the Dust Bowl in American memory. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, for the widest presence, and this presence is wide but not the widest: its place with the general audience has thinned beside Ford’s Westerns, and part of its surface (the studio comedy, the camp as government advertisement, Ma’s speech) is fixed to its New Deal moment.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-nine years. The form is whole: the French version survives complete and is the one in circulation, and the shortened, English-dubbed The Godson of 1972 was a variant that took nothing from it; restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous among those who care for cinema, in repertory, television, every home format and teaching, and its look is widely known through its descendants. The surface ages little, since the film was made almost out of time, though the cars, Delon’s styling and the club with its pianist read as 1967. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, and the figure is held a tenth short because the presence has stayed largely within cinephilia.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, with nothing lost, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous for sixty-seven years: exhibition, television, every home format, revival screenings, teaching, the National Film Registry in its first year, and Monroe’s performance and image in constant circulation; it is about as wide as a film of its decade reaches. Black and white has kept the fabric from dating as colour would have. The one charge is on the surface: some of its jokes about gender and some of its gangster turns read as period, and parts of its audience now watch the drag with different eyes. Survival is credited nearly in full, short of the widest by that small charge.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, and has been remastered and reissued. Presence is continuous but not the widest. The record has stayed in print and in the lists of the decade’s essential albums, and among musicians its presence is very wide, but it has never been widely heard by the public, and no track of it is a broadcast standard as Once in a Lifetime or Sound and Vision is. The fabric bears its moment lightly: the recording is rough and close by later standards, and the rhythm box of Peking O belongs to its year, but no production fashion in it has dated, and the drumming sounds current. Narrow public presence holds it where it stands.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the governing idea, three saw-tooth tiers of polygonal masonry, is wholly legible along the north face, and the lowest tier stands close to whole. The upper tiers are reduced, the summit buildings are gone to their foundations, and the gateways have lost what they led to; that is a real charge, though the unit is the walls. Use: the original use is lost and not even known; the staged Inti Raymi and the place of the walls as Cusco’s emblem keep them entered, a revived use, not a continuous one. Fabric: the makers’ own stone, unrestored in its great courses, has outlasted the earthquakes of 1650 and 1950. Five centuries in ruin with the use lost set it at 8.7, held down for the quarrying.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-one years. The form survives whole: one version, no loss, no recut displacing it, and its restorations are repair. Presence is as wide as a film’s can be: continuous on television and on every home format, repeated theatrical revivals, selection for the National Film Registry, its music and lines in common use by people who have not seen it. Part of that presence is fame, which is not proof of permanence; but the film is also taught as a model of suspense and editing, which is use. Held a tenth below the widest presence because the surface is charged in one place: the mechanical shark of the last act, seen in full daylight, reads as a machine to a viewer of today in a way the withheld shark never does, and the climax depends on it. It stands a tenth above Schindler’s List, by the longer span.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Form first: after 124 years all three walls survive and stand in their order, legible and whole in sequence. Presence second, and charged: made to stand for one exhibition and then be destroyed, saved by a collector, cut from its walls, seized, stored through a war and spared a fire that took its neighbours, out of public view for about eighty years and continuously shown only since 1986. Fabric third, and charged with it: casein and plaster in sections, damaged and restored over a decade, with retouching that cannot be measured, set again in a room that reconstructs its first disposition rather than in the hall it was painted for. The manner is closely dated to 1902, but the surface is not fixed to an event. Its present fame lends at most a tenth. The form is whole, and the axis clears the gate.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, and the rebuilding is weighed here. The form survives legible and whole: the three baileys, the convent square, the palace, the refectories and the walls stand in the Order’s plan, and the governing idea, cloister, palace and fortress in one, is plain. The use is lost: no convent or seat of the Order since 1457, then a royal residence, then barracks and stores, and a museum since 1961; the presence has been continuous, as monument. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: a reconstruction of much of the High Castle to a conjectured medieval state, the damage of 1945, and a second reconstruction that made good the first as well as the medieval work.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the bodies and heads survive whole, and the defining form, the standing warrior turned in attention, is fully legible after some 2,450 years. The shields, spears and helmets are gone; they completed the silhouettes and carried the figures’ identity, and their loss is charged in proportion: not the meaning of the body, but a real part of the meaning of the work. Presence: the figures were absent from attention for an unknown span under the sea, on the usual estimate some two thousand years, and have been present only since 1972; continuous presence is the weakest part of the case. Fabric: the bronze outlasted immersion, corrosion and incrustation, and has been cleaned and stabilised in successive campaigns. Millennia of endurance with loss and a broken presence: the lowest mark that millennia with loss can earn.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at forty-six to forty-nine years. Form: whole. The series as the artist has fixed it survives in prints from her negatives, and no image is known to be lost. Presence: as wide as any photographic series of its century, shown and reproduced constantly; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: gelatin silver, among the most stable photographic processes, printed in editions, so that no single print carries the work. A surface fixed to its moment would be charged, but the moment the series takes is already a remembered past, and the work has outlived the theory of its own decade. Nothing is charged, and the figure sits where its age and its presence place it.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, at 132 years. The form survives: the plan, the section, the street front and the governing hall are legible as Horta made them. The use is lost. It was a single man’s house and has not been lived in as one for most of a century; it was divided and converted. The fabric is in part original, the iron, the stone and the main structure, and in part reconstruction: decoration lost or altered in the twentieth century was remade in the restoration, from evidence, and how much of the painted work and glass is original cannot be stated. The furniture is not part of what stands. The charge for lost use and reconstructed decoration is taken; it is not heavy rebuilding, and the figure stays well above ruin.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The span is some 4,100 years. The form’s governing idea is legible from the foot of the stairs, mass, batter and three converging flights, but the form has lost its summit, the stage or stages above the second and the shrine, which were the end of everything that survives. The use is lost: cult use ended with the city, and for more than two millennia the building has been a mound and then a monument. The fabric is charged too: the core and much of the lower envelope are the makers’, but the facade and stairs were rebuilt in the 1980s, and the building stood near an air base through two wars. Ruin, lost use and heavy rebuilding are all charged.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published in 1975, with no versions and no loss. Presence is continuous: the book has been in print throughout in Britain, in successive paperback lines and in the collected reissues of Ballard’s novels; it is taught in courses on dystopian and urban fiction, it was filmed in 2015, and it is cited across disciplines. Its surface is fixed to its moment, the brutalist tower and the professional class of 1975, yet the book has not dated as that moment passed, because the towers and their argument have returned to public life. It stands at the foot of what its span usually earns, not above it. Its presence is strong in Britain and among readers of Ballard and of speculative fiction, but narrower than the widest: it is not a school text across the anglophone world, and its fame has been raised by the film more than proved by it.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across close to sixty years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, with restorations as repair. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching and constant citation, of its lines, its songs and the leg in the poster. Survival is demonstrated across that span. The surface is charged a tenth: the California of 1967, the music, the clothes and the campus are fixed to a moment, though the film is about that moment and ages largely as period.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-six years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, reissued and remastered, and the session reels survive beside it. Presence is the charge. The record failed on release and was little heard for years; its presence since has grown and is continuous now, in print and streamed, placed high whenever the rock album is counted, and kept alive by musicians. It remains wider among musicians and critics than among the public, and no song from it is a standard of broadcast. The fabric is little fixed to its year: the sound rests on almost no period technology, and a band in a room has aged less than the studio sound of 1970. The interrupted early presence holds the figure.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives legible and nearly whole: terraces, stair, temple and comb stand to their full height after some thirteen centuries, with the plaza and the facing temple. The use is lost wholly: the cult ended with the city in the ninth and tenth centuries, the building stood a thousand years in forest, and it is now a monument that visitors no longer climb. The fabric is charged: the plaster and paint are gone, the modelled figure of the roof comb is reduced to traces, the stair and terraces were consolidated and in part rebuilt by modern campaigns, the lintels that carried its one image of the king were cut out and taken to Basel, and the contents of the tomb were removed. The whole form lifts the axis; the losses of use, image and fabric hold it.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: the vault and its eight points as built, legible and unaltered in its governing idea. It has outlived the economy of cheap skilled formwork labour that produced it, does not read as a period piece, and after sixty-eight years remains the case the literature on shells turns to. Use and fabric are weighed with less certainty. The enclosure and interior beneath the shell have been changed, how often and how far is not established, and the present condition of the concrete is not established either; the figure carries that uncertainty and is held a little below the usual step for its age. Presence is wide among architects and engineers and narrower among the public, and earns little. What holds the axis is what cannot be shown of the fabric, not what is known of the form.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form is whole and legible, and it has outlived the conditions of its making, kept and lengthened in its own image rather than replaced: the strongest evidence of survival a working building can give. The use is continuous, as the airport’s main terminal since 1962, but its operating idea has largely gone, the lounges reduced to a minority service and the hall become a headhouse to concourses and a train; the charge is partial, because the room is still the room of departure. The fabric: piers and roof are original, glass and interiors altered, counters and screening inserted. The extension is faithful, not a loss. Its presence is wide within its field, not the widest.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: whole and legible after a century, its governing idea intact, and it has outlived the conditions that produced it, the Civil War, the state that built it and the radio age it served; it is known, copied and answered. Use: diminished. It was built to broadcast and carried radio and then television for decades; its service now is at most residual. Fabric: charged. The steel has corroded over a century of neglect, and in 2014 the tower was nearly dismantled; it survived by campaign, not by care. The scope of repair since then is not known with confidence and is not credited. Lost use and a threatened fabric hold the figure below the span the form has earned.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form, as left, is legible: front, flanks and chapels are the 1450s’, and the idea of the arch front has outlived the lordship that made it, studied as a model and a problem for five and a half centuries. Its incompleteness was there from the start and is not charged as loss. The use is continuous: a church throughout, a cathedral since 1809, entered and used in its purpose. The fabric carries the charge. The bombing of 1943 to 1944 damaged the church heavily, and the building now standing is the church as restored after the war, a heavy restoration on the makers’ design and not a replacement. The figure is held in the lower part of its range for that restoration and for the stump that time has fixed.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible as almost nowhere else of its age: the streets, the blocks, the house plans, the drains and the Bath can still be walked and read more than four thousand years on, and this is the strongest of the twelve. The use and presence are lost: the city was abandoned by about 1900 BC, its existence forgotten until 1922, and it is entered now only as a ruin. The fabric is charged: brick that survived burial has decayed since exposure, attacked by salt drawn up from rising groundwater; much of what is seen has been capped or relaid; floods of the Indus remain a threat; and the lowest levels are under water. Lost presence and fabric under attack set it at 8.7.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and reissued. Presence is continuous and wide. The record is heard whole, as it was meant to be, in homes and public rooms and now on streaming playlists of focus and sleep, and it has been performed live in an acoustic arrangement. Popularity is presence, not proof, and the widest presence earns a tenth at most. The fabric is little fixed to its year: piano, voices and tape reverberation carry almost no date, and only the synthesiser of 2/2 and the tape hiss mark it. It stands level with Low and Remain in Light at their spans, and well below what has lasted centuries.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the twelve-track record survives as issued and has stayed in print, reissued many times, sometimes with Volume Two. Presence is continuous and wide for its songs: I Can’t Stop Loving You and You Don’t Know Me remain in broadcast and in common knowledge, and the record is named whenever the history of country music and race is told. The album heard whole has a narrower public than its two best-known songs, and that is charged. So is the fabric: the studio chorus and the string writing are sounds of 1962, heard by some now as dated sweetening, though the voice and the band have not dated. It stands below the widest presence among albums, Kind of Blue at 9.0.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, across some eleven and a half centuries. The form survives in part: the enclosure’s outline, walls and towers, and the Malwiya whole in figure, so the governing idea, a vast walled precinct with a spiral tower on its axis, is legible from the ground and from the air. What made the mosque a room, the hypostyle and its roof, is gone, and survives only as a plan. The use was lost early, after the court left in 892, and the building has long stood as ruin and monument. The fabric carries the third charge: walls much restored, the Malwiya’s summit damaged in 2005. Presence has been wide and constant. The loss of both interior form and use holds it at the foot of its range.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. Form: the plan, the axis, the open hall and the chariot are legible and whole in their governing idea; the loss of the brick and stucco superstructures takes the shrine’s tower and the gateways’ height, which mattered to the skyline and the cosmic diagram, but not the core of what the work is. Use: lost entirely since 1565, the image gone and the festival ended; that is the heaviest charge. Fabric: the granite is durable and stands, and the hall has needed propping and repair. Presence: continuous, recorded since about 1800, among the most visited sites in India and on its currency, which earns at most a tenth. Centuries in ruin with lost use set its band, and it stands at the foot of it.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, the loss charged in proportion to what it takes. The form survives and is legible: three storeys, three manners, roof and phoenix stand where they stood, rebuilt whole to a documented survey within five years, and the design has outlived the shogunate, the villa and the war that destroyed every other building of it. The use survives: the relic hall of a working temple before 1950 and after. The fabric is lost entire, burned in 1950 with its contents; what stands is a building of 1955, regilded in 1987, and its complete gold, over a pavilion that had weathered to dark timber, in part restates the design rather than keeps it. The garden survives in its layout and stones.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, over 312 years. The form survives whole: plan, tiers and the twenty-two domes are those of 1714, legible from the water and recovered from the nineteenth century’s boarding and metal. The use is charged: worship ended in the Soviet period, and the church has since been a museum building, its interior long closed behind a steel frame set inside it. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: the shingles have been renewed many times, as a shingled roof must be, and the frame has been lifted and a large share of its logs replaced, in kind and on the same joints. That a log building has stood three centuries on an open lake is itself rare, and its presence is wide.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-three years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Its presence has been continuous and wide: the Academy Award, revival and repertory showing, television, home video in every format, teaching, and a title in common Italian speech; Rota’s theme is among the most played film themes of its time. The surface ages little, because a film of the 1930s made in the 1970s, in a studio and as remembrance, does not carry the date of its making as a contemporary surface would. Its frank sexual comedy and its regard for women now read as of their moment; they colour its reception without removing it from view. Its presence passes beyond cinema in the word, though not to the widest degree.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over fifty-six to fifty-seven years. Form: each canvas whole as far as can be shown, none cut or altered, and the format, which is the work, wholly legible. Presence: the series has been in view and in the literature since the 1970s, in two of the principal American collections among others, but it is dispersed among institutions and owners and is shown as a group only when a retrospective reassembles it. Dispersal is not loss of form, since the group was never an installation, but it is a charge on presence. Fabric: acrylic, which on present evidence has aged well; the late surfaces are matte and easily marked, and only that general risk is charged.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The governing form survives: the walls, the gates, the public axis from the Lahori Gate to the Diwan-i-Am, the principal pavilions of the terrace and the mosque. But the courts, gardens and household quarters that made the palace a city within the city were demolished in large part after 1857, and the Peacock Throne, the silver ceiling and much inlay were taken; that loss carried meaning and is charged in proportion. The use as imperial palace ended in 1857; the fort was a garrison until 2003 and is now monument, museum and national stage, present without a break since 1648. The river is gone. The sandstone and marble have held, with restoration. The figure is low for a work so long present and high for one so reduced.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the strata, the towers and the three houses stand as designed, and the NT Future works of about 2013 to 2015 left the governing idea untouched and in places restored it. The use has been continuous since 1976, in its own purpose: the company is still resident and the foyers are still in daily public use; the studio’s refit and new name are a change of use within purpose. The fabric has weathered, stained and needed care, as all exposed concrete of the period has, but it stands. The building has passed from derision to Grade II* protection, and so has outlived both the taste that produced it and the taste that rejected it. Fifty years is the span weighed.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two thousand years. Form: the defining form of the body, the head and its eye, survives in hundreds of heads, but whole figures are rare and most bodies are lost to breakage. Presence: buried and unknown for some two thousand years, found by tin mining in the twentieth century, before attention only since the 1940s. Looting since the 1980s has destroyed context at scale and filled the market with forgeries and with pastiches assembled from ancient fragments, which charges the corpus as record. Fabric: fired clay is durable; surfaces are worn, and many pieces are rejoined or restored. Centuries to millennia with heavy loss, at the foot of that step for the long absence and the contaminated record: level with the Terracotta Army at 8.7, another buried body recovered in fragments.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, at about sixty-seven years in the final state. Form: whole and legible; goat, tyre and platform stand in their final arrangement, and nothing of the defining structure is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: continuous in the literature, in a public museum in Stockholm, and among the most reproduced works of its decade, though fame is not proof. Fabric is charged: a taxidermied animal with real fleece is perishable matter, more exposed than a canvas, and the goat has needed conservation, whose extent is not given here. The work’s physical life depends on the continued care of organic matter in a way a painting’s does not. Whole in form, wide in presence, charged on fabric.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Span: seventy-six years, in the row from seventy years to two centuries, whose usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Form: whole as far as is known, one canvas, never cut or added to, with no later hand. Presence: charged. The canvas has been in private hands for most of its life, and its image is known more through the reporting of its sale than through being seen; fame and price lift the figure little. A private picture is not lost, but it has not been continuously present to attention as a painting. Fabric: Rothko’s thin layered surfaces are vulnerable to light, abrasion and fugitive pigment, as the fading of his Harvard murals of 1962 shows; the state of this surface is not known, and only the general risk is charged.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: the slab, the lifted block, the court, the open ground and the proportions are Bunshaft’s and legible, and the building has outlived the company’s occupation, a proposal to replace it with a larger tower, and the period of corporate modernism that made it, as a model copied and answered. Use survives: offices without a break since 1952, though the client left and the ground floor and plaza have been altered for later uses. Fabric is charged more than for most buildings of its age: the curtain wall, the building’s whole face and the substance of its claim, failed within fifty years and was replaced entire in 2001 to 2002. The new wall reproduces the old faithfully; but where the skin is the form, renewing it takes more than a surface.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The grids stand as made, in prints and in the book, and nothing that carried the work is known to be lost. Many of the towers have been demolished, which takes nothing from the work and adds to it as record. Presence: continuous and wide in its field since the 1970s, in the museums of photography and of modern art, and in a book long in circulation; a body that has outlived the industrial landscape it recorded. Fabric: gelatin silver prints, carefully made, are among the most stable of photographic objects. The body was made across decades and the book is thirty-eight years old. The figure is at the lower end of its row, because the widest presence is a field’s, not the world’s.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over some seven and a half centuries. The form is legible and largely whole: plan, room blocks, towers and kivas stand in the alcove as built, protected by the overhang, and walls of three and four storeys of mud-mortared stone have stood since the thirteenth century. The use is lost: no one has lived in the village since about 1280, and it is now entered by visitors and held by descendant communities as an ancestral place. Its presence to the wider world was broken for some six centuries, though not to the Ute or to Pueblo memory. The fabric carries the charge: roofs and most timbers gone, plaster mostly lost, contents removed, walls capped and stabilised from 1909.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: whole, one canvas, unaltered after the painter so far as is known. Presence: in a private collection and then in a major museum collection; shown and reproduced among her best-known paintings of the 1960s, though not on continuous view, and her presence as a whole is wide rather than the widest. Fabric: gold leaf on canvas is chemically stable, but a gilded and incised surface on a flexible support is open to abrasion, to flaking along the cuts and to cracking where the canvas moves; and the incised grid is the work’s form, so damage to it would take from the meaning. No such damage is known; the charge is for the general risk and for a presence short of the widest, a tenth below the usual figure for its age.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-four years. The form survives whole, the film as released in one version, and restorations have repaired the image. The red depends on colour stock and printing and is the part of the fabric most at risk; it has been kept legible, and that is the smallest charge. The surface is fixed to no moment: a manor at the end of the nineteenth century, dressed as period, so that nothing in it dates to 1972. Presence is continuous in revival, on television, on home video and in teaching, and the film is among its maker’s most often shown. What holds the figure is the reach of that presence: wide inside art cinema, it has not passed beyond it, as its maker’s best-known images, from other films, have.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-six years. The form is whole: one version, surviving complete. Presence is continuous and unusually wide, and for an odd reason: the copyright lapsed, so for decades the film played on television and circulated on cheap video in every market, and it has also been in repertory and teaching throughout; it is on the National Film Registry. Against this, the fabric: for much of its life the film was seen through worn, duped public-domain prints with poor sound, a real charge for a film whose instrument is its soundtrack, made good by later restorations. The surface, newspapers, a hanging and a radical scare of the late 1930s, is period, but the film is about the press room’s appetite, which has not aged. The fabric holds it a tenth below the widest survival of its age.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-five years. Form: whole, one panel, with no loss known. Presence: wide as an image, reproduced as the emblem of the painter’s beginning and of optical painting, and the painter’s standing has risen rather than fallen since; fame is presence, not proof. The panel is understood to belong to a collection that lends and tours its works rather than hanging them in one place; that is not verified here, and it is charged a little. Fabric: tempera on hardboard, a stable support, with a matte surface whose blacks would show any scuffing or retouching, a general risk only. Against it, a surface fixed to its moment: the manner was a fashion of the mid 1960s, and it has outlived the fashion.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-nine years. Form: the release survives whole, and the sequence cut before release survives too, reinstated in a restoration of 1998; the restoration is repair, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence: continuous exhibition, the restoration’s re-release, home video, a place in teaching, and a second life through Sweet Charity; but its presence is narrower than that of Fellini’s most famous films, and it is not one of the films everyone has seen. The surface of Rome in 1957, the ruins, the borgata and the Via Veneto, ages as history rather than as fashion, and the condition it treats has not changed. Held a step short of the widest figure by presence, not by any loss.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its theatrical cut, nothing lost and nothing replaced, and restorations for home video repair it without revising it. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching in film and acting programmes, and a scene and a chant known well beyond those who have seen the film. It is short of the widest presence a film can have, and its fame rests much on its star. The surface is fixed to 1972 Brooklyn by design, Attica, the hair and the heat, and it ages as period and document, not as fashion; the colour photography of its decade is the smallest charge.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Survival over sixty-two years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, nothing known to be lost, replaced or restored in a way that bears on the image, an oil in a stable manner. Presence: the image has the widest presence a painting of its decade can have, quoted and reproduced everywhere, and it is the image that the desk weighs for a painting. But wide presence earns little, and fame is not proof. The object itself is not argued as one on continuous public view, and its holder and condition are not given here. That is charged lightly on presence, less than for a work wholly unseen, and the figure sits a tenth under what this span usually allows.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-three years, the span in which this figure is usual. The theatrical cut survives whole and has been restored and reissued. The re-edit of 2000 replaced it in theatres and for a time in circulation, but the two have since been issued side by side, and the alteration takes little. Presence is wide and continuous: re-releases, television, every home format, Halloween programming, teaching, and a sequel line that has kept the title in view into the 2020s, though fame and box office are presence, not proof. The surface is partly fixed to its making: the dummy head and the vomit read as 1973, and the shock depended on a first audience’s innocence.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Survival is demonstrated over eighty-seven years, with no discount for age. The book has been in print in London and New York since 1939, corrected by its author’s own list of misprints and fixed in a pagination every commentary cites; it is read aloud in groups on several continents, and it has put “Here Comes Everybody”, “riverrun” and the quark into common use. The text survives whole. Charged: the readership is narrow, and the book is more famous than read; its surface (the music hall, the Dublin of 1900, Parnell, the radio and newspapers of the 1930s) needs heavy annotation; and eighty-seven years is a short demonstration beside the centuries behind the summit.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The case for survival at forty-one years rests on survival shown, and the evidence runs one way: a book that failed on publication is more read, more taught and more argued now than at any time since, its criticism growing since Vereen Bell’s study of McCarthy in 1988, and it has outlived its author and the Western revival around it. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the diction is archaic by design, the matter is the 1840s, and nothing depends on the 1980s. The text is whole. Forty-one years cannot show whether the book outlasts the readers who raised it and the turns of taste that only centuries test, and that alone holds the axis at the foot of the twelve.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Thirty-nine years, and that span is what holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: survival of decades, not centuries. The form survives whole, in print without break since 1987. Its presence is as wide as that of any American novel of its decade: taught in schools and universities, widely translated, and filmed by Jonathan Demme in 1998. That presence is credited. It is also charged: the book has been challenged again and again and removed from school curricula and libraries in parts of the United States, and in the 2020s it became an object of political campaigns over what may be taught. The challenges have not removed it from print, from universities or from readers, and they testify to its presence as much as against it; but presence that is fought over is charged presence, and the two weights cancel.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over two centuries, scored with no discount for age. For seventy years the book barely survived as a book; its fullest form is one coloured copy, and its persons were taken from a quarrel of 1803. It came through. Copy E is safe in a public collection, facsimiles have reproduced it, and the William Blake Archive puts every copy in reach. Its topical names outlived their owners by becoming myth: no reader needs to know who Scolfield was to read Skofeld. What holds it low is the narrowness of what survives. Survival here is mostly scholarly, few readers outside the field have read the whole, and the surface needs more annotation than any other work on the desk.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-six years and ten months. The form is whole: the double album as issued is still the record sold, in print throughout. Presence is wide and continuous: the title track has stayed in broadcast and in films and advertising, the album is heard whole, and the sleeve is one of the best known in rock; that presence is credited as presence, not proof, and it is wide without being the widest. The fabric bears its moment lightly: the production is live and unvarnished rather than of a studio fashion, and only a few references, the reactor scare of 1979 and the topical slang, are fixed to their year. But part of the presence is the title song’s alone, and the songs of side four are little heard. It stands far below what has lasted centuries.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, from completion in 1982, some forty-four years: the design and much of the fabric are older, but the work as completed dates from then. The form is whole: the building stands as completed, legible in plan, wall and light, and it has outlived the state that commissioned it. The use is continuous and its own: the national parliament through changes of regime, the assembly’s suspensions ending neither its use nor its form. The fabric is concrete in a monsoon climate, weathered, with no loss of form. The presence is wide among architects and central in Bangladesh, but short of the widest. The span since completion is short, and the figure keeps to it.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-one years. The form survives whole, in one version, and has been restored; nothing is lost. Presence is the charge. For much of its life the film was seen in festivals, archives and classrooms, not in general exhibition; its length and its distribution kept it narrow until its restoration and its release on home video, and only in the last few years, after the 2022 poll, has it been widely seen. Presence has risen, and recent presence is the least demonstrated kind. The surface fixed to its moment is small: the flat, the clothes and the shops are Brussels in 1975, but what the film is made of, labour and time in a room, has not dated. The figure stands a step below the usual mark for its age.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years. The form is whole. The record has outlived Britpop, the CD album, the software that voiced its recitation and EMI, the company that issued it, and is still heard as an album in a streaming culture that dissolved the album; its subject has aged toward it rather than away. The surface fixed to its moment still costs something: the riot shields and the IMF of the eighth track are period vocabulary, and the computer of the title is a desktop machine that knows nothing of the network. So weighed, it stands level with works of its own years, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao among them, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across thirty-three years: continuous exhibition and use in schools, selection for the National Film Registry in 2004, and a re-release in 2018. Some of that use is owed to the subject, which keeps any serious film about it in classrooms; it is neither credited nor discounted, and what is weighed is whether the film’s own surface holds. Black and white has kept it from the look of its decade. The surface fixed to its moment is charged: German and Polish characters speak accented English, a convention that now shows, and the score’s idiom places the film in the 1990s. That surface and the span hold it level with Three Colours, of the same year, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across forty-four years. The form is wholly legible: both versions survive complete, restored and in circulation, issued together with Bergman’s documentary of the shoot. The fabric is the smallest charge: the photochemical original survives and has been restored, and the film was already an image of 1907 when it was made, not fixed to the look of 1982 as a contemporary drama is. Presence is continuous, the film screened and studied since 1982, and it is what holds the figure, since the long form was less seen than the cut for much of its life. It stands level with Blood Meridian, three years younger, below Raging Bull, older and more widely seen, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across thirty-three years: continuous exhibition in cinemas and on television, restoration and reissue, steady teaching, and Blue and Red regularly among the most admired European films of their decade. The film material is whole. The surface fixed to its moment is larger than in most films of its rank: a concerto for the unification of Europe, the topical project of 1992 and 1993; the gangster capitalism of Warsaw just after communism, on which White’s jokes depend; a scanner on cordless telephones, a technology already gone. These age as history rather than fashion, but they age. What survives is the grief, the revenge and the conscience, which that surface carries rather than constitutes; the concerto’s text is St Paul’s, not a treaty’s.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years. The film as released survives whole. Its presence has been as wide as that of any art film of its year: continuous exhibition, re-releases, a place in common visual reference, and a standing among critics that has risen. That earns the highest figure a span of twenty-five to twenty-nine years allows. The surface is not fixed to its making: the film is set in 1962 and dressed as a memory, so nothing in it dates to 2000. Against all this stands only the span. Twenty-six years is a short demonstration beside centuries, and the figure says so; Persona, with sixty years behind it, stands at 8.8.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over forty years: continuous exhibition, issue on every home format, restoration, and a settled place in teaching and in criticism. The surface was out of time on release. A pastiche of a 1950s that never existed, worn over the 1980s, has little period surface to lose, and the 1980s show only in a few cars and clothes. Two things could wear. The irony is a mode, and modes date. And the treatment of Dorothy has been contested from the start: Roger Ebert’s review of 1986 objected to it. If that judgment hardens, the film will be shown with a caveat. The contest is charged as a risk to survival, not as a verdict. The bar is cleared with a tenth of room.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film survives whole, in its one cut; restorations have repaired image and sound, and nothing that made the work is lost. Presence: fifty-one years, continuous since its first years in repertory, on home video and in teaching, and held high by critics and directors; but charged at the start, by a narrow life at home, on the usual account, and a long delay abroad, and still a cinephile’s presence, narrower than a widely seen film’s. Fabric: Soviet colour stock and post-synchronised sound of their period, a small charge; a present framed as memory dates little. A tenth below the usual figure for its age, and below Stalker, at 8.7 on this axis, four years younger and wider in presence beyond cinema, and Andrei Rublev, at 8.9.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole over thirty-five years: reissued at twenty, and played whole from September 2023 into 2024 across a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, to audiences many of whom were born after 1991. Beyond that, presence rests most on one song: “One” became a standard beyond rock, recorded by Johnny Cash in 2000 and sung at weddings and funerals by people who do not know the album. The fabric is charged: the dance beat of “Mysterious Ways” and some of the industrial texture are fixed to their moment, surviving as period colour. That holds it level with Three Colours, below Goodfellas, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and the restoration of the 2010s is repair. The later films Lanzmann made from the same footage are separate works and take nothing from it. Presence has been continuous and specific rather than wide: festival and museum screenings, television, home editions, the published text, and constant use in teaching. Few have seen it whole, and that narrows presence. The surface is fixed to a moment by design, the faces and places of the late 1970s, and that is the subject, what remained then; it ages as record, not as fashion. Sixteen-millimetre colour of its period is the smallest charge.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, form first. The form survived in the strongest way a building can show, with no building at all: for fifty-six years the design lived in photographs, drawings and the buildings it caused, and in 1986 it compelled its own rebuilding on its own site. It is wholly legible, and it has outlived the Republic that paid for it, the exposition and the doctrine of its decade. The use survived as nearly the same use: built to be entered and looked at, it is entered and looked at daily. The fabric did not survive. Not a stone, pane or bar of 1929 stands; everything is of 1983–1986, of the same kinds, set out from the drawings. Where the form stands whole, replacement of material is the smallest of the losses. What holds the axis lower is presence and length: for fifty-six years there was nothing to enter, and the original was a temporary building, taken down after eight months, so the survival shown in stone is forty years long.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole over thirty-seven years: the album is still in print, still played whole on stage, and still the record most often named as the band’s best. The fabric is less fixed to 1989 than most rock of that year: little gated drum sound or digital sheen, no topical reference, and the keyboard string sounds, the clearest period mark, used as mass rather than novelty. Presence is continuous but held within a following, and survival rests partly on a sound world, which taste reaches more easily than structure. That holds it level with Blood Meridian, a tenth above Dekalog, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-seven years. Form: the film survives whole as released, in one version; restorations are repair. Presence: continuous and wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in the National Film Registry, in teaching across film studies, American studies and law, and returned to in public argument at each killing by the police; its reach passes beyond cinema into political speech. Surface: the film is fixed to its summer in its sneakers, its radio, its slang, its Mayor Koch and its graffiti, and that surface is charged. It has outlived the conditions that produced it by being confirmed by them again and again, and the period now reads as a period, not as a fashion. Presence carries toward the top of its span; the surface holds it at 8.6.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the cassette as mastered is the record still sold. Presence is continuous and has grown: the album is kept in print, its songs are covered and performed, and it has been returned to in books, a feature film and an expanded edition in recent years. It is less broadcast and less heard than its maker’s band records, and its presence is wide without being the widest. The fabric carries little of its year: no period production, no drum machine, no studio gloss, nothing of 1982 in the sound but the cassette itself, whose hiss is part of the form. Its plant closings are heard now as condition.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across sixty-six years. Form: whole and the makers’, plan, section, church, crypt and devices in place and legible, and it has outlived the conditions that produced it, the postwar renewal of the French Church and the house of studies, as a model studied and answered. Use: still a Dominican priory, its office still sung in its church, but the use it was built for, the formation of the province’s friars, ended within about a decade, and the house now holds a small community with guests and visitors. That is a real charge, smaller than lost use, since the use survives in kind. Fabric: rough concrete never finished against weather, repaired and restored; the smallest charge. Presence is wide, and earns at most a tenth.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Form first: the image is whole, the composition entire, the colour legible as Matisse set it, and no loss to what makes the work is known. Presence second: the canvas passed from a private house in Moscow through the nationalisation of 1918 to a museum of modern Western art, and at that museum’s dissolution in 1948 to the Hermitage. It came through a revolution, a war and a period of official hostility to everything it stands for; how long it was kept from view in those decades is not settled, and the interruption is a real but small charge. Survival is demonstrated over more than a century: the image is among the most widely recognised in modern art, and it has long outlived the quarrel of 1910.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over sixty to seventy years. The form survives: the three buildings stand whole in their governing ideas and legible from the plain, and the composition has outlived Nehru’s moment and the late modernism that made it, studied and answered still. The use is the strongest evidence: each building has served its own purpose without a break since it opened, and after 1966 took two states’ institutions without a change of form. The charges are real. The plain, the part that made the buildings one work, has largely lost its use as public ground to the fences of the 1980s; the concrete has weathered unevenly; and the original furniture has been dispersed by theft and sale. The figure stands above what such losses usually cost because the houses are in unbroken use and the charge falls on the ground.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Close to a century has elapsed. The film as released survives whole; restorations are repair, and the spread of running times is projection speed, not loss. The absence of a fixed score is not a loss, since none was fixed, but it leaves the film without a settled sound, and each showing supplies one. Presence is charged in part: decades of neglect in its own country from the early 1930s, and a revival that began only in the 1960s. Since then presence has been continuous among filmmakers, critics and teachers, though its audience is narrow, which counts as presence and not as proof. The industrial utopia is fixed to its year, and now reads as period. The figure sits between the usual mark for its age and the charged one, and clears the bar by a tenth.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-four years, and the history of the versions is weighed here and nowhere else. The form survives whole and nothing is lost: the workprint, both releases of 1982, the cut of 1992 and the Final Cut exist and were issued together in 2007, the last restored from the original elements. But the work judged is not the work that first survived. For ten years the film lived in its narrated form, with a voice-over and a closing drive imposed on the director, and the version under his full control arrived twenty-five years after release. That history is charged. Presence is of the widest kind for the span: continuous circulation, a standing that has risen, a sequel, the National Film Registry in 1993. The surface fixed to 1982, a November 2019 now passed and brands on its towers since gone, reads as a period future and charges little.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole over forty years, and presence is continuous: the record is in sale and broadcast, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” has become a standard, and bands born after 1986 play the title track. It has outlived the band and its label’s world, and kept its audience through its singer’s fall in public reputation, strong evidence that the work stands apart from its author. The fabric is charged: the sampled strings and the royal satire of the title track are fixed to 1986. That surface and the span hold it level with Blue Velvet and White Noise, of its own years, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over forty-one years, and the evidence runs one way. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost; the book has been in print for the whole span, and was filmed by Noah Baumbach in 2022. Its surface is fixed to its moment more than most: station wagons, tabloids, network television, the brands of the 1980s. But that surface is the book’s subject, not its accident, and the conditions that produced it, a culture of broadcast before the internet, have passed while the book reads as more pertinent, not less: it has outlived them. It has never been out of favour, and the reading of it is still growing. What holds the axis is the span alone: four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Twenty-seven years are weighed as twenty-seven. The text survives whole and in print without a break, translated widely, set on syllabuses in many countries, and adapted to film: the widest presence for its age, which earns the top of what that age allows. Its surface is tied to a moment, the South Africa of the late 1990s, the language of the commission and of the new university administrators; but the book has already outlived that moment’s arguments and reads now as a work about authority, desire and its loss rather than as a report. It goes no higher because twenty-seven years cannot outscore a century: survival is demonstrated for a generation, and the rest is still to be shown.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over more than six decades. Form: the release did not survive intact. Within weeks of opening it was shortened, and shortened again for the reissue of 1971, so the version most saw for a quarter of a century was an altered one. The reconstruction of 1989 recovered the film, but with some lines re-recorded by actors twenty-seven years older and with small trims of its maker’s own, so the whole form now stands by repair with small seams; that charge is real and small. Presence is continuous and wide: the 70mm revivals from 1989, television, every home format, and high standing in polls of critics and directors. The large negative served restoration well. The casting is the surface that dates. The bar is cleared, held below the widest figure by the cuts and the repair.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-four years. The form is whole: twelve tracks, in print since release, reissued in 2017. Presence is wide and continuous: Everybody Hurts and Man on the Moon in broadcast and in other hands, the album still named as the band’s measure after the band ended in 2011. The fabric aged well: acoustic instruments, real strings and a plain mix carry little of 1992’s sound. The surface fixed to its moment is small and real: Ignoreland’s quarrel with the Reagan and Bush years, and the topical puns of Drive. Its presence is narrower than the widest records of its years: it stands level with Achtung Baby and Loveless at 8.6, a tenth below Nevermind at 8.7, and far below what has lasted centuries.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years. The form is whole. The record has outlived its scene, its label’s crisis, the CD it was mastered for and the press that mocked it, and its standing rose rather than settled: carried into a major film twelve years on, played to large audiences from 2008, reissued in 2012. It used none of its year’s production signatures. Two charges hold the figure where it stands: a narrow first decade, against presence, and a disputed master, against fabric. So weighed, it stands level with films of its years such as Three Colours, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. Form: the film survives whole in both of Gilliam’s cuts, and the 142-minute cut is the standard version on home editions. The studio’s 94-minute re-edit exists and replaced the film for some television audiences, but it never displaced the release and now circulates as a document of the dispute; the charge for it is small. Presence is continuous: repertory, home video, a Criterion edition, teaching and lists of the best British films, though as a cult more than at the widest. Fabric: the surface is deliberately anachronistic, a future made from the past, and it ages as design rather than as fashion. The model effects of the dreams show their date, a small charge.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated across twenty-seven years, and the standing has risen across them, from mixed notices at release to a settled place among Kubrick’s major films, with repertory screenings at Christmas, restorations and new editions. Little of the surface is fixed to its moment: the pagers and mobile phones are furniture, and the built New York has no year. The one period surface lay outside the film. It was sold on its stars’ marriage; the marriage ended in 2001, and the film has outlived its marketing without loss. The digitally altered American print was a scar of its moment, and the unaltered film has replaced it. Held near the gate by the shortness of the span.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixty-five years. The film as released survives whole, and restorations repair it without revising it. Presence is continuous but not of the widest kind: it has been screened, reissued on home media, taught and cited throughout its life, and it is a fixed point in the history of art cinema, but its circulation is narrower than that of the most watched films of its age, and much of its fame is as a reference rather than a film seen. The surface is less fixed to 1961 than it seems, since the hotel is out of time by design, though the gowns, the coiffures and the parlour games bear the stamp of their year. The bar is cleared, with presence charged lightly.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty years. The form survives whole: the music in Glass’s performing materials and complete recordings, the staging in the makers’ own revivals of 1984, 1992 and 2012, which kept the design and added Childs’s choreography for the field dances within the life of the work. Presence is real but rationed. Its makers have staged it four times, with gaps of eight, eight and twenty years, and its demands, the length, an expert ensemble and Wilson’s stage, keep it out of the ordinary repertory; recordings and concert performances carry it between. Productions by other directors show it can live without its first staging. The surface fixed to its moment, the amplification of the 1970s and a cold-war apocalypse, is modest. The long silences are charged.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over fifty-one years. The form survives whole: one version as released, nothing lost, restorations that only repair. Presence has been continuous: revivals, television, home video, steady placing in critics’ lists, and a fixed place in the teaching of American film of the 1970s. Two charges hold it below the usual mark for its age. The surface is fixed to its year: the bicentennial, the Replacement Party and the mood after Watergate are worn openly, and they date it more than most films of the period. And its presence, steady among critics and filmmakers, is narrower than that of the period’s popular classics and has not passed far beyond cinema. The figure stands between the usual step for fifty years and the charged one.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print since release and remastered under Bush’s supervision. Presence is continuous and wide, and widened again in 2022, when the first track reached a new generation; presence is not proof of permanence. The fabric is charged: the LinnDrum, the Fairlight presets and the gated sound of some tracks are sounds of 1985, and parts of side one are heard as of their decade. Side two is less fixed to its year. It stands level with Housekeeping and The Queen Is Dead, and a tenth below Low.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: box, oblique wall, cross and dark room stand as built, and the design has outlived the conditions that produced it, a small congregation’s means and the Japanese building of the late twentieth century, as a model answered and copied. The use is continuous in its own purpose: it is a working church, with visitors admitted by arrangement. The fabric is the maker’s; the cross was glazed from the first, and the glass is not a loss. The Sunday school beside it changes the setting, not the work. Presence is wide among architects and visitors from abroad, but it is a small room seen by appointment, and fame is presence, not proof of permanence. Thirty-seven years are scored as what they show.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the fifteen are whole and together in one collection and have never been dispersed; nothing that makes the work is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: shown since 1989, at the Museum of Modern Art since 1995, as a group in the Richter retrospectives and on the collection floors, its standing rising with Richter’s. Fabric: oil on canvas, thinly and evenly laid, the smallest charge. Against it: the surface is fixed to its moment in a way a viewer must be told about, names and events of 1972 to 1977 that are already history to most who stand before it, and the cycle has not yet outlived the memory of its subject. Thirty-eight years is a short record, and wide presence in the art world is not proof of permanence.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The cycle was complete as named in 2003; its first film is thirty-seven years old, its last twenty-three. Form: whole. The films survive as films and in video transfer, and nothing of the cycle’s arrangement is known to be lost. The intermediate states of each drawing were destroyed by the method and survive only in the film: that is how the work was made, not a loss after it. Presence: wide and continuous since the late 1990s, in museum showings, surveys and the literature, and the cycle has outlived apartheid and the transition and is still shown as the account of them. Fabric: moving-image formats face obsolescence, the smallest charge; the charcoal sheets are fragile, but the sheets are not the work. A short record, with the widest presence.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one version, no loss, restorations as repair. Presence across forty-eight years has been continuous: repertory, television, home video in each format, a restored edition, and teaching, in cinematography above all. That presence is wide within cinema and narrower beyond it. The film is known to people who love and make films far more than to a general audience, and it has no line in common speech and no image as widely known as the steps in Battleship Potemkin or the shower in Psycho. The surface is set in 1916 and dressed as memory, so little in it reads as 1978; Gere’s styling is the slightest trace. Forty-eight years, and a presence real but not of the widest, hold it at the figure.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole and legible: nothing of the design is lost, and its governing idea has outlived the patron, the firm whose fortune paid for it and the architect himself. The use is continuous: it remains a family tomb, the Brions and Scarpa lie in it, and it is open to visitors and to the village. The fabric is charged. Board-marked concrete exposed to water was always a risk; the pools, channels and concrete have needed repair more than once, and the inlays and fittings have suffered. The span is about forty-eight years from the maker’s death. Its wide presence among architects adds a little, and the charge on the fabric takes about as much back.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-six years. The form survives whole as a recording; its versions differ by one short scene, the dance of the blind, and the restored versions, one of them supervised by Storaro, are repair, with the colour, which is the film, carefully restored. Presence has been unbroken among those who study film, in repertory screenings, restorations and teaching. But the film was long hard to see in the English-speaking world, and its public presence has never been wide; that narrowness sets the axis below the usual figure for its span. The fabric ages little, since a film of the 1930s made in 1970 does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its colour now reads as 1970 too. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over forty-six years, and credited as shown, not foreseen. The form is whole: the text survives as published, and has been in print throughout; form and fabric take no charge. The presence is continuous: taught in American universities and writing programmes, filmed in 1987, and read again by a wider public after Gilead and the novels that followed it. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the railroad town is given without dates or brands, and nothing in the book depends on 1980. Held where it is: the presence is wide in American literary reading and narrower beyond it, short of the widest a book of its age can show; and decades demonstrate less than centuries.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across twenty-seven years. A failure at the box office found its audience on home video and became a film in continuous circulation, still quoted and argued over. The double and the hollow consumer self are not fixed to a year. The surface is: the catalogue apartment, the pay phones, the office copier, the big-beat score, a plan to erase debt by destroying the buildings that hold the records. The ending, made two years before 11 September 2001, had its meaning changed by an event it could not foresee. It survives the change, but survival by reinterpretation is not survival intact. What holds the figure is the span itself, level with Radiohead’s OK Computer and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, two years older, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. The form: the film as released survives whole, and restoration has repaired its colour and image without altering the work. The presence: continuous and wide within art cinema, in repertory, revivals, home video in every format and the teaching of film and of Shakespeare; it is among the Kurosawa films most often shown, though below Seven Samurai and Rashomon in common reference. The fabric: the original colour is what restoration exists to protect, the smallest charge. The surface does not date to 1985: a sixteenth-century world in costume and landscape, with no idiom of its decade, leaves nothing fixed to its year. Presence wide, but not the widest a film reaches, holds it at the usual figure for its span.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over fifty-four years. The form survives whole and legible: the masts, the net, the saddles and their relation to the park are those of 1972, and the work has outlived the Games, the Bonn republic’s self-image and the cold war without reading as a period piece, which is rarer for a work of that decade than for most. The use is charged: the stadium lost its football clubs to the Allianz Arena in 2005 and now holds concerts, events and roof walks, while the hall and the pool continue in use; a plan of the late 1990s to rebuild the stadium for football was resisted and abandoned. The fabric is charged moderately: the acrylic has aged, yellowed and cracked, and has been repaired and in part replaced, and the net demands continual care. A use and fabric charge, set against a wide presence.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-three years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in Britain and America and in translation. Presence is continuous: the film renewed it, it is taught in courses on the modern novel and on theory, and Ballard’s death in 2009 brought a further wave of reading. Two charges hold it a tenth below what that record would otherwise earn. Its presence is narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its decade: it is a famous book more than a widely read one, held by writers, theorists and a cult readership. And its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the cars, flyovers and film stars of 1970s London, though it is now read as forecast rather than period, which lightens that charge.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Twenty-five years, and the film as released survives whole: one cut, the original Japanese track, the drawn image unaltered. The red colour cast of the early home-video transfers was a fault of surface, since corrected, and the original survives behind it; nothing is charged to it. Presence is of the widest kind for a film of its age: continuous circulation, theatrical revivals and study, and it was the highest-grossing film in Japan from 2001 until 2020. Fame and returns are evidence of presence only. Little of the surface is fixed to its moment: a car, a ruined theme park and a burst economy are furniture to a myth. Survival is credited for what twenty-five years have shown, and no more.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Forty-seven years are weighed as forty-seven years. The novel has been continuously in print, taught at school and university, and translated, and it has outlived the moment of its writing: the bicentennial frame of 1976, which might have dated it, now reads as a deliberate irony of national celebration. Its presence is wide, chiefly in the United States; it is less read abroad than its American standing suggests, and part of its presence is curricular. Presence of that kind is counted as presence and earns no more than a tenth, and it is not stretched to the top of the step. The adaptations of 2017 and 2022 are not counted beyond presence.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, and all three are whole. The form is legible and unaltered in its governing idea. The use has been continuous since October 1997, as the museum it was built to be, and the building’s image is fixed as the image of the city. The fabric stands as made, and nothing is lost. The survival is demonstrated, and it is not discounted for youth. What holds the axis is its length and its tie to a moment: twenty-nine years is what has been shown and no more, and part of the building’s standing rests on the faith of the 1990s in the signature museum and in early digital form, since widely contested. It has outlived that moment’s novelty, not yet the conditions that made it.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-eight years. The form is whole: the film as released survives in its one version, and the restorations, the 4K remaster of 2020 among them, are repair; the English dubs of 1989 and 2001 change a translation and the voices, not the work. Presence has been continuous and wide, wider than nearly any animated film of its decade: re-releases, television, every home format, IMAX screenings in 2020, and a place in visual reference far outside cinema. That would argue for more. Against it, the surface is partly of its making: the cyberpunk city and its biker gangs read as the 1980s imagining the future, and the film’s date of 2019 has passed. The drawn image ages less than the live-action effects of the same years. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across fifty-two years. The form survives whole in its one released cut, and restorations are repair. Presence is continuous: repertory, television, home video in every format, teaching in film and sound programmes, and selection for the National Film Registry. It is wide among those who study film and narrower beyond them, where the film is known as the small one its maker made between two epics, and that narrowness is charged in part. The fabric is fixed to 1974, in the reel-to-reel machines, the convention’s hardware and the analogue tape, but the film is about that technology, so it ages as history, and its subject has widened rather than dated.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: one cut, no loss, no altered versions, restorations that only repair. Presence across thirty-four years is continuous and wide: television, every home format, revival screenings, selection for the National Film Registry in 2004, and constant reference in writing on the western and on screen violence. The surface ages little, since a period film shot on location in plain light does not wear its decade as a contemporary drama does; the score and some performances, the deputies and the Kid, now read as early nineties. For thirty-four years of wide presence the figure clears the bar by a tenth, and the span, not the film, holds it there.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: published and performed as written, with nothing lost and nothing in doubt. The span is fifty years, and presence is charged for the first fifteen: after the premiere the work lived thinly until 1992. Since then its presence has been very wide, in recordings, broadcast and concert halls, and in use in film and memorial; but popularity and sales are presence, not proof of permanence, and earn at most a tenth. The fabric holds no obsolete means. The surface fixed to its moment is small, and the crossover phenomenon of 1992 dates the reception more than the score. The figure sits between the charged step and the usual one, a tenth above the bar.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over about forty years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in English and in many translations. Presence is continuous: the trilogy is read, taught, translated, adapted into a graphic novel, and was given renewed attention at its author’s death in 2024. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: Ghosts is set in 1947, and City of Glass in a New York of phone booths and notebooks whose texture has passed but whose matter, a solitary man in a city, has not dated. Held at the usual figure for its span, not the widest: presence is strong internationally but narrower in the United States than that of the most widely read American novels of its decades, and it lives among readers of literary fiction and in the study of postmodernism more than across the culture.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over thirty-nine years. The film as released survives whole. Its presence has been continuous: repertory screening, home video in successive editions, a steady place in teaching and in lists of the decade’s films, while the fame of the American remake has kept the original’s name in circulation. That is wide presence for an art film but not the widest, and the figure is the usual one for its span. The surface is fixed to 1987 exactly, in the divided city, the Wall, the post-punk concerts and their clothes. But that fixity has turned to document, not to staleness: the Berlin it shows is gone, and the film is a record of it. Its subject, the mortal moment seen from outside, has not dated.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-eight years. The form survives whole: the theatrical release is intact, restorations are repair, and the shortened television versions are variants that take nothing from it. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and every home format, in polls and in teaching. It is wide, though less constant than the most circulated films of its decade, and the film’s length and its politics have held its exhibition below its fame. The war of 1968 to 1975 is history in the film, not fashion, though the styling of its town dates it, and the treatment of the Vietnamese weighs on its presence more than on its fabric. Forty-eight years are survival demonstrated, and they are not centuries.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole, in the one cut as released, and any restoration is repair. The presence across thirty-five years is continuous: in world-cinema teaching and survey courses, in repertory programmes and on home video, and in the canon lists of Chinese cinema. It is wide in cinema but not far beyond it. The surface ages little: a period film in an invented ritual does not date as a contemporary surface does, though its saturated colour now reads as a style of its own festival moment as well as of the 1920s. Thirty-five years demonstrate survival, and they are not centuries; the axis stands where that span of evidence puts it, clear of the bar.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, continuously in print and remastered. Presence is wide and continuous within its kind: the record has never left the catalogue, the title track is a fixture of rock broadcast and of the band’s concerts, and in 2022 it found a new young audience through a television series. That is very wide for a heavy record, but much of it is a genre’s presence, and popularity is presence, not proof of permanence. The fabric bears its year: the drum sound and the dry, compressed guitars are of the mid-1980s, and the bass sits low in the mix, a fault heard ever since.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the original recording survives as issued and is still the version most heard. Presence is as wide as any rock album’s of its age: continuous sale, broadcast and streaming, Alive, Even Flow, Jeremy and Black in permanent rotation, the songs played by the band to large audiences ever since. Popularity is credited as presence, not as proof. The fabric is charged: the original mix is heavy with reverb and of its moment, and the band itself had the record remixed, the clearest evidence that its makers heard the surface dating. The widest presence would lift the figure; the fabric holds it at the usual mark for its age.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years. The form is whole: one cut, nothing lost and no altered version; restorations repair. Presence has been continuous and wide: steady circulation on television and on every home format, revival screenings, teaching, and a television series that has carried the title to an audience beyond the film’s own and sent that audience back to it. The surface ages little. The cars, coats and motels of the late 1980s are already period inside the film’s own fiction, set in 1987, and the winter landscape belongs to no decade. Thirty years clear the bar of the gate, with a tenth credited for the width of the presence, and thirty years are a short span beside the centuries behind the oldest works on the desk.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. Form: the chariot survives whole and legible, the audience hall stands to its full height, and the sanctuary’s base and its Suryas are in place; but the governing element of the type, the tower the whole composition rose to, is gone, and that is the loss of a principal part of the form, not of its surface. Use: lost. Worship ended centuries ago, the image is gone, and the hall has been sealed with sand since 1903; the building is entered only as a monument and a stage. Fabric: khondalite eroded by salt air, the horses broken, much carving lost, the hall held by fill and modern stabilisation. Against that stand some seven and a half centuries in place and form legible from every approach. It sits below the Brihadisvara Temple (9.0), whose tower stands and whose worship continues.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. All ten panels survive, kept together, uncut and undispersed, for 119 years, and nothing that made the work is lost or replaced. Presence is charged heavily: for about eighty of those years the cycle was in storage with the family and the foundation, before no public; it has been present to attention from 1986, and widely only from 2013. Fabric: tempera on paper mounted on canvas, large and often travelled, is fragile material, and cannot be cleaned or handled as oil can. A reputation that has risen this fast, partly on a story of rediscovery, has yet to show it can outlast its moment. The long survival of the form lifts the figure a little above what presence alone would earn, and no further.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Nine centuries would place a whole form high on the scale. Form: what survives is legible scene by scene, and the programme of paired text and image is still evident; but most of the set is lost with its texts, and the scrolls are no longer scrolls, so the defining form, a cycle across the whole novel, survives only in part, and is charged in proportion. Fabric: pigment has flaked across large areas, the silver has blackened, and the underdrawing shows where colour lay. Presence: continuous in collections and in reproduction, though the sheets are rarely on view. The loss is of most of the cycle as well as of surface, and the figure sits a step below centuries with heavy loss, above The Ajanta Caves (7.8), whose paintings had no outside viewer from their abandonment until 1819.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives whole: plan, section, frame, the onyx plane, the ebony curve and the glass wall are in place and legible, and the house has outlived the conditions that made it, a Jewish industrial family’s life in interwar Brno, as a model answered for ninety-six years. Use is the heavier charge. It was a dwelling for about eight years, then property seized under the occupation, a dance school, a children’s clinic, and since 2012 a museum, entered and walked through but not lived in. The fabric was stripped and damaged in the war and remade: the glass, the curtains and nearly all the furniture are new, while the frame, the onyx that never left its place, most walls and much of the travertine and fittings are the house’s own. Lost use and a reconstructed interior take it to the low end of the usual range for its age. Presence is wide but not the widest.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-two years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, remastered and expanded. Presence is continuous and wide: the album is in print, its singles are in broadcast, the title song is a standard, and Prince’s death in 2016 renewed its presence rather than closing it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is the charge: the Linn drum machine, the synthesiser timbres and the gated sound of 1984 are on most tracks, and Take Me with U and Computer Blue sound of their year. When Doves Cry carries its machines as content, and Purple Rain, a band in a room with strings, has aged least. Part of the record’s presence is still carried by the film, and it stands a tenth below the widest presence of its age.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Form: the text survives whole as Nabokov published it, and has stayed in print in English since 1969. Presence: continuous but narrow. It is translated into the major languages, the French under Nabokov’s own revision, and it is taught and written on, but it is read mainly by Nabokov’s readers and in the academy, and in recent decades its standing has been charged, as Lolita’s has, by readers troubled by Van’s treatment of the young Lucette and by the book’s erotic register. At fifty-seven years a book of uncharged presence would stand higher; presence here is charged but not low, and the figure sits between the charged and the uncharged. Its surface is not tied to its moment: the counter-world has dated less than a realist 1969 would have.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-two years. The form survives whole: one cut, never revised or replaced, its original version always in circulation; the deleted and extended scenes issued later on home video are not part of the film. Presence has been continuous and of the widest kind for the span: in repertory and on every form of home video, in teaching, in quotation, in parody, and in the general memory of people who have seen little else of the decade’s cinema. Fame is not proof of permanence, and wide presence is credited by a tenth at most. The fabric is charged a little: its pop references are already history to younger viewers, and its racial language has become a live objection in exhibition. The pop is mostly retro by design, the 1950s diner, the twist and surf guitar, and ages as style already aged.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty years. The form survives whole as released, in one version, and restoration has been repair. Presence is continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format and teaching, wider than most art films of its decade, its look known to people who have not seen it. The charge falls on the surface, and the surface is its moment: the clothes, the studio, the models, the club and the party are London in 1966 and read now as period dress. The film is in part about that surface and holds it at a distance, so it does not date as fashion alone; but the charge is real, and it holds the figure a step below what such presence over sixty years would otherwise earn.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-seven to forty-four years, from the first serial chapters to the collection. The text survives whole, has been in print continuously since it was collected, is translated widely and is taught. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: it is a book of Thatcher’s Britain, with a 1980s future, a 1997 that did not come and a computer for a god, and Moore himself conceded in 1988 the naivety of the early chapters. The political subject has outlived those conditions, which is the axis’s test, and the book has been reread in every period since. Presence is the widest of any comic of its years outside its American companions, but the fame of the mask is carried by the film and is fame, not proof, and the figure stands at the usual mark for its span, not the widest.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over 40 to 44 years. The form survives whole: halls, street, theatre, towers, bridges, water tower and deck as built, with no reconstruction. The use is the building’s own purpose, continuous since 1982 and heavy, a working SESC centre still filled with people of the district and the city; for its age, survival in use of the strongest kind. The fabric, exposed concrete and timber in a wet climate, has needed upkeep, with no loss of form. Its presence has grown wide since Bo Bardi’s revival, but fame is not proof, and the rough surface is still tied to a recognisable moment.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole, in one cut. A remaster of 2017 revised the colour grade, cooler and to some eyes altered from the theatrical look; it is a change of surface on one edition, not a replacement, since earlier transfers carry the original grade. Presence across thirty-one years is continuous and wide: television, every home format, revival screenings, a sequel novel, Heat 2 (2022), by Mann with Meg Gardiner, and constant citation in later films and games. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the pagers, the car phones, the Los Angeles of the mid-1990s, but the film is about the city as it stood and ages as record rather than fashion. Thirty-one years are credited for what they show, and no more.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-two years. The text survives whole, as published; the Czech original is in print, and the book has been continuously in print in English and French since 1984. Presence is wide: reading, teaching, translation and the film; it is among the most widely read novels of its decade in Europe and the Americas. Its surface is fixed in part to 1968 and the Cold War, but that is its matter, not its furniture, and it is read past the fall of the regime it describes. Charged: the book’s standing among critics has cooled from its height in the 1980s, part of its fame was a fashion, and popularity is presence, not proof. These hold it at the figure its span earns and not above. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole in every instance, nothing lost, replaced or refabricated; the surface carries no topical sign, and a spider and a mother are not fixed to 1999. Presence: the widest a sculpture of its decade has, casts standing permanently in public on four continents and seen continuously since 2000; that earns the tenth wide presence may earn and no more, for fame is not proof of permanence, and twenty-seven years is a short record. Fabric: bronze, stainless steel and marble, made for the open air and multiplied, the smallest risk; the steel original, thinner in its means, is the instance most exposed. No charge is laid; the short record alone holds the figure where it stands.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Forty-seven years, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: the theatrical cut is complete, in continuous circulation, and restored for each home format, and restoration is repair. The Director’s Cut of 2003 stands beside it and replaces nothing; the theatrical version remains the one generally shown. Presence is very wide, in revivals, broadcast and constant home release, with the creature and the film’s lines in common use, though presence earns little on its own. The surface carries a small charge: the ship’s screens and keyboards are fixed to the late 1970s, and the creature’s last appearance in full shows the suit. Otherwise the design has aged better than almost any science fiction of its decade. Survival is credited for what forty-seven years have shown, and no more.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over forty years. The form is whole and legible: the frame, the stepped profile, the concourse, the atrium and the sunscoop stand as built. The use is continuous, in its first purpose, as the bank’s headquarters through the handover of 1997 and the move of the bank’s group seat to London; the concourse has kept and widened its public use. The fabric has held: the steel, protected and clad, has stood without known structural failure, and refits of the working floors have changed fittings, not the building. Its presence in the city’s skyline and in its image is wide, but wide presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is not proof. Nothing is charged; nothing is added.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over forty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives in its one theatrical cut, and restorations for home video are repair, not a different film. Presence has been continuous: art-house revival, television, every home format, a collector’s edition, teaching, and two images, Kinski in a pink sweater behind glass and Stanton in a red cap in the desert, that circulate beyond the film’s own audience. The surface ages little. The motels, payphones and walkie-talkies are of 1984, but a road film of the American West wears them as landscape rather than as fashion. Credited at the usual figure for its span and not the widest: its presence, though wide for an art film, stays largely within the audience of art cinema.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over forty-nine years. Form is whole: the grid, the level plane of the tips, the isolation and the terms of viewing stand as made, under the institution that commissioned the work and maintains it. Fabric is stainless steel in a dry climate, and in a work of identical industrial units the resetting or replacing of a single pole would take almost nothing from it. Presence is restricted by design, a few visitors at a time for half the year and an image held to authorized photographs; the work’s fame is wide, but presence earns nothing above the usual figure. The remaining risk is the site itself: the work depends on an open horizon and on one institution’s care.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-six years. The text survives whole, in a form its author revised and approved, and has been in print throughout. Presence has been wide: a defining novel of its decade, translated, and kept in print with the later Rabbit novels in collected editions. But presence is charged in part: Updike’s standing has cooled since his death in 2009, the book is taught less than it was, and its treatment of women has become a principal ground of its contested reception. The contest has not removed it from print or from readers; it bears on presence, not on form or fabric. Its surface, the dime stores, the Mouseketeers on television, the radio news of 1959, is the matter of the book and dates as period rather than as dependence. The figure stands above a charged presence and below the step that unbroken presence over this span would show.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and use, and fabric, in that order. The form is legible: corridor, levels, tank and shaft read from the entrance as the builders set them, and the sculpture of the lower walls survives in rare condition, because the silt that buried it protected it. But the form has lost part of what defined it: the pavilion storeys that rose above ground and much of the pillared superstructure are gone, and the building reads as a trench rather than as the stacked structure it was. Presence was broken for centuries. Use is lost: it gives no water and serves no rite. The fabric has been cleared and consolidated. Some nine centuries set it among the eldest buildings; ruin, lost use, lost presence and restoration each charge it.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over more than eleven millennia. The form survives legibly in the excavated enclosures: rings, central pairs, inset pillars, benches, and reliefs crisp enough to read the knuckles of the hands. Burial preserved it, and very few buildings of any age keep their carved members so well. Presence: none for some ten thousand years. The enclosures were filled and lost, their use and meaning ended with their makers, and they returned to attention only in the 1990s. Fabric: walls slumped and in part collapsed, pillars broken or leaning, some propped in antiquity and stabilised now; the site stands under a modern roof as an excavation, not a building. The loss of presence across the whole span, and the fact that most of the work is still under the mound, weigh against the form’s survival.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 47 years from the first showings and 40 from the book, in the row of 35 to 47 years, whose usual figure is given. Form: whole in the book, which fixes a sequence and has been reprinted; the slideshow stands in Goldin’s later versions, shown again in museums. Presence: continuous in the history of photography, and widened lately by a documentary on Goldin’s life and work. Fabric: charged. Colour slides fade and are worn by projection, and a work that changed at every showing has no single fixed state, so what survives of the show is a version, not the first. The book offsets this. Wide presence, with the slideshow’s own fabric and fixity charged.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, as far as is known; one canvas, not cut, not altered, no part known to be lost. Presence: continuous in a public collection, reproduced in the literature on Kiefer and on German memory after the war, and shown in his surveys; but it is the presence of a known painting in a regional museum, not the widest, and fame lends it little. Fabric: oil and acrylic on burlap, a coarse support less stable than primed linen; no damage is known, and only the general risk is charged. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the subject is old, and the question of a national myth written over a killing ground has not dated. Fifty years is a short record, and the narrower presence and the coarse support each take a little from it.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over forty-two years, from 1984 to 2026, at the figure usual for that span. The form is whole and legible: the path, the drum, the galleries and the terraces are as designed, and the building has outlived the style it was born in, kept and visited as a work rather than as a period piece. The use is continuous and in its own purpose: the Staatsgalerie’s main gallery since 1984, heavily visited from the opening, with the path in public use. The fabric, a stone veneer, painted steel and coloured surfaces, asks for maintenance, and the extent of any renewal since 1984 is not established here; nothing known charges the form. The building is famous within architecture more than beyond it, and fame lends nothing.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival weighed in order, across a hundred and four years. Form: the release survives in a full restoration from surviving prints, but for most of its life it was replaced in circulation by altered versions with renamed characters, rewritten titles and different lengths; the judgment of 1925 ordered prints destroyed and put the film’s existence at risk; Erdmann’s score survives only in part, reconstructed. The charge is proportioned to what was taken, which was large and is now largely repaired. Presence is of the widest: continuous exhibition on every format and with live scores, and an image known to people who have never seen the film. The fabric, tinted nitrate of mixed generation, is the smallest charge. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most; the history of altered versions holds it at 8.6.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released in its one version, with no later cut displacing it, and restorations for home release are repair. Presence has been continuous and wide for a film of its kind: a small release that grew through home video and television into one of the most circulated and quoted American films of its decade, issued in a prestige collection, revived in repertory and kept in use through constant quotation. The surface charge is light, since the film was a period piece when it was made: its surface is set to 1976 by choice, not fixed to 1993 by fashion, and only its manner of nostalgia carries a trace of its making.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival over forty-two years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print continuously and remastered, with a deluxe box in 2016. Presence is wide and continuous: Fight Fire with Fire, the title track, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Creeping Death and Fade to Black have been played live for decades, the album is heard whole, and it is certified multi-platinum, though sales are presence and not proof of permanence. The fabric bears its year: the production is drier and thinner in the low end than the records that followed, and the Cold War subject of the opener is topical. Those charges hold the figure where it stands.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Thirty-one years old, between the usual span of a quarter century and that of four decades. The form survives whole: there is one release version, complete and in circulation, and restorations are repair. Presence is among the widest of any American film of its decade, in continuous exhibition, broadcast, home video and streaming, with its ending and its box in common speech. The surface is charged. The grime and the rain were imitated so widely that they now read as a period style of the 1990s, and the library records, the payphones and the photographs fix the procedure to its decade. But the unnamed city was built to belong to no time, and the moral design has not dated. The charged surface cancels the widest presence, and the figure is the usual one for the span.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording has been in print since release and is heard as an album. Presence is of the widest kind: seven of the twelve tracks were released as singles in the United States and all seven reached the top ten of the Billboard chart; the title track, Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days and I’m on Fire have never left broadcast, the stadium or common use; and the title phrase is part of the language of American politics. Charged: the fabric is fixed to 1984 more than his other records, in the gated snare, the synthesiser tones and Dancing in the Dark’s drum machine, and the presence is of songs more than of the record played whole.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than a century. The charge is real. Form: roughly a third of the painted surface was destroyed by fire, and with it the painter’s colour on the right side. Klee’s restoration kept the drawing and the composition legible, so the defining form survives; what was lost is the colour of a third of a picture whose argument is partly in colour. That is more than fabric and less than the loss of the work’s meaning, and it is charged in proportion. Presence: shown, hidden while damaged, restored, and widely reproduced since; fame lifts the figure only a tenth. The restoration bears on this axis alone. Charged from the usual figure for the span to 8.6.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-four years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, remastered and expanded. Presence is as wide as any album’s of its age: the record is in print and in broadcast, its songs are played at parties and in public places, and Billie Jean and Beat It are known to people who have never owned it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof of permanence. Two charges hold it a tenth from the widest figure. The fabric: the synthesiser tones and drum programming of 1982 are on several tracks, and The Girl Is Mine and P.Y.T. sound of their year, though Billie Jean’s spareness has aged well. And the presence itself: since allegations against the artist were revived in 2019, part of it is contested.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty years. Form: whole; the series exists in negatives, in prints in many collections and in books, and no single loss would take it. Presence: wide and continuous since 1986, through magazine publication, Workers, Gold, the film of 2014 and the exhibitions that followed the maker’s death; the images have outlived the mine, long closed to manual work, and the conditions that made them. That presence is broad, but much of it is the fame of the maker and of one or two images, and fame is presence, not proof, so the widest figure is not given. Fabric: gelatin silver on fibre paper is among the most stable photographic processes; who keeps the negatives and who prints now, after the maker’s death, is a small open question.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-eight years. The form survives whole: one version, released as made, with no altered cut and nothing lost; later transfers are repair. Presence is of the widest kind for its span: continuous on television, above all around the anniversaries of the landing, on every home format, in teaching and in common reference, so that the beach has become the image of D-Day for a generation that knows no newsreel of it. The surface is not fixed to 1998: the film is set in 1944 and made to look like a memory of it, and its grain and palette have dated less than they have been copied. Some charge falls on the frame, whose devotion reads as of its moment in American memory of the war, and that keeps the figure where the span sets it.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-seven years. The form is whole: the film as released survives without loss, and later digital restorations are repair. Presence is continuous and steady: in repertory and in retrospectives of Fassbinder, on television, on every home format, in sets of the trilogy, and in every course on the New German Cinema; it is the Fassbinder film most often shown. It is not the widest presence a film can have. The surface of postwar rubble, nylons and the Adenauer years is period recreated in 1978 and ages as period; the late-seventies colour shows a little, not enough to charge. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. Form: the film as released survives whole, and the restoration of 2014, made under Lynch’s supervision, is repair. Presence: continuous since 1977, first as a midnight film that ran for years, then on television, on every home format, in repertory and in teaching, and named to the National Film Registry in 2004. It is wide in art and cult cinema and less wide beyond them. Fabric: the surface is hardly fixed to its decade, since black and white, a placeless industrial city and an ageless soundscape date it less than the colour of a studio picture of 1977. That earns the usual figure for its span, not the widest, because its presence, though unbroken, has been narrower than that of the most seen films of its age.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across thirty-five years. Form: the film survives whole in its one version, the theatrical cut; restorations for home video repair it and do not change it. Presence: continuous, and among the widest any film of its decade has had, on television, in every home format, in revivals, in quotation and parody far beyond the cinema, kept present by its sequels and series; that presence is fame as much as proof, and earns a little and no more. Surface: the styling of the early 1990s ages little, since the film’s world is drab institutional America. The charge is Gumb, whose figure has dated and narrows how the film is shown and received. The wide presence and that charge offset each other.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
A film of 1984, forty-two years elapsed. The theatrical cut survives whole and is in circulation. For some years the director’s cut displaced it in home release, a small charge on the surface, since the film as released was for a time the less available version, and that withholds the tenth that the widest presence would earn. The presence is otherwise wide and continuous: television, home video, concert screenings with live orchestra, classroom use and the general idea of Mozart. The American accents and some styling of the eighties, the wigs and the punk inflection of the young Mozart, are of their moment, but the period setting has protected the film more than dated it. The bar of 8.5 is cleared by a tenth.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over fifty-two years. The form is whole: the film as released survives, restored rather than altered, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence has been continuous in art cinema, in repertory screenings, in successive home editions, in teaching and on the critics’ lists, though it has not passed far beyond cinema’s own audience and is narrower than that of the decade’s popular classics. The fabric is fixed to its moment in dress, in rooms and in the guest-worker term itself, but the subject has outlived its conditions, and the film is watched now as a film about migration rather than as a period piece. A presence real but confined to the art cinema sets the figure.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixty-six years, form first, then fabric, then presence. Form: the text survives whole, as Barth published it in 1960 and as he revised it in 1967, with nothing lost; the revision is the author’s and charges nothing. Fabric: there is none to charge. Presence is where the charge falls. The book has stayed in print and is taught in courses on American postmodern fiction, but it is read now mainly in the academy and by its admirers, its author’s standing has fallen since the 1980s, and its general readership is narrower than that of Catch-22 or Lolita, novels of the same years. Its archaic surface is not fixed to 1960, but its comic rape and its caricatured Indians and Africans are, and they have cost it readers. The charge holds the figure below what the span gives a widely read book, without taking it lower.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across fifty-six years. Form: whole, in one released version, nothing lost; restorations repair and do not revise. Presence: continuous, on television and home video, in revival programmes and in teaching on the New Hollywood, and the diner circulates far beyond those who have seen the film. It is steady presence rather than the widest, narrower than the decade’s largest films and than Nicholson’s best-known roles. Surface: the hitchhikers’ talk of ecology and the period styling fix it to 1970 more than its story does, a light charge; the oil fields and the motels age as history, not as fashion. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. Form: the film survives whole, as released, in its one version, and restorations for home video repair it. Presence: continuous and wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in teaching, in lists and polls, and in the National Film Registry since 1992. Two charges hold it at the usual mark for its age and not above. The surface is more fixed to its moment than most: 1970s Manhattan intellectual life, its analysts, its films and its names, McLuhan, The Sorrow and the Pity, Commentary and Dissent, which ages its jokes. And its director’s public life since 1992 has narrowed some of its exhibition and changed how it is watched, without removing it from view. These are charges of presence and surface, not of form.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over forty years. The form is whole: all one hundred boxes stand as made, in the order Judd set, in the buildings he refitted, under his foundation’s care. Presence has been continuous since the opening: the installation has been on view, kept as he left it, and has drawn steady attention, wide among artists and architects though not of the widest public kind, so presence earns nothing above the usual figure. Aluminum is durable indoors; the glazing and the roofs need upkeep, a fabric charge of the smallest kind, and nothing that carries the form has been replaced. The work is fixed to its site: it cannot be dispersed, and it depends on one institution and one pair of buildings.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface. The form survives whole: one version, nothing lost, the restorations repair only. Presence has been continuous for sixty-one years, in repertory, festival retrospectives, television and home video and the teaching of film, and the film’s images have outlived it as currency: the blue face, Karina’s striped dress, the dynamite. That presence is wide within cinema and limited beyond it. The Techniscope colour, restored, holds. The surface is the charge: the advertising talk, the pop and comic-strip register, the Vietnam playlet and the political allusions are fixed to 1965 and read as period. The charge falls on surface only, and the figure stands a step below what that span of survival usually earns, and above the figure it earns where presence is charged too.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: the fifteen-track sequence is in print in mono and stereo and is the edition heard. Presence is charged: the record failed on release and was little heard for years, a long silence for so young a span, and its presence since has been wide among critics and musicians, rising, but narrower among the public than that of the band’s singles. The fabric is of 1968, the Mellotron, the Pye sound, the thin edges of some mixes, but the subject is the past, so the period surface is heard as part of what it says. It stands a tenth below Low, and two below Let It Bleed.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, and its restorations repair it. Presence: continuous and very wide, in revivals, on television, on every home format, and in quotation that has not stopped since 1984. Fabric and surface are where the charge falls. Parts of the surface are fixed to their moment: the synthesizer score, the fashions and the punks of 1984, the stop-motion endoskeleton in the factory. Against that, the night city, the pursuit and the machine’s advance have not aged, and the film is still watched for itself and not as a period piece. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown; the dated effects hold it from the widest figure the presence alone would earn.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over twenty-seven years. The form survives whole: the dome, the ramps, the cone, the chamber and the stripped interior stand as built. Use has been continuous and intensive since 1999, the parliament’s and the public’s, and the dome has become the image of the building, which is in turn a principal image of the united state. The fabric has held. Presence is among the widest of any building of its decades, and earns its one tenth. The endurance of the inherited shell through fire, war, ruin and division is real record and is weighed here, but it lends the rebuilding nothing the rebuilding has not itself survived. What holds the axis: the dome’s glass and steel is a signature of its decade, and the survival shown is of under thirty years.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. Form: whole and legible as built; the roofs, the cluster and the island stand as designed, and nothing added alters the composition. Use: continuous; the house has sat here since 1982, through a civil war and attacks in and near the capital, through the enlargement of the house in 1989, which the chamber now seats, and through the crisis of 2022. Fabric: the copper has darkened and the concrete has weathered and been maintained. The security cordon round the shore has hardened, and it changes access to the setting more than the building. The span is forty-four years, and the figure is the one that span supports; the building’s presence is wide within its region and its field, but not world-wide.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival over sixty-one years is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued. Presence is real and uneven. “Sinnerman” is continuously and widely present; the album heard whole is present more narrowly, chiefly to Simone’s listeners, and the popularity of one track is presence, not proof of the album’s permanence. The fabric is sound: a small acoustic group, voice and piano, carries little date, and the fidelity is of its year without being fixed to a fashion. The narrower presence of the whole holds it below Let It Bleed at 8.8 and A Love Supreme, of the same year, at 8.9.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Forty-eight years since publication are weighed as forty-eight years. The text is whole and stable, and kept in a classics list; the book is taught and translated. Its presence is real but has narrowed: Murdoch’s standing fell in the decades after her death, and the novel is read more in the academy and among her readers than generally. The charge of a surface fixed to its moment applies in part: the London theatre world of the postwar decades and an idiom of upper middle class English talk that now dates. Fame is presence, not proof, and the Booker and the reputation are counted here at the figure usual for the span, with no step above it.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, with no loss, damage or reworking by another hand known. Presence: thirty-eight years, in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and reproduced as one of the best known of Richter’s images; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: oil on canvas in a smooth, thin, sound technique, the smallest charge. Its presence is wide within its field but not of the widest kind: the canvas is known to the art public more than to the general one. The surface is barely fixed to its moment, since a child in a patterned jacket dates by her clothes only lightly. Against it all: a survival of decades does not outscore one of centuries.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Span: thirty-five years. Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: it lies in the conditions (the ideal weight, the wrapped candy, the taking, the right to replenish), fully legible and transmitted by the certificate and the owner’s practice. Nothing that makes the work has been lost; the candies were always meant to be eaten and replaced, so the replacement of fabric is the design, not a loss. Presence is wide and continuous since 1991; fame is presence, not proof. Against it: the work exists only when an owner installs and replenishes it, so its survival depends on institutional will and on a supply of suitable candy, and between installations it is a certificate. That dependence offsets the width of presence.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across 102 years. The form survives whole, in its one five-reel version; restorations are repair, and the accompaniment, never fixed, takes nothing from it. Presence is real but not continuous: the film was not widely shown through the 1930s and 1940s, and its exhibition rests on the revival that began in the 1950s; since then it has been continuously present in repertory, teaching, festivals and every home format, and named to the National Film Registry in 1991, while its public is narrower than a sound classic’s, as a silent comedy’s must be. That charge sets the figure a step below the usual for its span. The fabric is nitrate grain and wear in surviving elements, the smallest charge, and the surface of 1924 ages as period. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-eight years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one cut, and later restorations and transfers repair it. Presence has been continuous and among the widest of its decade’s films: repertory and midnight screenings, a festival held every year in its name, television and every home format, and quotation in common speech. The cult grew after the first run rather than fading; fame is not counted, but a presence that has grown for a quarter of a century is. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, the Gulf War and a Los Angeles of pornographers and conceptual artists, but the film is about a man out of his moment, and the period reads as setting rather than fashion. Twenty-eight years, with the widest presence credited, take the figure.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over sixty-two years. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1964, and lives on also in the Collected Essays of 1995; nothing to charge. Presence: the book is in print, taught, cited and anthologised essay by essay, and read by writers and by readers of jazz as well as in the academy; but it is read chiefly there, in American and African American studies, and far less by the general reader than the novel it stands beside. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, reviews of Myrdal and of Blues People, a piece of 1949 on Home of the Brave and the race films of its year, though the arguments have outlived their occasions. The figure sits a tenth above the row for a presence so charged and below the usual figure for its span: the presence is real and unbroken, but academic.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-six years. The form is whole: the film survives as released in 1940, and restorations are repair. Presence has been very wide and continuous: theatrical reissue, television, every home format, teaching, and the speech and the globe dance circulating far beyond the film. The charge falls on surface. This is a topical satire, made in 1939 and 1940 against a named regime in its moment, Tomainia, Bacteria, Osterlich and the invasion thin veils for the events of 1938, and the ethnic comedy of the Napaloni scenes has aged. What lifts the axis is that the moment it fixes became the century’s archetype of tyranny, so the satire has outlived its occasion as few topical works do; what holds it a step below the films that keep their surface clear over such a span is that its surface remains visibly that of its year.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form survives whole: three clusters, every box in place, the streets, cores and gardens legible as built, and the design has outlived the fair, the centennial and the decade’s faith in industrial housing as a model still copied and answered. The use survives continuously as dwelling since 1967, which is its own purpose, but the social use it was built to show has gone, from demonstration housing for ordinary incomes to a prized co-ownership, and dwellings have been joined, so the plan’s housing types are altered in part; that is charged. The fabric has held with repair, chiefly against water at the joints and the roofs. Presence is wide but not the widest. Fifty-nine years, form whole, use altered: a tenth below the foot of the usual row.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the broadcast series and the theatrical cut both exist complete, restorations are repair, and nothing of the original is lost. Presence across fifty-three years is wide: repeated broadcasts in Scandinavia, the theatrical cut in continuous circulation in art cinemas, home video in both versions, a life on the stage, a sequel by its maker and a remake. Two charges are taken lightly. For decades the broadcast series, the unit judged here, was less seen abroad than the cut, so the presence of the work is narrower than the presence of its title. And the surface is fixed in part: the 16 millimetre image is softer and grainier than Bergman’s features, and the décor and some of the sexual and professional assumptions are of 1973. The condition treated has not changed, and the faces do not date.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole and has been in print since release, though charged a little: two songs on the record as released were cut for release, and longer versions now circulate beside it, so the text is in mild dispute. Presence is continuous and wide for Sweet Jane and Rock & Roll, which live in broadcast, in film and in bars, and narrower for the album played whole, which lives as the band’s accessible record in the shadow of its first. The fabric is little fixed to 1970: the production is plain, dry and unfashionable, and has aged well for that. The charges on text and presence hold it below the usual figure for its span.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Fifty-one years. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1975, with no question of its authority, and Borges’s prose carries no surface fixed to its moment. Presence is continuous: the book has stayed in print in Spanish, in the collected works and in single editions; it stands entire in Hurley’s Collected Fictions; it has been widely translated. The charge is on presence, which is uneven. The title story and “El otro” live across the culture, as present as any Borges. The book as a book is read much less than Ficciones, El Aleph or El hacedor, and most of its stories are known chiefly to readers of the complete Borges and to the academy. That unevenness holds the figure a step down; the two stories keep it above the bar of the gate.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty years. The form is whole: one version, as released, and later restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, in revivals, on television and every home format, in the teaching of film and of journalism, and beyond cinema in a cry that is still quoted. The fabric is the charge the axis names. A topical satire of 1976, with its panic over Arab money, its parody of an armed radical cell and its three channels of network news, is fixed to its moment in its particulars. Against that, the particulars have aged into prophecy more than into period, and the film is watched for what it foresaw. The topical surface keeps it a tenth above the bar of the Epochal Gate.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over thirty-four years and is weighed as thirty-four years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in many translations. Its presence is continuous and of the widest kind for a literary novel of its decade: read through the 1990s and 2000s, taught in some courses, and revived from about the late 2010s by a large young readership that took it as the foundation of a mode. The surface is fixed to its moment in small things, the 1980s, no telephones in the students’ rooms, a Vermont college before computers, but that fixity is the period setting of a book that never depended on it. With the widest presence the figure takes the upper end of the step for its age and no more, since fame and sales earn at most a tenth.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-four years. The theatrical cut survives whole. The edition of 2002 altered it, with digital shots of the creature and the agents’ guns replaced by walkie-talkies, and for about a decade was the version most readily found on home video; the original was issued beside it, has since been the standard release, and its maker has said he regretted the changes. The original was never lost, only for a time displaced, and that is charged by holding the figure at the usual mark for its span. Presence is as wide as a film’s can be, in reissues, television, every home format, teaching and quotation. The bicycles and the suburb date, but as period, and the film is about that suburb.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form survives as it was: the rebuilding reproduced the arch, the deck and the profile from surveys and the record, so the bridge a visitor crosses has the form Hayruddin built. The use ran without a break for more than four centuries, through Ottoman, Habsburg and Yugoslav rule and the Second World War, was severed for eleven years after 1993, and has resumed in full. The fabric carries the largest charge: the arch fell into the river, and the stone of the bridge as it stands is new, quarried from the same beds, and has stood twenty-two years. What lifts the figure is that the form outlived its own destruction.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the orientation, the signature, the title and the act are all carried by the replicas, and from 1917 to 1950 the work showed that it could survive with no object at all, as one photograph and a report. For a work that consists in a choice, losing the chosen thing takes less than it would from a painting. Presence was nil for a generation, then as wide as any work of its century, and fame is not proof. The fabric is wholly replaced: the object of 1917 is lost, the authorised replicas date from 1950 to 1964, and the copies of 1964 are handmade sculptures after a photograph, the reverse of a readymade, which have been attacked and repaired. The lost object and the handmade fabric hold the axis below its span.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-nine years. The form survives whole in its one cut; restorations for home video repair it, and nothing is lost. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and home video, and in teaching, as Buñuel’s last film and as the case of the two actresses; it is narrower than that of his most exhibited work, and has not passed far beyond cinema. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the bombings were topical in 1977, in a Europe of the Red Brigades and ETA, and the dress, light and lingerie are of their decade. Against that, the terror is kept abstract and satirical, a group named for the Infant Jesus, and the obsession it frames has not dated. Presence that is steady rather than widest leaves little room above the bar.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-five years. The form survives whole: there is one cut, the film as released is available, and the alterations of later home editions are small and take nothing from its form. Presence is of the widest kind: continuous on television and on every home format, in repertory and in teaching, chosen for the National Film Registry in 1999, its theme and its boulder known to people who have not seen it. Part of that is fame, which is not proof of permanence, but the teaching is use. That presence would carry the figure a tenth higher. The charge is surface: the native people of the prologue and the crowds of Cairo are drawn as a serial of the 1930s drew them, and that surface has aged as attitude, not only as period, and draws criticism that grows rather than fades.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over thirty-nine years. The form survives whole: the building stands as Piano and Arup designed it, with no addition that alters its governing idea. The use is continuous and in its own purpose: a free museum of the same collection, the treasure house working as intended. The fabric is weighed as substantially original; the leaves and the timber need care, and clapboard is a material renewed rather than kept, so the record of repair since 1987 bears on the figure without being stated here. The building is well known among architects and museum people but less widely beyond them, and it takes the usual figure for its span. It does not read as a period piece, and that is credited within the figure.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the tiered building stands as built, and its governing idea has outlived the period that produced it and been answered and copied. The use is continuous: it has been the seat of Boston’s government without break since 1969. The fabric is charged. The concrete has weathered and leaked, the services and the envelope have needed repeated repair, and the interiors have been altered over time; the plaza, half of the unit, was substantially remade in the early 2020s, its first severity softened by planting and ramps. Its survival has also been a public decision more than once: proposals to sell or demolish it were made and not carried out. Use is whole; fabric and the plaza are charged.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-five years. Form: the image is whole as painted; nothing of its defining arrangement is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. Presence: it is held at The Broad in Los Angeles, one of the major private collections turned public, and is reproduced widely; that is wide presence, though fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric: acrylic and oilstick are younger and less tested materials than oil on a prepared ground, and oilstick surfaces can be delicate; the risk is general and is charged lightly. The surface is not fixed to a technology or a topical event. Whole in form, wide in presence, lightly charged on fabric.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: one version was released and survives complete, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous and, for a genre film, wide: television, every home format, revival screenings, teaching and constant citation, and Veronica’s line “Be very afraid” passed into the language as the film’s tagline. The surface is charged a little. The computers of 1986 and the sound of a decade show, though the practical effects have aged better than most of their time and still work. The widest presence is not reached: the film is known everywhere, but it is held chiefly within its genre.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-eight years, a span on which a work whole stands at 8.6, the widest presence at 8.7 and a lowered survival at 8.5. Form: whole. No part is known to be lost, repainted or restored, and none is supposed. Presence: in the Tate collection in London, and one of the pictures by which the painter’s turn is discussed; good presence, not the widest. Fabric: acrylic on paper laid on canvas is a less proven support than oil on canvas, and paper at this scale carries some general risk; that could weigh a tenth at most, and it is not charged, since no damage is known. The usual figure for the span stands.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over thirty-four to forty-nine years. The form is whole and legible: the governing system of corridor, pergola and court stands as designed. The use is continuous and in its own purpose, as one of the country’s leading schools of business. The fabric is mixed. Granite is among the most durable of materials, but exposed concrete in a monsoon climate stains and weathers. Buildings added later by other hands are part of the work as it stands; their extent, and how far they follow the original system, could not be established, and the figure allows a small charge for them on the form of the whole. Presence widened after 2018 without reaching the widest. This is the work’s highest axis, and the only one of the five epochal axes it clears.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-eight years. Form: whole. All ten canvases survive together in one collection, never dispersed, and are shown together in a gallery given to the cycle alone; no part is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. Presence: long on view in a major museum, and its standing has risen rather than fallen, which lifts the figure a little, since fame is presence and not proof. Fabric: oil crayon and graphite on largely bare canvas are fragile surfaces, easily abraded, and that general risk is charged lightly. The span is short of fifty years, and the figure stands near the top of what that span allows.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: whole, one canvas, unaltered after the painter so far as is known, sixty-one years old, and the image fully legible. Presence: real but partial. The canvas belongs to a memorial collection in a Czech village and spent decades on the far side of the Iron Curtain from the painter’s public; its wide presence has come through reproduction in the Richter literature, and fame and price are presence, not proof. It survived, too, where Richter destroyed or abandoned many photo-paintings of the same years. Fabric: oil on canvas in thin grey layers; no loss or repair is known, and none is charged. Six decades with presence wide would stand higher; presence here is partly charged, and the figure sits between.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, with no later hand known; the image stands as made, and it has outlived the gestural moment it took as its material, for it is not seen as a period piece. Presence is charged. The canvas has been in private hands throughout, sold at auction in 1988, and seen at intervals on loan and in retrospectives rather than in continuous public view. Its wide fame rests on reproduction and on price, and price is presence, not proof. Even so, presence is reduced, not absent: the image is among the most reproduced American paintings of its decade. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no damage known. Over sixty-seven years the form is whole and the image widely known; private keeping holds the figure a step below what a painting of this age would otherwise carry.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the film survives complete as released, and restorations of its colour and its CinemaScope frame are repair. Presence has been continuous and very wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in teaching, and beyond the cinema in the image of its lead, though some of that presence is the star’s rather than the film’s, and wide presence earns little on its own. The charge is on surface. The diagnosis of a weak father in an apron, the vocabulary of its teenagers and some broad playing among the adults are fixed to the mid 1950s and are now often watched as period. The anguish of the young has not aged. The bar of 8.5 is cleared by a tenth.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Fifty-two years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole and fully legible: three parts and a loop, documented, reproducible and shown continuously. Presence is wide, in collections, in the history of video art and in the variants. The charge is fabric, and it is more than a canvas’s craquelure: the cathode ray monitor and the analogue camera belonged to their moment, have been replaced and will have to be replaced again with apparatus that does not look or behave as the first did, since a flat screen is not a glass bulb. The work’s surface is in part a technology. The form has proved that it outlives its apparatus, and the figure is the most stable of the parts. Set one step below the usual figure for its span, for the obsolescence of its means.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole in all four objects as made in 1986, nothing known lost, replaced or refabricated. Presence: forty years, continuous since its first showing at Sonnabend, and its fame grew rather than faded after the decade that produced it, which is the evidence that it has outlived its moment. Fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence. Fabric: stainless steel, about as durable as sculpture is made, though a mirror finish shows every scratch and fingerprint and needs care. Forty years give 8.6 as the usual figure. It is held there and not a tenth higher, though the presence is wide, because the argument is still bound in part to the market that made it famous.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Forty years, and survival is demonstrated. The film as released survives whole, in its original negative and in restorations; the theatrical cut has never been withdrawn, and the longer Special Edition circulates beside it as an alternative, not a replacement. Presence has been continuous: television, home video in every format, revival screenings and constant citation. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, the military vernacular of the 1980s, cathode-ray monitors and some optical compositing, though the practical creatures, the Queen above all, have aged better than most effects of the decade. Forty years are not centuries, and the dated surface is a real charge. The figure credits what elapsed time has shown, and it clears the bar of the gate by a tenth.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as made, in place on its original site, nothing lost or replaced, and needing no maintenance to remain legible. Presence: continuous, and of the widest kind for its age: an outdoor work seen by tens of thousands of people daily for twenty-eight years, free of charge and without a museum, a landmark on maps and signs and in the region’s picture of itself, which has passed through the opposition that met it and out the other side. Fame is presence, not proof of permanence, and is given little weight. Fabric: weathering steel, ribbed, and piled about twenty metres into the hill. Nothing is charged. The span is short, and the figure stands where twenty-eight years can place it.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over seventy years, on form, presence and fabric, for the record as released. The form survives whole, but its defining claim, that this is the night, has been shown to hold only in part, and the Newport set is now more often heard in the complete edition of 1999 than in the sequence of 1956. Presence is wide and continuous for the event and for “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”, much thinner for the suite and for the original sequence as a whole. The fabric is a mono recording of 1956 with a soloist heard off his microphone and applause laid on: dated, and sound. Both form and presence are charged, and the event keeps the figure up.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-six years. The film as released survives whole and has been restored; nothing of it is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide for an art-leaning drama: eight Academy nominations at release, steady television and home video, teaching in film and in the medical humanities, and a cry known beyond the film. The surface is not fixed to 1980, since a Victorian story in black and white does not date as a contemporary one does, and Tucker’s makeup still holds under scrutiny. That earns the usual figure for its span. It stops short of the widest because its critical standing has narrowed beside Lynch’s later films, and because the disability critique has made part of its reception uneasy, though it has not removed the film from view.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across thirty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, the theatrical cut, with no loss and no replacement by altered versions; restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and as wide as a film of its decade can have: repeated broadcast, every home format, streaming, a place in the teaching of screenwriting and in popular film culture, and a standing in audience polls held for three decades. The surface is not fixed to its moment: the period setting of 1947 to 1966 protected it from the look of 1994, and nothing in it is topical. Thirty-two years of survival with presence at its widest carry the figure, which clears the bar with a tenth to spare.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is legible and nearly whole: pylons, courts, birth house, pronaos, sanctuary, roof chapels, kiosks and gates stand, roofed where they were roofed, with their reliefs, fifteen centuries after the religion, the state and the frontier that made them. But the form included the island, and that ground is under the reservoir; Agilkia is a careful substitute, and the buildings were kept at the cost of their place. The use was lost about 1,500 years ago, after an unusually long late life and a time as a church. The fabric was defaced in late antiquity, stripped of most of its colour and scoured by seventy years of flooding, then cut into blocks and rebuilt, though the stones are the original stones. The highest of the twelve, and above the gate narrowly.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about three and a half millennia. Form: legible, but in large part restored. The bull, the vaulter and the act survive as a reading of fragments completed with modern infill on the restorers’ reconstruction, so the defining form stands partly on evidence and partly on Evans’s interpretation; that is charged more heavily than fabric decay would be. Presence: none for more than three thousand years, buried in the ruin of the palace from its destruction until the twentieth century; on view in Heraklion since its recovery and among the most reproduced images of Aegean art, which lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: fragmentary plaster, mounted. The figure stands at the foot of its row, and a tenth below.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Survival of what makes the work, weighed on form, presence and fabric, at sixty-two years. Form: no part is known to be lost or replaced, and nothing of its defining arrangement is known to have changed; no restoration is recorded here, and none is invented. Presence is charged in part: the painting is not argued as one on continuous public view, its holder is not given, and fame is not proof. Fabric: an assemblage with a chair, a cast, standing letters and hinges is more exposed than a flat canvas, and that general risk is charged lightly. Whole in form and charged a little on presence and fabric, the painting sits between the figure usual for its age and the figure lowered where either is charged.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-two years. The form survives whole: the film as released is the work. Presence has been continuous, in repertory and festival screenings, in home video through a series of editions, and in a regular place in retrospectives and in the teaching of Buñuel and of surrealism in film. It is narrower than the presence of the most widely known films of its span, and it has passed beyond cinema only through the toilet dinner. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the riot police and the sniper speaking to France in the years after 1968, but the satire’s target is not topical, and it ages as period.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has been continuously in print, played and reissued, the reissues standing beside it. Presence is wide: 1979, Tonight, Tonight and Bullet with Butterfly Wings remain in continuous circulation, and the album is among the most heard double albums of its decade. The charge is the fabric: the surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the production’s mid-decade wall of guitar and in the adolescent register of some of the words, which date more than the record’s best music does. The width of presence lifts the figure; the period surface holds it where it stands.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. The form survives: the theatrical cut of 1977 is complete. Its maker’s own altered versions charge it a little: the Special Edition of 1980 replaced it in circulation for some years, and the edition of 1998 was for a time the standard version at home, so the original was partly displaced by its director’s revisions; since later editions carry all three cuts, the charge is small. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching, and the five tones quoted far beyond the cinema. The fabric ages as period, the photochemical effects and the Indiana households with their televisions, but the effects, made of light rather than models, have aged better than most. At its span and presence, the small charge for displacement holds it at 8.6.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole as issued and has been in print since its release. Presence is of the widest kind for a record of its age: continuously sold and streamed, heard by listeners who hear no other Cuban music, its songs, Chan Chan above all, played by bands and buskers far from Cuba, and kept present by Wim Wenders’s film. Popularity is presence, not proof, and it is credited only so far. The fabric carries little date: an acoustic ensemble recorded in a live room, with nothing of the 1990s on it beyond the gloss of its mastering. One charge is light and real: part of the presence lives as a brand and an image of Havana rather than as the record heard whole.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over fifty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print and been reissued. The title song’s presence is of the widest kind, sung, broadcast and taught continuously for five decades; the album’s is narrower, heard whole chiefly by those who come to it as Parton’s best early record, and since the song’s presence is not the album’s, that narrowness is charged. The fabric is largely sound: a band record of acoustic and electric instruments ages less than synthesiser pop, though the Nashville backing places it in its year. Blue, of the same year and heard whole and widely, holds 8.9 here.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-nine years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: in repertory and on television, on every home format, in teaching, and beyond the cinema in its line, known to many who have not seen the film. That presence is wide in America and narrower elsewhere, and it rests in good part on the line and on Newman’s fame, which are presence rather than proof. The surface is charged a little: the star vehicle of 1967, the zooms and the leering car wash scene date it, though the road gang and its rules age as period rather than as fashion. The axis stands highest of the twelve, on a whole form and long exhibition.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at fifty-five years. Form: whole, one canvas, with no loss or alteration known. Presence: the canvas is shown and reproduced; but continuous public view is not shown here, and the series’ fame, which is wide, is presence and not proof, and belongs partly to other canvases. That is charged a little. Fabric: acrylic of 1971 is stable, while the graphite and charcoal are delicate passages on an unglazed surface of this size, and that general risk is charged lightly. The figure sits a tenth under the usual figure for its age: form whole, presence charged a little, fabric charged lightly.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-six years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, singly and in the trilogy, in Canada, Britain and the United States, and in translation. Presence is continuous and wide in Canada, where it has been taught for decades, and steady elsewhere among readers of literary fiction. That presence is not contested, but it is concentrated in one national literature and narrower beyond it than that of the most widely read English-language novels of its decade, and the concentration holds the axis below the usual figure for its span. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the book is a period novel by design, set from 1908 to 1968, and has not dated as its own era passed. Decades demonstrate less than centuries.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-one years. The form survives whole: one version as released, no altered cut, restorations that repair, a director who has not revised it. Presence is of the widest kind for a film of its span: continuous television and home video, revival screenings, two sequels, and a public calendar date, 21 October 2015, borrowed from the second of them. What holds it short of the widest figure is the surface. The 1985 frame, the Libyans, the brand-name jokes, Doc’s “Ronald Reagan? The actor?”, is itself now period, and some of the comedy, the car scene with Biff and Marvin Berry, is read with more unease than it was. The 35 mm colour and optical effects are the smallest charge.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, presence and then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, nothing of it lost and no altered cut put in its place. Presence is of the widest kind a film of its span can have: continuous on television, home video and streaming, returned to every year on 2 February, its title a word in the language. The surface ages a little, since the clothes of the early 1990s and local television with its equipment date the frame, but nothing turns on them, and the day itself is placeless. The fabric, a studio colour film in good condition, is the smallest charge. Thirty-three years is a short span for survival to prove, and the span, not the presence, holds the axis at 8.6.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about forty-two years. Form: whole. The image is a single frame on a transparency and in innumerable prints and reproductions, and nothing of it is lost. Presence: as wide as that of any photograph of its decade, continuous since 1985, renewed by the portrait of 2002 and by the news of Sharbat Gula’s later life; but that width is largely fame, and fame lifts the figure only a little. Against it, the surface is to a degree fixed to its moment, a refugee of the Soviet war shown to a Cold War readership, and the ethical critique has changed how the picture is shown and received without taking it away. Fabric: the image is secured in reproduction.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been kept in print. Presence is as wide as any album of its decade. Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger are among the most heard British songs of their time, and the second was sung by crowds as a civic hymn in Manchester after the arena bombing of 2017. That widest presence earns a tenth at most, and popularity is not proof of permanence. The fabric is charged: a mastering among the loudest of its year and a mark of its era, and a sound fixed to 1995. The tenth earned and the tenth charged cancel.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across a quarter-century, against two conditions. It outlived its origin as a television pilot: the seams are visible and are now studied rather than a reason to set the film aside. It outlived the fashion for the puzzle film, which it helped to make; the film did not pass with it, because its puzzle is a grief and not a trick. The surface fixed to its moment is charged: the telephones, the videotape, the Hollywood of agents and casting rooms around 2000. Presence holds the figure at the gate: it was named the best film of the century in the BBC critics’ poll of 2016 and stood eighth in the Sight and Sound poll of 2022, a critics’ standing more than a public one, level with Kid A and far below what has lasted centuries.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over thirty years, and the evidence is positive. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Presence is wide and continuous: public rereadings, a film about its author, The End of the Tour (2015), and a readership that has grown since Wallace’s death in 2008. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the cartridges and the videophone belong to the 1990s imagining the future, though the satire of a culture of streamed entertainment reads more pertinently now than then. Charged against it: the book’s standing has been contested in the last decade, both for the readership it gathered and for what became known of its author’s conduct, and its presence is narrower outside the United States. The contest has not removed it from print, from teaching or from readers; it bears on presence, not on form or fabric. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published. Fabric: nothing to charge. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the penny stocks and conglomerates of the early 1970s, but that is its matter, and the economy it satirised has become more like the book since, so that it is read as forecast more than as period. Presence is where the charge falls: it has been kept in print and reissued, but it is read by a small devoted readership and in courses on postwar fiction, and it is better known as a famously difficult book than read. Five decades of survival, with that presence, do not stand with centuries.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over twenty-nine years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is continuous: the book is taught, and its prologue circulates on its own. Its surface is set in the Cold War, but as history recovered from the 1990s, not as the accident of a production era, and the conditions that produced the book, the decade after the Cold War, have passed while it still reads as pertinent. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: the length limits its general readership, and its standing is a standing among critics and committed readers more than a presence across the culture. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Weighed under the step for modern books. As a collected book it is twenty-seven years old, and its serialisation began thirty-seven years ago; for that span the usual figure is 8.5 to 8.6. The text survives whole and has stayed in print in one volume since 1999, in English and in translation, and its presence in the reading and teaching of comics is continuous. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: its matter is 1888, its drawing is period by design, and nothing in it depends on the 1990s. Two charges stand. Its presence is concentrated in the readership and scholarship of comics and is narrower beyond them; and a later coloured edition shows that even its makers have revised its look, though the original stands. Scored at the usual figure for its span, not raised for fame, and so exactly at the bar.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across thirty-two years. The form is whole: one version, nothing lost, and the restoration of 2019, a repair of the same cut, brought it back to cinemas. Presence is continuous but narrow: the running time has kept it from television and from most repertory programmes, and it has lived at festivals, retrospectives and cinematheques and on home video. The fabric is not fixed to its moment in the usual way: the decay of a collective farm at the end of the 1980s dates the setting, but the film is shot as if from no date, and the mud and the rain do not age. Thirty-two years is a short demonstration, and the narrowness of the presence holds the figure at the bar.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival over forty-six years from first publication, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is charged: the text survived its seizure only because copies escaped, it was first published from microfilm with gaps, and it has been made good since rather than read whole from the start. Presence is charged too: for most of its life the book was read by émigrés and specialists, and its wide presence is recent, in France, then in Britain after the BBC radio adaptation of 2011, and in Russia after Sergei Ursulyak’s television serial of 2012. The fabric is not fixed to its moment: its subject is the century’s two states, and it has outlived both. The present strength of its presence is real but young, and the figure stands at the foot of the band for its age, where text and presence are both charged.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-six years. The form is whole, and the record has outlived every condition that produced it: the CD booklet it left empty, the millennial dread it was heard against, the campaign of animated blips, the guitar-band era it answered. The fabric carries some of its year in the programmed rhythm of the eighth track and the glitch edges of the second, aged into period colour. Presence holds the figure. Its standing rose until it was named the album of the decade, but that is a critics’ standing more than a public presence. It stands level with or below the films of its years, Mulholland Drive among them, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence and use, then fabric: twenty-seven years since completion, twenty-five open with exhibitions. The form survives whole: zigzag, voids, axes, Garden and Tower are as built and wholly legible, and the building has outlived the moment of its competition, the end of the divided city and the deconstructivist debate, without reading as a period piece. Use has been continuous, as museum and memorial, and presence is wide: it is among the most visited museums in Berlin, and the image by which the institution is known. The charge is on use: the exhibitions have been rebuilt once, as the museum works out how to live in the building, and a quarter of a century is a short demonstration. The presence is the institution’s as much as the form’s.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole: blocks, joints, pools and rooms stand as built, and the design has outlived the conditions that produced it, a commune rescuing its spa, as a model copied and answered. Use is continuous in its own purpose: it is still a bath. Presence carries a small charge: since the sale of 2012 the bath the commune built for the public has belonged, with the hotel, to a private owner. The fabric is the maker’s, stone in a wet and heated building that asks constant care of its owners. Fame among architects is wide, but fame is presence, not proof, and a span of under thirty years is scored as what it shows.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over fifty-four years: continuous screening, restoration and issue on each home format. The comedy has held. The manners, the deference to the cassock, the ritual of the aperitif and the dread of the unexpected guest are not tied to a decade. The surface fixed to its moment is real. Miranda is a 1970s Latin American dictatorship, the young woman in the street a terrorist of the period, cocaine in the diplomatic bag the period’s headline, and the sexual and political jokes carry the date of the early 1970s. Against that, the central device, the meal that cannot happen, is timeless, and the register of politeness under threat has gained currency. The bar is met with no room.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the version first shown in Paris ran about half an hour longer than the one in circulation, and whether it survives whole is not established. Tati made the cut himself, soon after the premiere, which lightens the charge, but a fifth of the film as first shown is not the film that is seen, and that is charged in proportion. Presence: for two decades the film was a famous failure, seen mostly in shortened 35mm prints that broke its form; since the restoration of 2002 it has been in wide and continuous circulation. That broken presence is the second charge. The surface, the modernism of 1967, is the subject and ages as history, and restoration has made good the fabric.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over thirty-one years. The text survives whole, as published. Its presence has been continuous and international, in print in Portuguese and in translation throughout, and it was renewed in 2020, when readers around the world returned to it and the book showed that it had outlived the conditions that produced it. Its surface is as little fixed to its moment as that of any book of its years: no brands, no technology to date it, no named country or decade. What holds the axis is the span alone. Three decades demonstrate less than four, and far less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen. It stands at the bar of the gate, the figure its span and its undated surface together carry.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Presence has been wide and continuous: the prize, the survey, the teaching of the book as one of the defining American novels of its decade, Ewan McGregor’s film of 2016, and renewed reading at Roth’s death in 2018. Its surface is fixed in part to its subjects, the riot, Vietnam, the Weathermen and Watergate, but those are its matter, and the conditions that produced it have passed while the book has been read as more pertinent, not less, in each later season of political violence. The presence is wide but not the widest, and the span is short: that holds it below Blood Meridian and White Noise, twelve years older, and far below what has lasted for centuries.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over nearly four decades. The cycle has outlived the state that broadcast it, the estate’s economy of shortage, and the home computer of 1988 on which I turns. The surface fixed to its moment is large: lifts that fail, queues, the post office, money orders, the drab light of late socialism. That surface now reads as historical rather than topical, and the precepts do not date. The cycle is taught, and it is still argued over. What holds it at the threshold is elapsed time, as for every work of its period, and a cost particular to this one: a television look in some films, with a smaller frame, that makes it age faster than the features made from two of them.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, in print without break in the Knopf and Vintage editions. Its surface is not fixed to a production era: it is set in a past already historical when it was written, and its atomic dawn has only gained weight since. The charge is on presence. The book is read among readers of McCarthy and taught in courses on him and on the West, more narrowly than All the Pretty Horses or The Road, and it has not been filmed. What carries it to the bar of the gate, and not below it, is the continuous presence of the trilogy. Thirty-two years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Twenty-five years, and survival of decades, not centuries. The text survives whole, images included, in print in German and in Bell’s English since 2001, and the images are reproduced in the editions known here. Its presence is continuous in reading and teaching, chiefly at university level, and it is the object of a steady scholarly literature. It is not fixed to a surface of its moment: its matter is history, and its manner is archaic by design. Not credited the widest presence, because its general readership is narrower than its critical name and its presence is strongest in English, not in its own language. Not charged, because no contest bears on it.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival over fifty-five years is shown: the ensemble has stayed whole and in place, as the Seagram set did not; it has been visited continuously; and its standing has risen since the late dark paintings were dismissed. Its surface carries no iconography, no creed and no style fixed to its decade. Against this, the late paint layers are fragile and have needed conservators’ care; the skylight of 1971 let in far more sun than the studio’s light and at times washed the dark flat, so for most of its life the work was seen under a light it was not made for; and the light seen since the restoration of 2020 is a designed reconstruction. That restoration cuts both ways: it brings the work nearer its intended state, and shows how much it depends on intervention to be seen at all.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: no loss of what makes the image is known. Presence: continuous, as one of the most reproduced pictures of Kiefer’s career and of German painting of its decade. Fabric: this is where the charge falls. The surface is built of mixed media in thick encrusted layers, materials not made to last as oil on canvas lasts, and Kiefer’s surfaces of these years are known to crack and shed. The work’s matter is part of its meaning, so a change in the matter is a change in the work. The present state of this canvas is not verified, and the charge is for the risk its materials carry, not for a loss shown. Forty-three years is a short record, and the figure sits at the line.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-eight years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has been reissued. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians, critics and those who study the form, and Don’t Believe the Hype, Rebel Without a Pause and Bring the Noise remain in circulation. Two charges. Presence among the general public is narrower than the record’s standing among critics, and some of it is charged: the group’s own public controversy began within a year of the record, and the Farrakhan endorsement still bears on how it is heard. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment, in the sampler and drum-machine sound of 1987 and 1988 and in topical surfaces, though its subjects have aged toward us rather than away. It stands level with The Downward Spiral at 8.5 and below What’s Going On at 8.9.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated. The revisionist western was a wave of one decade, and most of its films are now period documents; this one is still shown, and its standing has risen as the wave receded. The surface fixed to its moment is charged: the flashed, fogged colour and the zoom lens read as early 1970s; the ensemble’s loose manner and the placing of a folk singer’s songs over a western date it; the opium ending belongs to its time’s view of the drug. Against that, the film’s subject, a town built by small people and bought by a company, has outlived the mood that produced it and reads now as a plain account. Held at the gate because the period surface is heavy and is part of what the film is.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-nine years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one cut, and the English dub is an alternative track that replaces nothing. Presence has been continuous. In Japan the film has been broadcast and sold without a break; abroad it has been in repertory and on every home format, though its presence is below that of the studio’s most widely seen films. The surface is mostly free of its moment, set in a medieval Japan and painted by hand, but it carries a small charge: the digital compositing of 1997 is visible in places and is of its year. Wide presence over that span, with a slight charge on the surface, meets the bar and no more.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-three years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, remastered and reissued, with live material added as evidence. Presence is continuous but narrower than that of the band’s later records: the album is placed high whenever the decade or American rock is counted, but its public presence is smaller than that of the band’s later singles, none of which is on it, and much of it lies among critics and musicians. That charge stands. The fabric is the record’s strength: it refused the gated drums and synthesiser tones that date most records of 1983, and its guitars, bass, piano and voices carry little of the year. The fabric lifts the case against the charge, but not past it.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, its order fixed, and nothing of it is lost. The fabric is the strongest of the three. Made of acoustic instruments, organ, brass and strings in a natural room, with almost nothing of the production habits of 1991, the record carries no date on its surface, and it has outlived its occasion, the end of a band and a dispute with a label. Presence is where the charge falls. The record failed commercially on release, its presence for years was narrow, and its standing was built later, among musicians and critics more than the public. A form whole and a fabric unaged, held down by a presence that came late: it stands level with Spirit of Eden, which carries the same charge.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Forty-two years have elapsed. The film Leone completed survives whole: the 229-minute version has been shown and issued, and the restoration of 2012 is repair and addition, not loss. But for years, in its largest market, the work was replaced by an altered version that unmade its form, and that charge falls on the form first: for a decade or more many viewers knew a different film under the title. Presence since has been steady but not of the widest kind; the film is studied and revived rather than continuously before the public. The surface is not fixed to its moment, since its settings were already period in 1984. The bar is met exactly.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form stood whole and in use from 1743 to 1945, through the bombardment of 1760, the cracking of its piers and their repair; it was lost entire in 1945; it stands legible again as Bähr’s, recovered from exact documentation and from its own rubble, and its image outlived the sixty years of absence. Use was broken for sixty years and resumed in 2005, as parish church, concert room and place of pilgrimage; the ruin itself was a memorial and a gathering place. The fabric carries the heaviest charge: most of the stone, the organ and the cross are new, the painting reconstructed. The gate is met at its edge.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the twelve-track release of 1993 is still the record sold, and the later mix stands beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous and wide: Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies remain in broadcast, the record is heard whole, and it is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Part of that presence is charged, carried by the legend that grew around the singer’s death and by the larger fame of the previous record. The fabric is little fixed to its year: a trio in a room, recorded plainly, with none of the gated or processed sound of its period. It stands level with The Bends, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over twenty-six years. The form survives whole: there is one version, 173 minutes, nothing is lost, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous in festivals, revival houses, home video and teaching, though for years it was limited in its own country, and the film has never had wide popular circulation. The fabric is a well-made 35 mm colour film of its year. The surface fixed to its moment, Taipei at the turn of the century, the computer-game business, the mobile phones and the lifts, ages as record rather than as fashion, since the film is about how such a life feels. Mulholland Drive, a year younger, stands at the same figure.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-eight years on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the record is in print as issued, and nothing of it is lost. The fabric carries almost nothing of 1988: no drum machine, no gated reverb, no bright synthesiser, but acoustic instruments in a real room, recorded with a dynamic range few records of the decade allowed. That is real protection, and the record now sounds newer than most of its year. Presence is the charge. It began narrow and has grown in a following of musicians and critics more than in public use, and none of its tracks is in common circulation. So weighed, it stands level with Dekalog, of the same year, and a tenth below Loveless.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence and use, then fabric, over forty-nine years. The form survives whole: frame, gerberettes, ducts, escalator tube and square are as designed and legible, and the building has outlived the cultural policy and the high-tech moment that produced it without reading only as a period piece, though it reads partly as one. Presence has been continuous and very wide. The charges are on fabric and use. The exposed steel and services weathered fast, and after some twenty years the building closed for a full renovation, from 1997 to 2000; the free public climb was given up when it reopened; the inside has been remade more than once. A building made to be changed has been changed, and to stand it has needed to be.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, and its restorations repair only. Presence has been continuous: repertory and festival revivals, television, home video in successive formats, a place in the study of von Trier and in the teaching of European cinema, and a steady critical standing. It is the presence of a celebrated art film, not of the widest kind, and the director’s later controversies have coloured some reception without taking the film from view. The surface is partly fixed to its making: the drained colour and the processed grain read now as a look of the mid-1990s as much as a choice. The songs belong to the film’s period and do not date it. Thirty years of survival carry the figure; the narrower presence and the processed surface hold it there.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-seven years, on form, presence and then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives in the one version in which it was released, and nothing of it is lost or replaced. Presence is continuous in Taiwan and in film culture, where it is studied and screened, and Jiufen, its principal location, has become a place of pilgrimage, which is noted and not weighed. The fabric does not date: the film is set from 1945 to 1949 and dressed as memory, and nothing in it belongs to 1989 except its moment of daring, which has become history rather than surface. Thirty-seven years have shown survival without proving it long, and the axis meets the bar of the Epochal Gate exactly.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The theatrical cuts survive whole and remain in circulation. The extended editions stand beside them without replacing them, and count as additions, not losses, since the theatrical release has not been withdrawn. Presence over twenty-three to twenty-five years is of the widest kind: television and home video in every format, theatrical re-releases, marathon screenings, a tourist economy, lines held in common memory. The fabric is mixed. The miniatures and prosthetics age well; parts of the digital work, Legolas on the oliphaunt, the Army of the Dead and some composites, fix the surface to 2001 to 2003. About twenty-four years of survival set the figure at the bar; the widest presence earns a tenth, and the surface fixed to its years takes it back.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole, and a restoration has been issued, which is repair. Presence across twenty-seven years has been uneven: narrow for two decades, a festival, retrospective and disc film, then widened sharply when it entered the top ten of the Sight and Sound critics’ poll of 2022. That is real circulation, though not the widest. One element of the surface is fixed to its moment, the Eurodance hit of the last scene, and the film uses that datedness: the song was already cheap in 1999, and the force of the dance is a drilled man giving himself to it. The condition shown is not fixed to a year. Decades, not centuries, are what the film has proved, and the bar is met exactly.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over twenty-six years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in English and in translation. Presence is continuous and wide: the book is taught, read in the debates it anticipated, and more cited now than at its publication. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the summer of the Clinton impeachment, which the narrator treats at length and which already needs annotation; but the book has outlived the scandal, and is read for the persecuting spirit, not for the president. Charged: the dated surface of the impeachment arias, and a presence that owes part of itself to its author’s standing. Twenty-six years demonstrate far less than the centuries behind the summit, and the figure is the usual one for its span.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole and in print over forty-two years. The fabric has held better than most of 1984’s, the production favouring room and decay over the period’s processed drums and bright digital synthesis; Elvis Presley and America is heard as a sketch, and the misplaced hour stays in Pride. Presence is the limit. Pride and Bad have stayed in the band’s sets for four decades, and Pride is heard far beyond the album, but the album is heard whole less often than its best songs, and survives most as two songs and a sound. That holds it level with Dekalog, below Fanny and Alexander, and well below what has lasted for centuries.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across thirty-three years. The full version survives whole and is the version now exhibited. The charge is the history of versions: for years the American audience knew the film in a cut of about 156 minutes, and the mainland audience in a censored release, so that the work as made was for a time displaced in two of its largest markets. That is charged, though the original was never lost. Presence is continuous and wide for a film in Chinese: revivals, home video, teaching, and a place in Chinese popular memory reinforced by its star. The fabric ages little, since it is a period film of the 1920s to the 1970s, and its early-nineties gloss of colour and score shows only lightly.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and is still the version heard. Presence is continuous and wide: Closer and Hurt remain in circulation, the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and the band still performs it. Charged: a large part of Hurt’s presence is Cash’s recording, not this one, and Closer’s presence leans on notoriety. The fabric is little dated for its kind: the record is built from processed sound more than from the period’s preset timbres, though some industrial textures and the distorted vocal treatments are of the early 1990s. Between the usual marks for twenty-five and for thirty-five years, with presence partly charged, it stands at the bar.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-five years. Form takes no charge: the novel survives whole as published in 1981. Fabric takes none: the book is set across generations, not fixed to its moment, and its near-future City has aged into a period piece less than most near futures do. The charge falls on presence. The book lives among readers of fantasy and among writers, as a cult classic rather than a continuously taught or widely translated novel, and it is little present in schools and in the wider culture beside the most read American fiction of its decade. That narrower presence sets the figure where it stands. Decades demonstrate less than centuries, and forty-five years show survival without yet showing permanence.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over thirty-eight years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is continuous and fairly wide: the book is taught and reread, and each anniversary of the assassination and each release of its records keep it in view. Its surface is not fixed to 1988: its matter is 1963, and the period’s furniture is its subject, not the accident of its making. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: it is read less widely than the most widely read American novels of its decade, and some of what keeps it in view is the event rather than the book. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, presence, then fabric. The form is whole, in print since release in both editions. Presence is continuous and wide: Last Nite, Someday and Hard to Explain stay in broadcast and in use, the album is heard whole by listeners born after it, and it is placed high whenever its decade is counted; popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric was made to be dateless, a lean band, a dry room and a deliberately cheap sound, with none of the period’s gloss, and it has aged less than most rock of 2001. Charged: the record’s image, the look and the downtown scene of its moment, is fixed to that moment and carries part of its presence, and the split of editions leaves two records in circulation.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years. The form is whole: the album survives as issued and in print, with the full-length title track available beside it. Presence is continuous but charged: the record is heard whole and placed high whenever its decade is counted, but it was little played on radio in its time and is little known beyond musicians, critics and devoted listeners, and no song from it has entered common circulation. The fabric carries little date: clean guitars and a dry room, with nothing tied to a studio fashion, though the thin, dry sound is heard by some as of its year. The span and the fabric would carry the figure higher; the narrow presence is charged against them, and the figure stands where that charge sets it.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-seven years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print since the Random House first edition of 1979, through the paperback reissues of the 1990s and after; it is translated into the major European languages. Its surface is fixed to a place and time, the Knoxville of the early 1950s that urban renewal and the expressway destroyed, but the book is itself about that destruction, and it is read more now than when those conditions passed. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: the book is read by its author’s readers and by readers of Southern literature, studied in the academy and more read since 2023, but its readership is narrower than that of his later novels and it is not read in schools at large.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-nine years. The film as released survives whole, and no altered version replaces it. Presence is continuous within art cinema: the film is kept in circulation with the other winners of the Palme d’Or, taught and screened, and it is one of the two or three titles by which its director is known. It is not presence of the widest kind among art films of its years, narrower than that of In the Mood for Love (8.6). The surface does not date: dust, hills and a car are without period, and the coda’s video, which is of its moment, is part of the argument rather than a dated finish. The bar is met at the foot of what that span allows.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-four years. The film survives as released and wholly legible, and restored transfers exist, so fabric is the smallest charge. It has stayed continuously in view in repertory, criticism, teaching and home video, and its premise, guests who cannot leave a room, has passed into common speech among people who have never seen it. The surface fixed to its moment is modest: the evening dress and the Mexican studio manners date the look, but the condition shown outlives the society shown. Its survival has passed into another art, in Adès’s opera at Salzburg in 2016 and at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in 2017. What leaves no room above the bar is breadth: the film lives chiefly in the art-house canon, not in the wide public memory of the best-known films.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival weighed in order: form, presence, fabric, across ninety-nine years. The long loss is the charge. Within months of the premiere the film as released had left circulation: Channing Pollock’s American cut for Paramount removed the Hel subplot and Georgy’s thread and rewrote the titles, Ufa shortened its own release, and the version first shown was presumed lost until 2008. For most of the century the world saw an altered work, and from 1984 a tinted version with a pop score: presence was wide, but presence of something else. Since 2010 the form is nearly whole, short passages still missing and bridged by titles, the recovered footage scratched and coarse, which is fabric and the smallest charge. Presence has never lapsed, and the surface dates as history, not fashion. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most; the long loss holds it at 8.5.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across thirty-eight years. The form survives whole: the film as released, restored for home video, nothing lost. Presence is real: continuous circulation on video, disc and streaming, a place in a prestige home-video collection, revival screenings and steady use in courses on religion and film. But presence is charged. The film was banned or restricted in several countries for years and rarely broadcast on television, and many know it only as the scandal; it is seen far less widely than its director’s crime films. The surface carries some marks of its moment, the synthesizer and world-music texture of the score and the colloquial dialogue, though neither has dated it badly. The charged presence holds the figure at the gate exactly.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-eight years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print with its small press for nearly four decades, which is itself evidence for a book that was nearly not published. Nothing in its surface depends on a technology or a topical occasion; a typewriter is its only furniture. Presence is the charge: the book lives among writers, in courses on experimental fiction and in a devoted readership, not across the culture, and it is not widely translated or taught beside the novels of its decade. Survival shown is real and narrow, and the axis does not score what the book is foreseen to become.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is shown over thirty-one years. The form survives whole in Japanese, as published in three books, and its presence has been continuous and wide, in Japan and abroad. The surface is mostly free of its moment: an alley, a well, a war fifty years past. Book Three’s exchange by computer terminal is dated, and grows more so. Abroad, most readers have met the book in an abridged English; that is a fact of its presence and a shortfall of the translation, and the work is not charged for it. What holds the axis is the span: three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen. It stands at the bar of the gate, the figure its span carries.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across sixty-eight years. Form: the 1958 release survives whole, but it was an altered version, recut and partly reshot against the director’s wishes, and the version he made was never finished. The reconstruction repairs much, the sound of the opening, the intercutting and the order of scenes; it cannot repair all, since it works from a memorandum against the studio’s cut, keeps the scenes another director shot, and is an inference by other hands forty years on. That loss takes the film’s proportion and finish, not its substance, and is charged in proportion. Presence is continuous in repertory, teaching and every home format, wide in the cinema and narrow beyond it, and divided among three versions. Heston’s brownface as a Mexican official is a surface fixed to its moment. The monochrome is the smallest charge. The figure stands at the bar.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over twenty-six years. Form: the text survives whole as the author made it, and has stayed in print in its designed form, which the publisher has kept despite its cost. Fabric: no charge. Presence is wide and continuous for a book of its age: a cult readership renewed in each generation of young readers, lately through social media; translations into many languages, in spite of a layout that resists translation; a place in university courses on contemporary fiction and on media. Charged lightly: its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the video and tape of a late-1990s documentary and the parody of 1990s critical theory, and its presence is more a devoted readership than a culture-wide one. Twenty-six years demonstrate far less than centuries, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and surface. The film as released survives whole: one cut, and no altered version. Its presence across twenty-five years is continuous and wide for a film of its kind, in revival screenings, steady circulation on home video and streaming, a place on many lists of the decade’s films, and renewed attention as its director’s later films reached larger audiences. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and fame is not proof of permanence. The surface ages little: the style is fixed to its maker more than to its year, and the costumes and songs belong to an invented past rather than to 2001. Twenty-five years is a short demonstration of survival, and the bar is met, not cleared.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print, remastered and reissued on vinyl, and heard as an album. Presence is continuous and wide among musicians and critics, steady on the lists by which the period is remembered, with Jóga and All Is Full of Love in broadcast and use; it is narrower among the general public, and popularity would not be proof in any case. The fabric bears its year in part: the distorted beats of Pluto and 5 Years are sounds of late-1990s electronic music, while the strings and the voice are fixed to no year, and the mix has dated less than most records of 1997. Presence wide but not widest, and the beats’ date, set the figure at the bar and not above it.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Presence is where the charge falls. The book is read by Gaddis’s readership and in the academy, and is often the book through which readers come to him, but it is not widely taught outside courses on postwar American fiction, and it is the least discussed of his three central novels. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, Reagan’s America, the televangelist, a proxy war of the Cold War, the rotary telephone, though the alliance it satirises has outlived its occasion and reads as forecast rather than period.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Presence: continuous and international, renewed by two films, Away from Her (2006) and Hateship Loveship (2013), and by the Nobel Prize of 2013, with the last story anthologised and taught. Fabric: the surface is fixed to no moment, since the stories run from the middle of the century to the 1990s and their furniture is period by design, not by accident. What holds the axis where it stands is the kind of presence: a collection’s is narrower than a novel’s, and much of this book’s is carried by a single story. Twenty-five years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: the theatrical cut and a later unrated version both circulate, the latter restoring footage trimmed for the rating rather than losing any, and a television version padded with alternate material has not replaced the work. Presence over forty-three years is continuous but narrower than the widest: a failure on release, then a steady cult, home video in every format, a Criterion edition, revivals and teaching. The surface is fixed to a technology, Betamax, cable channels and cathode-ray sets, and that is charged; the charge is partly offset because the film is about that technology, and its meaning has outrun the hardware. The bar is met exactly.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one cut exists, and it is in circulation. The colour of some later home-video masters has been disputed against the theatrical grade, a partial question of colour only. Presence across twenty-seven years is continuous and wide: broadcast, every home format, return to cinemas, and a fixed place in teaching and citation. The sequels, the animation and the later uses of its images are other works and alter nothing in the film. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, the payphones, the CRT monitors, the mobile phones and club wear of 1999, and some effects, the bug and the flush, read as of their year; the central idea has grown more current, which offsets them. The bar is met, exactly.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-three years. The form is whole: one released version, complete, with any restoration a repair. Presence has been continuous and wide: exhibition and re-release, every home format, teaching, and Nyman’s music in wide circulation of its own. Thirty-three years have shown survival without proving it long. A tenth is charged to the surface: the treatment of the Māori, set at the edge as chorus and comic relief, and the romance of a coercive bargain are the parts most fixed to their moment and most argued against since, and they are the parts by which the film may age. The fabric, 35mm colour of its decade, is the smallest charge. The axis meets the bar of the Epochal Gate exactly.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on what has been shown. The form survives whole, the text as published. Presence is wide: the book is in print and read thirty-five years on, more read now than at publication, and kept in view by the film. The surface is heavily dated: the brands, the restaurants and the music of the late 1980s, and a property developer named as the narrator’s hero. That surface is the book’s subject, not its accident, and the book has outlived the decade it catalogues. Two charges hold it a tenth below what its span alone would give: the dated surface, which needs more annotation each year, and the share of its presence carried by the film’s figure rather than by the text. Thirty-five years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: one canvas, whole as far as is known, forty-five years old. Presence: in a major American collection, exhibited and reproduced in nearly every account of the cycle, but not of the widest presence, and the figure is not lifted for it. Fabric: here the charge falls. Straw is brittle and sheds, and its gold dims toward grey and brown, and the gold is the more perishable half of the image’s polarity of gold and ash. The darkening of straw can be read as the poem’s own movement from the golden to the ashen; that reading is noted and not credited, since the image needs the gold to hold against the black. The condition of this canvas is not known; only the risk of the material is charged.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been repressed on vinyl. Presence is real: the record became more heard after its maker withdrew than before, it is heard whole rather than as a single, and the band’s reunion tours of 2013 to 2015 filled halls with listeners born after it was made. That presence is wide within a large listening public of its kind rather than the widest, and it owes something to a mystique of withdrawal, which is presence, not proof. The fabric bears its moment lightly: the lo-fi sound was chosen against its decade’s gloss and already sounded old on release, so it has not dated as a production fashion dates. It meets the gate exactly.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, kept in print and remastered, and later editions that add material are not the object. Presence is continuous but charged. The album is heard and placed high whenever its decade is counted, yet its presence is narrower than its band’s: Blue Monday, which is not on it, is far better known, and much of the album’s presence is among musicians, critics and the band’s followers. The fabric bears its year more than most: drum machines, sequenced synthesiser tones and sampled strings and choirs are heard as period sounds, though the playing and the melancholy carry over.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and nothing has been lost or revised. Presence has been continuous and is now wide: a domestic success on release, steady circulation in repertory, on television and on home video, a place in teaching, a renewed international audience after the director’s later prizes, and in 2019 the resolution of the case brought it back into the news. The surface is not fixed to its moment of making: the film is set in 1986 and dressed as period, so nothing in it dates it to 2003. Twenty-three years is a short span against centuries, but presence near the widest for a film of that span carries it to the bar of the Epochal Gate, which it meets exactly.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in Britain and the United States and in translation. Presence is continuous: it is read, taught on courses in contemporary British fiction, and named as its author’s best book. Its surface is heavily dated: the royal wedding, the arcade games, the prices, the pornography and the television of 1981. But, as with the consumer satires of its kind, the surface is the subject, and the book has outlived the summer it catalogues. Charged: the dated surface, which needs annotation, and a presence narrower outside Britain than its fame suggests; together they hold the axis a tenth below the usual figure for its span. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole in one cut, and restoration is repair. It has been in circulation for about thirty-one years, in revival screenings, on home video and in a modern restoration, and its reputation has risen since a cool reception, which is survival demonstrated past the conditions of its making. The surface is not fixed to its moment: black and white and a period setting keep it from dating, though Depp’s star presence of the mid 1990s is part of its draw. Presence is real but not the widest: a cult and art house film, not a common inheritance. Thirty-one years are credited for what they have shown, and the gate is met exactly.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-one years. The form is whole: the record issued in 1995 is the record still played and sold, its order undisturbed. Presence is continuous and wide, in sale, reissue, broadcast and streaming, and High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees and Street Spirit are among the best known British songs of their decade. Popularity counts as presence, not proof, and part of it is carried by the band’s later standing. The fabric has aged better than most guitar records of its year, the guitars and voice kept close and largely unprocessed, though the drum sound and the swagger of Bones and the title track date it. The record has outlived the moment after Creep, not yet its generation of listeners.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twenty-eight years. The form survives whole: ten cases, three villages, the walk and the grounds as built, and the image does not read as a period piece of the 1990s. The use has been continuous, as the cultural centre of the ADCK, though how fully the Kanak community has taken the centre up has been questioned, which bears lightly. The fabric is timber on a tropical marine site with cyclones, and it has weathered as it was meant to, to silver grey; its present maintenance is not verified here. Presence is real but not the widest. The figure is the one the span earns where nothing is charged against the form.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-five years. The form survives whole in the European release; a restored edition circulates, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: repertory exhibition, home video, a standard edition on disc, a place in the teaching of European cinema, and Preisner’s music heard apart from the film. That presence has stayed largely within art cinema and has not reached the common reference of the widest films of its decade. The surface dates little: Kraków in 1990 is caught in passing, a demonstration crossed rather than explained, and nothing in the French half is fixed to its year beyond its cassette tapes. Presence continuous but narrower than the widest sets it at the foot of the step for its age, at the bar and no higher.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, and its restorations and home editions are repair. Presence over thirty-three years is continuous but not wide: shown in repertory and retrospectives, kept in a prestige home edition, taught in courses on adaptation and on the ensemble film, and named wherever Altman is; its length and its ensemble without stars keep it out of the broad television rotation. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment, the early-1990s Los Angeles of medfly spraying, phone-sex lines and the cast’s period styling, though the stories underneath date little. Thirty-three years are credited for what they show, and the bar is met exactly.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years and some months. Form: whole; the film survives as released, with restorations and high-definition transfers as repair. Presence: wide and continuous, on television, on every home format, in repertory and the streaming catalogues, in the study of time-travel cinema, and renewed by its television series. The survival step for these years gives the figure. The surface carries a small charge: the Philadelphia of the 1990s, the eco-terrorist subculture, Pitt’s mannered performance and some of the effects are fixed to their moment, though the 2035 sets, built of found industrial parts, have aged less than the effects work of their time. It sits at the foot of its band rather than the top.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole as far as is known, the work as it can still be shown, with no loss reported. Presence: steady but local; reproduced in the literature on Kiefer but not among the most seen images of its decade, so presence lifts nothing. Fabric: lead is soft, creeps under its own weight and corrodes; the glass lies loose and must be laid again by hand whenever the work is moved; the present condition is not verified here. The image is not fixed to its moment: Luria is four centuries older than the work, and the debate on German memory that framed its reception is its context, not its image. A tenth is charged for the fabric and for the floor reset by hand.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric over some ninety-five years. Form: the governing idea survived as a model copied and answered, and now stands legible again, columns open, plan, section, bridge and colour returned; but for some sixty years it was obscured, the columns walled in and the communal block put to other uses. Use: dwelling has gone on since 1930, but the use that made the work, the transitional commune, ended within a decade and does not return; the restored flats are private property, so the building survives as a house of flats bearing the form of a commune. Fabric: the experimental infill and finishes failed early, decay by the 2000s was severe, and the restoration remade much, to its documents but by later hands.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-four years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost. Its presence is continuous and wide: in print since 1992, taught, and kept in view by its prizes, by the trilogy and the film, and by its author’s later standing and his death in 2023. The surface is little fixed to 1992, since the matter is 1949 and the diction is McCarthy’s deliberately timeless register. What holds the axis is the span, and a presence wider than its height: the book is widely read, but its standing among readers of fiction has not been shown to rise as a rising book’s does. Thirty-four years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Forty-two years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the text survives as published and has stayed in print since 1984. The presence is about as wide as a book of its age can have: translated widely, taught in courses on science fiction and on postmodern fiction, and kept in view as the source of a whole aesthetic. What holds the figure two tenths below the widest presence the span allows is a surface fixed to its technology: the hardware and the megabytes, the Hitachi and Hosaka brands, the Soviet Union as a power, the decks and the phone booths, all of which date visibly, while the prophecy for which it is famous is judged against the internet that arrived and found strange. The charge is lightened because the book is now read as a period vision, and its argument about bodies and corporations has outlived its gear.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over twenty-five years. The form survives whole and legible. The use has been continuous as the city’s mediatheque, its own purpose, broken only by the closure of 2011. The fabric took real damage in the earthquake of 11 March 2011, ceiling panels fallen on an upper floor and glass broken, and was repaired: a small charge, offset by the demonstration that the frame on which the form depends came through one of the largest earthquakes recorded. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the language of media and information flow of the late 1990s that the building’s name carries. Its fame is in architecture rather than in the world at large, and lends nothing here.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole so far as is known, one canvas unaltered after the painter, the image legible. Presence: held in a public collection, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, exhibited and reproduced as one of Kiefer’s principal architecture paintings, though not among the widest presences of its century, and the museum’s long closure for rebuilding in the 2000s took its galleries from view for years; fame is not proof. Fabric: paint over paper on canvas, a mixed surface with known risks of cracking, flaking and lifting at the paper. The condition of this canvas is not known, so only the general risk is charged. Forty-five years is a short record, and with the fabric charged the figure sits at the foot of what that span allows.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-two years. Form: no loss or overpainting is reported. Presence: wide in Australia and growing abroad, shown in a retrospective of the painter and reproduced often; but the work has changed hands at auction, and much of its fame is its price, which is presence and not proof. Fabric: acrylic paint of the early 1990s, laid flat in the open at Utopia, is not a known risk, though the supports and grounds of community art centre works of the period vary. The figure is the usual one for a work of its age, set at the lower end of that span for a presence that leans on its sales.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric; for a painting, the image. Thirty-nine years from completion. Form: whole as far as is known, one canvas in one public collection. Presence: in a major museum and reproduced, though not among the most reproduced images of its century. Fabric: the charge falls here. Kiefer’s mixed media, emulsion, clay and attached objects, are known in his work generally to flake, shed and alter, and the artist has accepted change; the wires and fragments are attached parts that can loosen. The condition of this canvas is not known, so the risk is charged and no loss. Against it too is the axis’s own test: a circuit board is a technology fixed to its decade, and it already reads as period.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The housing is fifty to fifty-seven years old, the arts centre forty-four. The form survives whole: podium, terraces, towers, lakes and gardens are the makers’ and in place, legible in their governing idea, and the estate has outlived the welfare planning that produced it. The use survives and is intensive: the flats are lived in and sought, the arts centre among Europe’s largest and in continuous use. The charges: the theatre lost the company it was built for in 2002; the social programme, rented municipal housing, did not survive the sale of the flats; the arts centre’s entrances were twice reworked. The fabric holds well for concrete of its age, guarded by the listing. The gate is met at its edge.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: nothing is lost, and no altered version has displaced it. Its presence across twenty-seven years has been continuous, on each home format, on television, in repertory screenings and in steady teaching and writing, and it is widely known and quoted, though presence of the widest kind belongs to more popular films. The surface is somewhat fixed to its years: the late-1990s office, the celebrity culture of its moment, a cameo by Charlie Sheen as himself. But the conceit has outlived those conditions and gained point with every new medium of borrowed presence. The surface is charged lightly, the presence is good, and the bar is met exactly.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has stayed in print throughout. Presence in Britain is wide and continuous: Unfinished Sympathy has stayed in broadcast and in common use for more than three decades, and the album is placed high whenever British albums are counted. Two charges hold the figure at its step. Presence is narrower outside Britain and is carried more by one track than by the album heard whole. And the fabric is partly fixed to its moment: the raps, in their flow and phrasing, are the surface most of 1991, and some drum programming is of its year, though the slowed tempo and the soul and string sources have aged little.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, in print, reissued in 2005 and 2016, and streamed. Presence is continuous and wider than its sales: it is placed high whenever its decade’s albums are counted, Midnight in a Perfect World has stayed in use in broadcast and film, and producers know the record as a text; that presence is among musicians and critics more than among the public. The fabric is less fixed to its moment than most records of 1996: made of older records, it never had the period’s sound. A fabric of uncleared samples is one that law could disturb, though it has not.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Span: thirty-six years. Form: whole and legible, because the work is a system and its design survives; the case, partition, box and killer carry it, and the head and flies are meant to be renewed, so that renewing them takes almost nothing from what makes the work. Presence: wide in reputation, intermittent in view. A work that must be stocked with a head and live flies cannot hang on a wall; it is shown for a season, under conditions, and then dismantled. Fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: every living part is replaced at every showing, and each showing depends on the supply of a head, the breeding of flies, and the law and the lender permitting both; the killer and the case are industrial and replaceable. Presence and fabric are charged, and the figure meets the bar and no more.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole; the thirty-nine places and the floor are shown together as designed, in a gallery made for them. Presence: wide on the tour from 1979 into the late 1980s, then interrupted, the work largely in storage through much of the 1990s, shown at Los Angeles in 1996, given to Brooklyn in 2002 and permanently installed in 2007, continuous since. The interruption is charged, and fame lends nothing. Fabric: porcelain, lustre and textile, fragile to light and handling and kept under low light, a perishable assembly that depends on a permanent home, which it now has. The surface is also in part fixed to its moment, the cultural feminism of the 1970s. At forty-seven years the decade of storage and the period surface take a tenth from the usual figure for its age.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, by the step for age. The conversion has stood twenty-six years and the extension ten. Scott’s shell, weighed as inherited, has stood between sixty-three and seventy-nine years, and it has already outlived the conditions that produced it, the coal and oil power station: that is the strongest evidence the building has. Form: the conversion of 2000 survives legible and whole; the bridges of 2016 cross the hall and the switch house side has been remade, which alters the governing idea without obscuring it. Use: continuous since 2000, in its own purpose, at very wide public presence. Charges: the extension is young, its terrace was found a nuisance by the UK Supreme Court in 2023, and the joining of 2016 changed the hall of 2000. With the extension weighed as the lesser part, the axis meets the bar exactly.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, each loss in proportion to what it takes. Ninety-seven years. The form survives and is legible: plan, section, terraces and the governing idea stand, and the house has outlived its conditions as a model reread. The use is lost. Lived in as a private summer house into the 1990s, then empty and derelict, it is now a monument entered on guided visits, and the use it was built for, its whole subject, is gone. The fabric decayed badly through wartime damage, neglect and dereliction and was renewed by restoration; the movable furniture, which in this house carried much of the work, is largely in copies, the originals dispersed. Both use and fabric are charged, and the axis meets its bar exactly.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives intact as released, in print without interruption and reissued on its anniversary. Presence is wide and continuous: Black Hole Sun is one of the most heard rock songs of its decade, and the album is still played whole, its standing undiminished and in some measure risen since Cornell’s death. Popularity is credited as presence, not as proof, and earns the tenth that wide presence allows. The fabric is charged modestly: the dense, compressed production of the mid-1990s and the frame of its scene date it, though its psychedelic and heavy idioms are older than 1994 and keep it from sounding only of that year.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty years. Form: the film as released survives whole, and restorations since are repair. Presence: continuous exhibition in art cinema and on home release, and a place in every account of Tarkovsky, but a narrower presence than Mirror (8.6), Stalker (8.7) or Andrei Rublev (8.9) has held. Fabric: the surface most fixed to its moment is the nuclear fear of the 1980s. The jets, the television announcement and the dread of the bomb belong to the Cold War, and the film was first shown weeks after Chernobyl; they have aged partly as period. The film treats them as apocalypse in general, so the loss is small, but it is a charge. The narrower presence holds the figure at the bar.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-seven years. Form: the film survives whole, as released; it has been restored and kept in circulation in its widescreen frame, and no loss or altered version charges it. Presence: continuous, in revival screenings, on home video, in critics’ polls, and in the opening montage, in constant use as an image of the city. Two charges hold it at the lower mark for its age. The surface is fixed to its moment in one load-bearing respect, the relationship with Tracy, which its own era let pass and which now changes how the whole is received. And presence has been touched by its maker’s later history: the film is still shown and studied, but it has left some programmes and is no longer offered without comment. These are charges of presence and surface, not of form.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and surface across twenty-eight years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, with no altered cut replacing it, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, on home video in every format, in a Criterion edition, in revival screenings, and in a following that has grown with its director’s reputation; it is steady presence, narrower than that of the most circulated films of its decade. The surface ages little: a private school, a barbershop and a steel company, dressed in timeless blazers and scored to music of the 1960s, are insulated from their own year by a deliberate anachronism. Twenty-eight years is a short demonstration, and the bar is met, not cleared.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over forty years. The form is whole: the record survives as issued and has been remastered and reissued. Presence is continuous but narrower than its age would lead one to expect: the album has stayed in print, Life’s What You Make It has stayed in broadcast, but it is less widely heard than the decade’s landmark albums and partly kept in view by the band’s later records. That narrower presence is charged. The fabric has aged better than most of its year’s: organ, piano, acoustic instruments and choir in place of the synthesisers and gated drums of 1986 keep it largely out of its decade. The insistent drum and piano of Life’s What You Make It, and some keyboard tones, are of their time. One charge, against a fabric that has held, sets it level with The Unforgettable Fire, whose presence is charged more heavily.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-nine years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and reissued. Presence is wide and continuous: Anarchy in the U.K., God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant are known far beyond the record’s listeners, though popularity is presence, not proof. The charge is the fabric. The record is a topical satire by design, fixed to Jubilee year, a record company’s contracts, the Berlin wall and the New York scene of 1975, and the axis penalises exactly that surface. Some of it has outlived its moment, and “No future” survives as a phrase; some has not, in E.M.I. and New York. It stands level with Marquee Moon here.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over some five to eleven centuries. The form is legible in plan: the compounds still read as rectangles of high wall from the ground and from the air, their courts, audiencias and platforms traceable. In elevation much is lost: walls slumped to mounds, the friezes mostly gone, and those a visitor sees at Tschudi in large part reconstructed. The use has been lost for some five and a half centuries, since the Inca conquest, and the form has not been taken up as a model since. Looted for centuries, the city has been in scholarly and Peruvian attention since the nineteenth century and a World Heritage Site since 1986. The fabric is mud, under active loss to rain, wind, salt and groundwater. Ruin, lost use, reconstruction and continuing decay are each charged; the erosion has been survived for centuries. The highest of the twelve, at the gate’s edge.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, has stayed in print, and was reissued in an expanded edition at twenty. Presence is continuous and wide for a record of its kind: it is heard whole, its songs carried in film and broadcast, and it is commonly placed among the records of its decade, popularity counted as presence, not proof. The fabric is little fixed to 1999, with no period drum machine or production fashion to date it. What holds the figure is a presence narrower than that of the decade’s records with the largest public, and much of it fragmentary use in other media.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print and streamed. Presence is continuous but narrow. The record is heard by musicians, by the singer’s listeners and by those who follow film scores, and its title track and The Feeling Begins are used and borrowed; but it is seldom placed among the central albums of its decade, and its public presence is a fraction of So’s. The fabric bears its moment in part: some synthesiser pads and drum treatments are of their years, though the acoustic instruments at the core of most tracks are fixed to no year. Charged for presence, it sits at 8.5.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as released, continuously in print and reissued, its sequence intact; nothing is lost. Presence is steady and wide among listeners of its kind and beyond, kept in its maker’s live sets and revalued by critics, but less broad than its predecessor’s, and its first life was a commercial fall. Charged: the treated guitars and programmed drums of the late 1990s mark it, though the instrumental and piano passages, its best, carry little of the era’s surface, and the production has worn better than most of its decade. These balance at the low end of the usual figure for its age, which meets the bar.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over forty-three years. The recording survives whole, ten tracks in the order set, with nothing lost. Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year’s Day have been continuously present since release, on radio, in the band’s concerts and in any account of the political song, and “40” stayed for years as the band’s close. The album as a whole is narrower in presence: the second side is little heard, and the record is known chiefly through its singles, though it remains their home and is still heard in order. The dry drum and bright guitar are of their moment, and the Troubles and the nuclear fear of the early 1980s are now heard as period, though the opener has outlived the conditions that made it.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is scored as built: no loss, alteration or replacement is known, and the later buildings at Gando are separate works. Stabilised earth needs its roof and its plinth to keep the rain off, and the design has done that through twenty-five rainy seasons, so that the fabric itself answers the old doubt about earth. Twenty-five years of survival and a wide presence in the field’s literature place the figure. What holds it at 8.5 is a fabric more vulnerable than masonry or concrete, and a use that rests on conditions in a troubled region: an armed insurgency since about 2015 has closed many schools in Burkina Faso. No closure or damage at Gando is known, and uncertainty is not charged as loss.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years since Venice in 2000. The form survives whole in its one released cut; a chronological re-edit issued later on home video is a curiosity beside it and takes nothing from it. Presence is continuous and wide for a film of its scale: home video in every format, television, revival screenings, steady use in teaching and a place in popular reference, carried further by its director’s fame. That fame is presence, not proof, and is credited no further than its share. The surface ages little: Polaroids, motels and the absence of mobile telephones read as the film’s world, since Leonard’s condition needs objects, and the photography is plain rather than fashionable. The figure is the usual one for the span, short of the widest.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across thirty-two years. The film as released survives whole, restored more than once and never lost. Its presence has been continuous and wide: festival and repertory screenings, home video in every format, a Criterion edition, international teaching, and the theatrical circulation of the 2021 restoration. A span of thirty-two years sets it at the foot of what such an age allows. Two charges stand. The 2021 restoration, supervised by Wong, regraded the colour, so the image now in circulation differs from the image of 1994: a small alteration, but a real one. And the surface is fixed to its moment, the pagers, the fashions and the pop of 1994 Hong Kong, which some viewers now watch as period.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-six years. The form is whole: the film survives in its theatrical cut, and restorations and new transfers are repair. Presence has been continuous and wide, on television, on every home format and in steady revival, and above all through the songs, which have kept the film present to people who have not seen it; that presence is borrowed from the soundtrack’s own life and is credited only as far as wide presence allows. The surface ages little where it is set, since a fable of the 1930s made in 2000 does not date as a contemporary story would. The charge falls on the digital grade, an early instance now legible as a mark of its moment, its saturated amber reading as the look of a process more than of a place. The film meets the bar of the gate, and no more.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and reissued, and is heard as an album. Presence is as wide as that of any electronic record of its decade: One More Time and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger are continuously played, streamed, sampled and used, and the album is still heard whole. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and popularity is not permanence. The fabric bears its moment more than most: the pumping compression, the filtered loops and the early pitch-corrected voice are sounds of the turn of the century, and some of them later became clichés of others’ records, so that the surface now dates partly to its imitations. The fixed surface takes the tenth back.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-four years. Form: whole. One canvas, nothing known to be lost or replaced, the image legible as made. Presence: wide for its age, through Sensation, the career and the widely reported sale of 2018; but the canvas is privately held and not continuously on public view, and presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: a thick oil on canvas of three decades, with no reported damage, and no charge. Interpolated for its age between the rows for twenty-five and thirty-five years, the figure falls at 8.5 to 8.6, and is set at the foot because the presence, though wide, is the presence of fame more than of public access. A survival of three decades does not outscore one of centuries.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over about forty years, a span short of a full demonstration. The form is whole and legible, unaltered in its governing idea; it has outlived the moment of its making, and the lotus does not read as a period piece of its decade’s taste. The use has been continuous since the opening, in its own purpose, and intensive beyond almost any building of its age; the wide presence of the building is credited, but only for a small share of the figure. The fabric of concrete and marble has held in a hard climate of heat, monsoon and polluted air, with the care that marble and waterproofing require. Four decades is a beginning, not a proof, and the figure sits at the height that so short a record allows.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print and in circulation, now streamed widely. Presence is continuous and has grown rather than faded; Xtal and Ageispolis in particular are heard, sampled and used, though the presence is concentrated among electronic musicians and a specialist public. The fabric is the interesting case: the hiss, the wobble and the analogue timbres fix the record to its means, yet they were already a past when it was issued, and the surface has aged into the work rather than out of it. One charge remains, the dim, uneven master. Below Remain in Light’s 8.7, above Zooropa’s 8.4.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-one years. Form: whole. The image is the one painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: the image is among the most reproduced paintings of its decade, but the canvas has been in private hands since its sale in 2008; fame and price are presence, not proof, and the private keeping is a small charge. Fabric: thickly built oil on canvas, with no known condition problem. The usual figure for a span of three decades with form whole stands a little above this one; the canvas is held a tenth below it for the private keeping. The surface carries little fixed to its moment beyond the office named in the title.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Form, use, then fabric, over forty-eight years. The form is whole: the triangle and the court stand unchanged in their governing idea, and the type has been answered and copied for decades. The use has been continuous since 1978 in the building’s own purpose, broken only by the renovation of 2014 to 2016. The charge falls on the fabric. The anchors holding the marble panels failed, and every panel had to be taken down and rehung on new anchors within about thirty years of building: the work’s endurance failing, weighed here. The stone is largely the original stone and the form survived the repair whole, so the charge is moderate. Presence is wide within the nation’s capital, though not the widest.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-five years. Form: the film survives as released, in its one version, and later restorations for home release repair rather than revise. Presence has been continuous: television, every home format, a release in a prestige collection, revival screenings, and steady attention through the reputations of its director and its star, which grew again after Williams’s death; it is steady presence rather than the widest a film of its years can have. Fabric: the surface is charged. The shock jock, the bar of young money and the video store fix the film to New York at the turn of the 1990s, and its picture of the homeless belongs to its moment. The form is whole and the presence unbroken; the dated surface is what holds the figure where it is.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirty-one years. The film as released survives whole, in the one version in circulation, with restorations as repair only. Presence has been continuous and wide: television, every home-video format, streaming, quotation, its images in common circulation, and a standing that has risen. The surface ages little, since a film of the 1970s made in 1995 as period dates its costumes and its Strip to the story rather than the making; the compilation score and the gloss of the photography now read partly as the mid-1990s too. A span of thirty-one years places it at about 8.5 to 8.6, and it stands at the lower figure because its presence, wide within cinema, is narrower than that of its director’s most present films and has not passed far beyond film.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and is in print and streamed. Presence is continuous and wide: Fell in Love with a Girl, Hotel Yorba and We’re Going to Be Friends remain in broadcast, film and common use, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. The fabric is little fixed to 2001: the record was made to sound older than its year, analogue and bare, and has dated less than most of its decade’s production. The charge is that much of its presence comes through three songs rather than the record played whole, and that keeps it a tenth under the widest figure its span allows, and below records of forty years and more such as Remain in Light at 8.7.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and any restoration is repair. Presence is continuous but not wide: a Palme d’Or winner kept on home video and television, shown in its director’s retrospectives and in teaching on acting and British cinema, less circulated than the most watched art films of its decade and carried in part by its director’s name. The surface ages as period rather than fashion: the box factory, the council sweepers, the new-build estate and the high-street studio fix it to mid-1990s London, but the film is about those conditions. Thirty years, and a narrow presence, hold it at the bar.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording as released survives intact and is heard as an album. Presence is continuous and narrower than the band’s widest: Rusty Cage and Outshined have stayed in rock radio and on playlists, and attention returned after Cornell’s death in 2017; but the record lives somewhat in the shadow of Superunknown, at 8.0 here, more often named than played whole. The surface is fixed to its moment in places, in Terry Date’s dense early-nineties production and in the record’s standing as an artifact of the Seattle wave. Those charges hold it at the line.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed across about twenty-seven years. The form is whole: the theatrical cut survives complete, and nothing is charged for loss. Presence has held, in continuous circulation on home video, in repertory and on streaming, with a strong place in critical and popular regard for its decade, wide though not the widest of its films. The surface carries some charge: the late-1990s Valley, the quiz show as a cultural centre, the self-help seminar’s idiom and the Aimee Mann songs fix it to its moment, though the seminar has, if anything, gained point since. A presence that has held, weighed against a surface partly dated, sets the figure at the foot of what a span of twenty-five to twenty-nine years allows: the highest of the twelve, at the bar of the gate and no higher.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, eleven tracks in order, and has been reissued, with demos and a live set added in 2016 that are context, not the work. Presence is wide for one song, Losing My Religion, among the most heard records of its decade and still so. The album whole is present more narrowly, in print and streamed but living in the shadow of Automatic for the People, which stands at 8.6 here; it sits level with Murmur at 8.5. The fabric is lightly fixed: the acoustic and string palette has aged well, but Radio Song’s rap and its complaint about radio belong to 1991.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print. Presence is charged twice. The record most heard by many listeners is not the unit: the American edition and later British CDs inserted “How Soon Is Now?” at the head of side two, so the nine-track record as the band sequenced it has had a divided presence. And the album has lived in the shadow of the band’s next record; its songs are known more than its whole, and the title track is present as a stance more than as a song. The fabric, a self-produced sound of 1984, has worn reasonably. It stands level here with War, at 8.5.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Survival over forty-nine years, at the top of the span in which decades begin to demonstrate and short of the next. The text survives whole, has been in print throughout and has been widely translated, and its presence is wide and continuous: King’s readers, school and university courses on horror and popular fiction, and the steady pull of the film. A tenth is charged on presence, since much of the book’s presence is carried by Kubrick’s film and by its author’s name, and the academy reads the film more than the novel. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment, in the brand names and the period vernacular, though the matter has outlived it. That leaves the axis the highest of the twelve, and exactly at the bar.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Thirty-four years since publication, and survival is demonstrated over that span. The text survives whole as published. The Discworld has been continuously in print and translated into many languages, and this book in particular has been read and reissued throughout, in steady use as the series’ standing introduction. Its surface is little fixed to its moment: its satire is on religion and certainty, not on 1992, and nothing in it has dated as that year passed. Two charges keep the figure at the usual mark for its span rather than above it: much of its presence is the presence of the series, and fame and sales earn little on this axis. Decades demonstrate less than centuries.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: five objects, each whole as made, nothing known to be lost or replaced. Presence: twenty-six years from completion, with the widest presence a contemporary sculpture has: the Blue in a public museum on continuous view, the Magenta shown at Versailles, the Orange sold under worldwide attention. Fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence, and earn at most a tenth. Held a tenth below what the span and that presence would give, for two charges together: a surface fixed in part to its market moment, since the price of 2013 is now part of what the object is; and a fabric whose identity is a coating, the colour lying in a thin transparent layer that scratching or refinishing would change. The steel weighs least and does not offset the charge.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twenty-seven years. Form: whole. The image exists in six prints, and no single loss would take it. Presence: wide, shown and reproduced without end; but much of that fame is its price, and fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric: chromogenic colour prints are known to fade and shift in colour over decades, and a print face-mounted to acrylic cannot easily be treated; an edition can be reprinted, which raises the question of what then survives. That general risk is charged lightly, and the edition offsets it. The figure is the usual one for its span, not the widest, because its presence leans on one auction.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print throughout and reissued with added material. Presence is real and narrower than its age would usually carry: So. Central Rain is still known and the album is heard whole by the band’s listeners, but it lives somewhat in the shadow of Murmur and of the band’s later, far larger records, and the general public does not much hear it. That is charged. The fabric is little charged: the production avoided the synthesisers and gated drums that fix so many records of 1984 to their year, and the sound of a band in a room has dated less than most of its decade. Nothing in the subject is topical. The record meets the bar exactly.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over sixty-eight years. The form survives whole and legible: the nine spheres, the tubes, the bipods and the corner stance are those of 1958, and the building has outlived the fair, the decade’s atomic faith and the temporary licence under which it was built. The use survives, changed in kind but continuous: a pavilion for six months, then an exhibition building and visitor attraction, closed from 2004 to 2006. The fabric is charged. The whole visible surface, the figure’s face, is not original: the aluminium had degraded by the 1990s and was replaced in full with stainless steel, and the interiors were renewed. Its survival after the 1990s was a decision, not a fact. Its presence is among the widest of any building of its age.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print since 1994, remastered in 2011, and the book package has been reproduced. Presence is wide and continuous for the songs: Better Man and Corduroy have stayed in rock broadcast and in the band’s concerts for three decades, and Nothingman and Immortality are heard often. The album as a whole is heard less than its songs, and the fragments are commonly skipped, which is charged. The fabric is less fixed to its year than most records of 1994: the dry, live sound avoided the period’s gloss, though the voice and its quarrel with fame belong to their years and are heard as such.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, and has been reissued. Presence is real and wide for two songs: In Between Days and Close to Me have been on the air and in the band’s sets for four decades. The album as a whole is present more narrowly: it has lived in the shadow of Disintegration and of the singles collections that carry its two hits, and that is charged. The fabric is lighter than much of 1985: acoustic guitars, piano and live drums age well, though the gated snare and some synthesiser sounds fix it to its year. It’s My Life, of the year before, carries a fabric charge as well and holds a tenth lower, at 8.4.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty years. Form: legible and whole, on its site, in the park named for it, in view from the highway the whole time. Presence: wide; it is one of the most reproduced walls in New York and has given a playground its name, but fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric is the charge. This is an exterior wall in exterior paint, and since Haring’s death its surface has been conserved and repainted by other hands following his design, so that much of what stands is not his paint. The form survives; the made surface is in part replaced. Its surface is also fixed to its moment, crack and 1986, which the axis penalises, though the mural has partly outlived that as a document of its years. The lower figure of its row, meeting the bar exactly.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-four years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, and later transfers and restorations repair only. Presence has been continuous and wide: theatrical revivals, home video in every format, television, its own anniversary screenings, and a place in the general culture through its title walk, its colour names and its torture scene. Fame is not proof of permanence, and wide presence is credited by a tenth at most. The fabric is charged slightly: the pop soundtrack was already period in 1992 and dates little, but the black suits, the talk about Madonna and the casual slurs fix the film to its moment, and the slurs now narrow some of its reception. It stands at the foot of its span.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The form survives whole in the released cut; restoration has repaired it without making another film. Presence across forty-three years is narrow: the film failed in cinemas in 1983, and its life since has been on home video, in repertory, on television and in a cult and critical following, its standing rising rather than falling, but it has not stayed in common view as the most exhibited films of its decade have. The black and white guards it against the colour stock and styling of 1983; the score’s electronic textures, the clothes and the hair are of their year. Decades are credited for what they have shown, with presence charged: Apocalypse Now, four years older and widely seen, stands at 8.7 here.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirty-six years. The theatrical cut survives whole, and restorations are repair. The director’s re-edit of 2020 stands beside it as a variant and takes nothing from it, though Coppola has said that the re-edit is the version he and Puzo intended, which puts the 1990 cut in question from within. Presence is continuous and wide because the film travels with the trilogy: every boxed edition, every television cycle and every retrospective of the saga carries it. That presence is borrowed in part, and the film’s own standing has been that of the trilogy’s weakest member; both are charged. The surface ages as history, though the styling of the New York party shows its date. The figure is the lowest the span allows.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The case for survival at twenty-two years rests on a presence as wide as any book of that age shows: in print without a break in Spanish and in English, translated into the major languages, taught in universities in Latin America, Spain and the English-speaking world, and read well beyond them. The form survives whole as published; the joining of the five parts in one volume after the author’s death costs little, since the parts are his and the arrangement is the one the structure asks for. Its surface will not date it: the 1990s of Santa Teresa are history now, and the war half a century before that. The span alone holds the figure where it is: twenty-two years cannot show whether the book outlasts the turn of taste that raised it, or the season of attention to its author’s life.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is partly demonstrated. The film was received in 1998 as the lesser of two Second World War films released that year, lost the Academy Awards to the other, and has since reversed the comparison in most critical accounts; it is now the one more written about. Its surface is not fixed to its moment, since grass, light and questions asked over the dying have no decade, and the 1942 setting has already outlived the conditions of its making. What is weighed against it: twenty-eight years is a short span by this measure, the film’s standing rests on a critical consensus more than a popular one, and its length and drift keep it from the continuous circulation that the gangster film and the thriller enjoy. Held just under the gate for want of elapsed time.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-two years, on form, presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as issued, in print since release. Presence is continuous and wide for its kind: the record is still heard whole, Wake Up and Rebellion (Lies) remain in broadcast and use, and it is placed high whenever its decade is counted; popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is little fixed to 2004: acoustic strings, accordion, piano and a live-sounding band carry less date than the period’s production, though the rough mix and the strained vocal manner are of their scene and year. Charged: some of its presence is now bound up with the band’s later career, and the many-voiced anthem it helped make common has worn as a manner, which dates the original a little by association.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across nearly nineteen years. The form is whole. Presence has held and grown: the film has stayed in repertory and reissue, and its score and last scene have a public life of their own. The fabric is strong: the surface is 1898 to 1927, not 2007, with no technology and no topical reference of its production era. At release it was read against the oil politics and the evangelism of the 2000s, and it has outlived that reading. The cost is the central performance, pitched high, the part of a film most exposed to changing taste. What holds the figure is the span itself: nineteen years, level with No Country for Old Men and Radiohead’s In Rainbows, works of its year, short of the gate and far below what has lasted centuries.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over nineteen years. The form is whole, and the record has outlived the surface most fixed to its time: the episode of the price the buyer chose is now history, and the album is heard without it. Presence has been continuous: it has stayed in the band’s live sets, its standing has risen since 2007, and a generation born after its release has taken it up. The fabric has not dated; Godrich’s production avoids the loudness and fashionable textures of its year, and nothing in the words is topical. What holds the figure is the span itself: nineteen years, level with films of its year such as No Country for Old Men and far below what has lasted centuries.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed across two decades, and the surface gives it little to lose. The setting is 1980, chosen, not contemporary: the telephones, the trucks and the motels were already of the past when the film was made, and read as period now as then. It was placed tenth in the BBC critics’ poll of the century’s films in 2016, and its Best Picture award has not come to look like a mistake. Charged against it: Chigurh has been imitated to the point of parody, and the prestige violence it exemplified is now familiar. What holds the figure is the span: level with There Will Be Blood and In Rainbows, works of its year, a tenth short of the gate, and far below what has lasted centuries.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across the whole. Every part survives whole and as released; restoration for home video is repair, weighed here and nowhere else. Presence is continuous and wide for the founding parts, in rerun, home video, streaming, quotation and parody over thirty-five years, and the revival is itself evidence of it. But survival is demonstrated only on the series and the film, about 61 per cent of the running time, and forecast on The Return, which is nine years old. Weighed by running time, that is what holds the axis here, a little above the weighted figure for the reach of the founding parts’ presence. The surface charge is small and real: the network look of 1990, and the second season’s broad comedy, which has dated where the Lodge scenes have not.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the coil is whole in plan; no rock has been replaced and no restoration made, and dumped rock in a saline lake has held its figure through three decades under water. But what made the work is a coil of black rock in red water, and it now stands white with salt and, in the drought years, on dry lakebed far from the water, where the jetty as a road into the lake is at times not there to be read. The change was invited, and it is weighed as survival, not as fault. Presence is charged hardest: for about half its life it could not be seen, and its fame grew on the film and the photographs while the object was under water. Fabric is sound, the smallest charge.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as made, and no loss of it is known. Presence is where its history is unusual. The state banned it and disowned its nationality, and it circulated abroad for years as a Mexican film before its first public showing in Spain, in 1977, after Franco’s death. Since then it has been continuously present, in repertory, in the standard histories and in restored editions. What sets the mark is the surface. Its target, the National Catholicism of Franco’s Spain, has receded, and the blasphemy shocks less than it did, though the argument about charity has outlived its occasion. Its audience is narrower than the most present films’.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as published and has stayed in print through its twenty years; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is as wide as a book of its age can have: taught in schools and universities, widely translated, carried further by the film, and read on after its author’s death in 2023. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the catastrophe is unnamed, the objects are few and generic, and the one brand in it, a can of Coca-Cola, the book itself turns into a relic. The widest presence a book of twenty years can show earns a tenth above the usual mark for its span, and no more. Two decades demonstrate far less than the centuries behind the summit, and the figure credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-nine years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the diction is archaic by design, the matter is the 1760s, and nothing depends on 1997 except the anachronistic jokes, which date by design to no single year. It has outlived the conditions of its making and is read as more pertinent, not less, in later quarrels over the nation’s founding. What holds the axis is presence. It is continuous but narrow, a readership drawn largely from the readers of Pynchon and from the university, narrower than that of the works of its age that stand higher; and a span of under three decades shows far less than the centuries behind the summit.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-six years. The form survives whole: a recording continuously in print, with no part lost, which has outlived the double album of the CD era and the millennial dread it was heard against. The fabric carries little period signature, since strings, guitars and drums in a room date less than programmed rhythm or bright production, and the street recordings are dated by design, as documents. Presence holds the figure where it stands: continuous within its field and narrower beyond it. The record stands level with films of its years such as The Thin Red Line, below works of its age whose public is wider, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed as twenty-one years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout; nothing is lost. Presence is wide and continuous, in schools and universities and in translation into many languages, renewed by the film of 2010 and by its author’s Nobel Prize in 2017. Its surface is as little fixed to its moment as a novel’s can be: it is set in an alternative England of the late 1990s, furnished with nothing that dates it, cassette tapes and all, so that the period markers already read as part of its world. Nothing in its presence is charged, and twenty-one years with presence this wide take the top of the usual figure for the span. Two decades demonstrate less than three, and far less than the centuries behind the summit.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and in print. Presence is continuous but narrower than the record’s standing among critics: Race for the Prize and Waitin’ for a Superman remain in circulation and in the band’s concerts, and the record is placed high whenever the decade is counted, yet the album was never widely heard by the general public, and its presence is concentrated among musicians and critics. That is the charged column. The fabric bears its moment: the mastering is loud and saturated to the point of audible distortion in places, a surface of its production era. A span of twenty-seven years with presence charged sets the figure.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, nothing lost and nothing replaced. Presence: across twenty years it has been continuously available on home video, television and streaming, has risen in critics’ polls of the century, and is taught and reshown as a model of the long take and as a political film; its presence has grown rather than faded, and is wide for a film of its year. Fabric: the digital elements are few and mostly unseen, the newborn among them. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the iconography of the war on terror in the mid-2000s, but the film placed it in 2027 and it has been read as foresight rather than dated topicality. Twenty years is a short demonstration, and the figure says so.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Fabric: its surface is little fixed to its moment, since its periods, the street theatre of the 1950s, the war, a New England college town in the 1990s, are history by design. Presence is continuous among readers of serious fiction and in the criticism of Roth, and it is charged. The book is the one most often named in the case against Roth’s treatment of women; it is little taught because of its content; and since Roth’s death in 2018 his standing has been contested more openly than before. With presence charged on this book in particular, and narrower than a widely taught novel’s, the figure stands below the bar. Three decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over thirty-four years, and it is weighed as thirty-four years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost, and there is nothing in its fabric to charge. Its presence is continuous: it is taught and reread, it was filmed in 1999, and its standing rose rather than fell after its author’s death. The surface is fixed to a moment, the drug culture of the Midwest in the late 1960s and the 1970s, but as setting, not as a production era, and the book does not depend on it. The charge is on presence: the book lives among readers of literary fiction and among writers more than across the culture, more narrowly than the most widely read American fiction of its decades. Three decades and more demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the release of 1993 is still the record heard, and reissues have added beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous: the three singles remain in broadcast, the album is heard whole, and it is placed high whenever its decade’s rock is counted. That presence is narrower than the widest. It is largely American, and much of it is a decade’s rock remembered. The fabric is more fixed to its year than a plainer record’s would be: the dense overdubbed guitars and the polished production are a sound of 1993, though they have aged without embarrassment. Those two charges hold the figure, which stands far below what has lasted centuries.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the release of 1998 is the record heard, and reissues have added remixes beside it, not in its place. Presence is continuous and wide in its kind: the album is placed high whenever its decade is counted, and it is heard whole. Part of that presence is charged, carried by Teardrop’s life in broadcast, and the album is heard less widely than the song. The fabric is little fixed to its year: the record avoided the bright digital surfaces of the late 1990s, and its darkness and weight of bass have aged slowly, though some processed textures and the whispered delivery are of their time. It stands level with F♯ A♯ ∞, of the same year, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: the further endings are additions on home video, not replacements, and no altered version has displaced the theatrical cut. Presence over twenty-four years has been continuous and wide, in home video and broadcast, in repertory screenings and in every account of the genre, and renewed since the sequel of 2025 brought its makers back. The fabric is charged a little. Standard definition video was chosen, but it is a technology fixed to its moment and has aged as film stock does not: some daylight scenes now look degraded rather than raw, and no restoration can add resolution that was never recorded. That keeps the axis a tenth short of the gate.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. At some sixty-seven years the cycle stands where a work usually holds 8.8 to 9.0, and lower where presence or fabric is charged. Form: the image of each canvas survives whole, but what makes the work is the cycle as walls, and the cycle as a whole cannot now be shown: it was never installed, and it is divided between London, Sakura and other hands. What stands is the nine at Tate, a room Rothko chose, and seven at Sakura as a second room. Presence: wide at Tate, partial elsewhere. Fabric: thin layers of paint, a surface easily harmed, as the ink put on Black on Maroon in 2012 showed; it was restored and rehung in 2014. Charged lightly on all three, and held at the low end of its step. Below The Rothko Chapel (8.5), which stayed whole and in place.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print on vinyl and CD and in streaming. Presence is continuous and, through one song, as wide as any rock recording of its decade: Seven Nation Army is played at sporting events and sung by crowds who may not know its source. That breadth belongs to a song more than to the album, which is heard far less than its first track, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is deliberately old, and two players in a dry room date less than the production of their year.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-one years. The film survives whole: one version, nothing lost, no replacement by altered cuts. Its presence has been continuous and wide for an art film, in exhibition and circulation since 2005, on home release, and in teaching, in film studies and French colonial history alike, with a standing among critics that has held. Twenty-one years is a short span beside the centuries behind the oldest works on the desk, and even the widest presence at that span earns no more than this. The surface charge is small: the videotapes and the cathode-ray television date the objects to their moment, but the theme they carry, the domestic image as surveillance, has grown more current. The gate is missed by span, not by fabric.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on survival of what makes the work: the landing body, the wind in the cloth, the wings and the ship. The body from neck to feet survives in original stone, pieced with fills; the left wing, pieced; the ship, nearly whole in its blocks. Lost: the head; both arms, and with them the gesture of arrival; the right wing’s stone, now a plausible plaster mirror; the setting that completed the scene. That is perhaps a fifth of what makes the work, and a body landing against wind on a ship stays legible. Beyond it the charge is presence: the monument lay broken and buried for well over a thousand years and was recovered by chance. Since 1884 it has been among the most secure images in Europe, free of its moment.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Span: 35 years as a work, 20 for the present animal. Form: whole and legible as conceived; the concept, pose, scale and title stand. Presence: wide and continuous, lent and shown in London, New York and elsewhere; fame is presence, not proof, and is given little weight. Fabric: the first animal decayed through a failure of the first making and was replaced, and the present shark is a different body. The work’s survival now depends on a regime of replacement and maintenance, with no proof yet that fluid and specimen will last. Since the animal is the work’s content and not its support, its loss takes more than a loss of fabric usually does, and the charge is taken here, and on no other axis. The clock is not reset to 2006: what was made in 1991 still stands, in another body.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half centuries. Form: the cycle is mostly lost. A seventh or less of the paintings is known, the sequence of the volumes cannot be reassembled, and the narrative is legible only in fragments; each surviving folio is legible as an image, and the style and the project’s nature are fully knowable from them, which is why the charge is not heavier. Presence: dispersed from the Mughal library, out of view for long periods, recovered as a group only from the late nineteenth century, and now scattered across many collections, seldom seen together. Fabric: cloth and pigment worn, trimmed, stained and faded on many survivors. The loss goes past heavy repair, to the greater part of the work.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole; nothing is lost and nothing has replaced it. Its presence across twenty-two years is continuous and wide: home video and streaming, revival screenings, wide quotation and use, and a phrase from it in common speech. Fame is not proof, and the axis does not lean on it. The surface dates a little: the dyed hair, the cassette tapes, the apartment and office of the early 2000s, the handheld look of its years. The device itself, a clinic that erases one person, is fantasy and does not age with a technology. Twenty-two years sits between the rows of the step for twenty and for twenty-five, and wide presence with a mildly dated surface sets it there.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years. The form is whole: nothing of the recording is lost. The fabric bears time: strings, guitars, drums and tape carry no production date, as the programmed rhythms of their year do, and the monologue’s millennial dread has found its referent in the decades since. Presence has been continuous in its field, through a seven-year hiatus in which the record’s standing rose, and into a second life after the band’s return in 2010. Presence is also the limit: it survives in a tradition, not across the culture, level with films of its year such as The Thin Red Line and far below what has lasted centuries.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-two years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and in steady circulation, and it has been reissued. Presence is wide within its field, and Blood and Thunder remains a fixture of the band’s sets and of metal broadcast; presence earns at most a tenth, and the figure is not lifted for fame. The fabric is the charge. Bayles’s production, dense, compressed and of its decade, fixes part of the surface to 2004, though less than many metal records of those years. The recording has aged better than most of its peers, and the figure sits at the point twenty-two years give, neither lifted nor lowered.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over thirty-five years, and it is weighed as thirty-five years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the American scenes belong to the decades they depict, and the subject has not dated. The book is continuously read and taught, and Amis’s death in 2023, with the attention given to his later novel of Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest (2014), and to its film, has kept it in view. Presence is where it is charged: it is read as one of Amis’s novels and as a text in a field of study, more than across the culture, and its presence is narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its decade. Decades demonstrate less than centuries, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has been kept in print with Gaddis’s other novels. Fabric: the surface is in part fixed to its moment, the Japanese car, the litigation boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, the Hollywood Civil War epic. The charge is lightened because the matter, Americans suing over everything, has grown more pertinent since, not less. Presence is where the charge falls: the book is read mainly by Gaddis’s readers and in the academy, and it has a smaller public than his two great novels. Three decades, with that presence, are weighed as three decades.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-eight years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print and streamed without break. Presence is of the widest kind for its age: the album is heard whole and not only through its singles, Ex-Factor and Doo Wop live in broadcast and in sampling, and the record is placed at or near the top whenever its decade is counted. Popularity is presence, not proof of permanence, and is credited no further. The fabric is mostly little fixed to 1998: live strings, horns, organ and harp, played drums and an analogue warmth carry little date. But the sampled grounds and some of the drum programming are of their decade, and the classroom voices, heard across the record, are of their year. Survival is demonstrated, and firmly; twenty-eight years is still a shorter proof than this axis rewards at its height, and the dated parts sit in the frame that holds the whole.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued on vinyl. Presence is continuous and wide for its kind: the album is heard whole, Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day are in common use, the songs are covered and sung, and a stage work made from the record has renewed it for a new public, though popularity is presence and not proof. The fabric holds little fixed to 2005: acoustic instruments, brass and voices date slowly, and the home-made sound has kept rather than aged. The figure sits at the top of what the span allows, a tenth over Boxer at nineteen years and level with Elephant at twenty-three.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twenty-one years for the whole and twenty-nine for Snake. Form is whole: installed permanently, every part in place as made, nothing lost. Presence is wide and continuous, in one of the most visited museums in Europe, seen by millions and widely reproduced; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric is weathering steel, which forms its own stable rust, spared weather indoors, among the most durable materials any artist of the period used. Against it: the work is bound to one room in one building, its survival is the institution’s, and a mass of this kind cannot be shown elsewhere. Predicted survival does not outrank demonstrated, and twenty-one years is twenty-one years.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print. Presence is continuous and wide, among musicians and the public: C.R.E.A.M. and Protect Ya Neck are still played and quoted, the title of the first has passed into common speech, the clan’s emblem is among the most recognised in popular music, and the record is placed high whenever the hip hop of its decade is counted. Popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is charged, and it holds the figure short of the bar: the murk of the mix was a choice and also a limit of the means, voices sit at uneven levels, and the surface is fixed to the production and slang of 1993, though the subject has not dated.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed as record, on form, presence and fabric, at forty-six to fifty-three years. Form: the made works are gone by design, and what makes the work, the figure in the ground and its undoing, is legible in the record, for some pieces fully, through film, for others through one or two slides. Presence is charged: almost nothing was seen before 1985, and wide presence came in the late 1980s and after 2000; fame since then is presence, not proof. Fabric: colour slides and Super 8 are fragile, and many prints in circulation were made after the artist’s death from her slides, so that the images met today were in part chosen by others. A further tenth is taken because the record, not the object, now carries the whole work and was in part shaped after her.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, and for a temporary work, as record. The form is legible: the journey, the room, the animal, the felt and the rite are all carried by the film and the photographs, and the work is known and taught. Presence has been wide for fifty years, and that earns at most a tenth; fame is not proof. But what made the work was duration and the encounter itself, and the record keeps a fraction of it, in images whose making was another’s: Tisdall’s frames, the film’s cuts. The days are gone and the animal is gone, and no one can now meet the action, only its traces. The loss of the live event, more of the work than the loss of an object, holds the figure a tenth below the charged step for its age.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twenty-three years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, nothing lost or altered. Presence is wide and continuous: theatrical success, constant circulation on home video, television and streaming, steady critical standing, and a place in common reference, the karaoke wig, the ending, the whisky advertisement, beyond film culture. Twenty-three years fall between the steps for about twenty and for twenty-five, and the width of the presence is credited. The surface holds the figure a tenth short of the gate: the Tokyo of 2003, its flip phones and fax machines, and above all the comic treatment of the Japanese characters, which part of the audience already reads as a period attitude. The core, two people at a window, does not date.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over forty years. The form is whole and the makers’: towers, ducts, atrium and vault in place, and protected by listing. It has not yet outlived the conditions that made it, for the market it was built for still occupies it. Use has been continuous since 1986 in its own purpose, though the Corporation is now a tenant, the Room’s trading has thinned, and the building has never been tested by a change of use. The steel and glass have held, but the services outside the envelope need renewal by design, and keeping them there has been a recurring cost. Forty years is a short span, and the surface is tied to the machine aesthetic of its moment.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the theatrical cut survives whole and circulates, and nothing of it is lost; but a director’s cut of 2008 now circulates beside it and partly displaces it, a modest charge. Presence across twenty-eight years: continuous on home video and in revival, sustained by a cult following and by critical defence, but not presence of the widest kind. Fabric: the photography and design age well, being already retrospective in 1998, while the computer images of the tuning and the final duel date the film to its year more visibly. Twenty-eight years earn the step below the usual band, where the charges on surface and on the second cut set it.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, and its restorations and remasters are repair. Its presence across twenty-four years is continuous and wide for a film not in English: in exhibition, on home video in every format and on streaming services, in the lists of best films, and in teaching on Brazil and on cinema. Twenty-four years demonstrate survival, but not over a span that would carry the axis to the gate. The surface is charged a little: the cutting, the music cues and the digital grade of the turn of the millennium already read as of their moment. It stands a tenth short of the bar, on elapsed time and that surface together.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across sixty-four years. The form survives whole in the head house: shells, piers, seams, inclined glass, lounge, bridge, stairs and tubes are in place and legible as the makers left them, and the building has outlived the airline and the era of flight that made it, standing as that era’s image. The use was lost: it ceased to be a terminal in 2001 and stood closed for eighteen years; the gate buildings at the ends of the tubes were demolished; it serves now as a hotel lobby, a passage still but not a departure. The fabric has been restored, much of it remade or renewed, and new buildings stand behind it. The lost use and the lost gate ends hold it below what a form whole and still in use would earn over the same span.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-six years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: eleven tracks as issued, nothing lost. Presence is continuous and wide for the songs and narrower for the album: Beautiful Day remains among the most widely heard rock songs of its era in public and broadcast use, but the record is heard whole far less often than its singles. The fabric has aged well. The production is dry, warm and band-centred, and the surface fixed to its moment, the millennial turn and the hearing after September 2001, is heard now as period, not dated. Under thirty years, with its presence chiefly the singles’, it stands level with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, of the same age, whose presence is likewise charged, and a tenth below Kid A, of the same month, and The Unforgettable Fire, both at 8.5.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one version, no loss, and later issues repair rather than change it. Presence over twenty-three years is continuous and as wide as any Korean film had before Parasite: international distribution in 2004 and 2005, home video in every format, television and streaming, repertory and anniversary screenings, a remake, and steady use in teaching and in the common vocabulary of the action and revenge film. Wide presence earns a little and is given. The charge is a surface partly fixed to its moment: the digital grading and some effects of 2003, the mobile phones, an extremity that belonged to a festival fashion. That holds the axis where it stands, and twenty-three years are not centuries.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over thirty-nine years. The form is wholly legible, its image famous and copied. The use has been continuous since 1987, as institute, museum, library and auditorium, in its own purpose. The fabric is whole, but the mechanism of the diaphragms, the defining part of the defining face, failed in the hands of its first builders and stood largely idle for much of the building’s life, with renovation needed and its present working not settled. That is a failure of the original making, and it takes something from the work in proportion to what the mechanism was: the instrument on which the building’s wager rested. The figure stands a tenth below what a building of this age charged in its use or fabric usually holds. Presence earns little; fame is not proof of permanence.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives in its one version as released. Presence has been continuous but not of the widest kind: revival and repertory screenings, home video in a prestige collection, teaching in British cinema and in courses on its director, and a steady critical standing. Two charges hold the figure under the gate. Presence is narrower than that of the films that reach it at this span; and the surface is partly fixed to its moment. The empty office blocks and the landlord who owns the flat belong to the London of the late eighties property boom, and the landlord is played as a type of that year, which has dated more than Johnny has.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-nine years. The form survives whole: the film as released, in its theatrical cut. Presence is continuous since release, on television, on video and in repertory, with a standing that rose after a poor first reception; but it is a cult presence rather than the widest, the Lynch film people come to after Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. The surface is partly fixed to 1997. The industrial-rock cues, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson over the porn-film sequence, and some of the styling of the middle movement now read as the mid-nineties, not as the dream. That is a charge on surface, and the narrower presence is a second. Both are mild, and together they hold the figure a step below the usual mark for its span.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over thirty-seven years. The form survives whole: pyramid, small pyramids, pools, stair and hall stand as built, and the figure does not yet read as a period piece. The use has been continuous and heavy since 1989, as the main entrance of the most visited museum in the world. But the use is charged: the hall was reworked within about twenty-five years, the single entry has become a funnel for a crowd the hall was not sized for, and the glass brings heat and glare into the hall below. The fabric has held well, the glass kept clear by constant cleaning. Survival of under forty years is short demonstration, well short of the fifty years at which the measure of age begins. Its presence is as wide as any building of its age has, and presence earns at most a tenth.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible; the arrangement, the cut, the title and the passage are carried as fully by the reported copy of 2007 as by the work of 1993. Presence: wide and continuous since 1993 in histories and exhibitions; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: the bodies are perishable by nature, held in a solution whose long-term behaviour in large specimens has proved uncertain in Hirst’s tanks, and whether the animals of 1993 stand as first shown is not known. Replacing a particular dead body takes more than replacing a readymade, and less than losing a painted image. The span is thirty-three years; the charge on the fabric and the replacement takes it to the lower figure.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over a span of twenty-eight years, short of the half-century by which survival is best judged. The form survives whole: pair, plan, setbacks, bridge and pinnacles stand as built, nothing lost or remade. The use survives unbroken: offices since completion, the client’s headquarters still in them, the bridge and an upper level open to visitors in great numbers. The fabric has held in a tropical climate for nearly three decades, stainless steel and glass keeping their face, and no structural trouble is known. Presence is the widest a building of its age can have, a national emblem known worldwide. High for its span, and short of the gate because the span is short and because its survival is also that of a prestige economy, oil and the state’s project, not yet tested by its end.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, with the step for twenty-two years. Form: whole as designed, with no significant alteration on record here; the diagram is widely reproduced and has outlived the moment of its making. Use: continuous and heavy since 2004, in its own purpose, as both museum and civic commons. Fabric: thin glass, a thin roof and white surfaces are demanding to keep, and the building’s look depends on immaculate upkeep; no serious failure is known here, but the record of its maintenance is not verified. Presence is wide within architecture and among visitors to Japan, which earns at most a tenth and is already taken within the figure. Its use and its form are the case; its fragile finish is the check that holds it at 8.4.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives intact and is heard as an album. Presence is real but narrower and more interrupted than that of the band’s central records: in print and streamed, with Stay and Numb still known and its critical standing risen, it has lived in the shadow of Achtung Baby, at 8.6 here, as a respected side-turn more than a record played whole. The surface is fixed to 1993 in its programmed drums and samplers, its satellite-television Europe and the advertising of the opening slogans, though the subject they serve has aged toward us. Those two charges set it level with Siamese Dream, of the same year, which carries the same two, and two tenths below Achtung Baby.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over sixty years, on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published, frame and all, and takes no charge. Fabric: none. Presence is where the charge falls. The book has stayed available, but its readership has narrowed since its first decade; it is read now mainly in the academy, and there less than Lost in the Funhouse, and it is rarely taught whole. Its surface is fixed to its moment in the way the axis penalises: the allegory of the Quiet Riot, the paired computers and the émigré scientists all ask the reader to decode the cold war. Narrowed presence and a topical surface together hold the axis at the foot of what sixty years of survival can show.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, has been in print for the whole span and has kept a large readership. Two charges. The surface is fixed to its decade: the catalogue furniture, single frames spliced into reels of film, the photocopier and the office of the mid-1990s, the voice of the generation that coined Generation X. And part of the novel’s presence is carried by the film: many of its readers come to it through Fincher, and its life as a book is narrower than its name. Against both, the conditions of its making have passed and the book is still read for what it saw. Three decades demonstrate less than centuries, and both charges are made.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over thirty-five years. Form: whole and legible. The work is a set of canvases and a procedure, and the procedure carried it intact from 1991 to the restaging of 2012; the replacement of butterflies, pupae and plants is how it is made each time and takes nothing from it. Presence: thin. The whole can be seen only when it is staged, and its living half depends on a supply of tropical pupae, a controlled climate and a museum willing to stage the death of thousands of insects; the criticism of 2012 makes every future showing a decision. The fame of the maker is presence, not proof. Fabric: butterflies in gloss paint are fragile, and the canvases depend on care. Both charges are taken, and a further charge for a renewal that is now contested.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one theatrical cut, nothing lost, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous and steady, in repertory, on television and on every home format, in teaching and in the study of its director, though it is not the widest a film can have. The surface is charged, and this is the satire’s cost: the film is fixed to Hollywood at the start of the 1990s, its stars, its executives’ cars and car phones, its fax machines and the studio politics of the moment, and the first audience’s pleasure in recognising faces thins as those faces pass. The structure beneath, an industry absorbing a crime into a product, has not aged.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Span: twenty years from completion, twenty-two from first showing. Form: whole as completed in 2006; no plate is known to be lost or replaced, and the defining arrangement stands in its original place. Presence: as wide as a sculpture can have, outdoors, free, in a city park, in view and in use since 2004. Fame is presence, not proof of permanence, and earns at most a tenth. Fabric: stainless steel is as durable as outdoor sculpture is made; the mirror keeps its finish only by being kept clean and polished, a dependency that charges a little but is the ordinary upkeep of the surface. The 2004 state with its seams was a stage of the making, not a failure of a finished work, and nothing completed has been lost. A survival of decades takes the figure for decades at widest presence, and cannot exceed it.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Thirty-four years of survival read high on the desk’s step, and presence has been wide and continuous: broadcast, every home format, the score in concert and in use. Two charges hold the figure. The first is replacement: Mann reworked the film for home video, in an expanded version of 1999 and a version of 2010 he called definitive, changing dialogue, sound and the placement of music, so that the film as released has had to compete with its revisions; the theatrical cut survives complete, and the charge is a tenth. The second is a surface partly fixed to its moment: the glossed romance, the hair and the lighting of the love scenes carry the early 1990s. The form, a pursuit through a landscape, has not dated.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, with no loss and no replacement, and later restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous: home video in every format, repertory and anniversary screenings, a cult that has kept the image and the soundtrack in circulation, and renewal through sequels and a remake. That presence is wide in its subculture and short of the widest. The surface is charged: the film is fixed in places to its moment, its alternative-rock soundtrack, its music-video cutting and the club and street style of 1994, and much of its circulation is bound to that moment and to the circumstance of its making. The fabric, its photography and miniatures, is the smallest charge.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Form first: the installation survives whole in Tate’s holding and can be shown as made, and its defining form is legible. Span: thirty-four years, short of the evidence the axis prefers. Presence is charged: a room installation is shown only at intervals and is not continuously in view, and in public memory it has been partly overlaid by the restaurant that took its name. Fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric is charged a little: the honey, the coloured liquid and the insects are renewed at each showing, which is the work’s design and costs it little; the packaging is printed matter of the early 1990s whose brands date it, a surface fixed to its moment, which the axis names as a cost. The form stands whole, and the charges on presence and fabric hold the figure just below where its span alone would set it.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twenty-eight years. Form: legible and whole as a bed with its linen and debris; no part that carries the meaning is known to be lost. Presence: wide and continuous for a work of its age, from the Turner Prize room to the Saatchi Gallery to a long loan to the Tate; fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric is charged. Stained linen, cigarette ends and soiled objects are perishable; the arrangement is remade at each showing, and items have differed between installations, so that what stands is the artist’s reinstatement, not the bed as found in 1998. The surface is also in part fixed to its moment, the scandal of 1999. These charges set the figure at the lower edge of what the span allows, and no further.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, from 1999. The film survives whole as released: there is one version, with nothing lost and nothing replaced. Its presence is continuous but of a cult rather than the widest kind: it circulates on disc and on streaming, returns in repertory, and its score has been reissued and is widely heard on its own. Two charges hold the figure where it is. The presence is narrower than that of the films most widely kept, and the surface is fixed to its moment more than most, late 1990s hip-hop, pagers, car electronics, an idiom of the mafia in decline from that decade. Against that, its pigeons, its rooftops and its code have outlived the surface well.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, with age taken into account. The form survives whole as completed: tower, stepped wings, nave and choir stand as built, with nothing of the governing design lost. Its oldest fabric is some eighty years old, but the work has stood whole for only forty, a short span for a building, and that sets the figure lower than the form alone would. The use is unbroken: the crypt from the first, and the church since 1986, as parish church, concert room and the city’s landmark, more used now than ever. The fabric is charged: concrete in a wet, freezing, salt-laden climate. Presence is the widest an Icelandic building has, and lifts the figure by a tenth at most.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole, with nothing lost and no other cut known; a later restoration repairs and does not revise. Presence across twenty-four years is continuous: revival screenings, home video, a restoration in a prestige collection, steady critical attention and a cult reputation that has grown with the director’s. It is not presence of the widest kind, less than the director’s larger films and less than the most circulated art films of its years. The surface ages little: the warehouse, the phone lines and the pudding promotion date the film mildly to its moment, but its colour and sound remain its own. Twenty-four years is a middle span, enough to show survival and short of the gate.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over forty-two years on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued. Presence is real for the songs: the title song and Such a Shame have stayed in broadcast for four decades. The album as a whole has been present more narrowly, kept in print and heard by those who come to it backward from the band’s later records, and that narrowness is charged. The fabric is charged too: the synthesiser timbres, the drum sounds and the gloss are of 1984 to the ear, a surface fixed to its production era. Two charges, presence and fabric, hold it well below the records of its age that are heard whole and widely, and a tenth below War, of the same years, which carries the same two charges but whose album is heard whole more often.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-four years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print, in its first sequence. Presence is very wide: Clocks and The Scientist have stayed in broadcast, film, advertising, performance and common listening for two decades, and the album is still heard whole and still sells. That width is presence, not proof, and the charge on it is that the songs are far more present than the album. The fabric is little fixed to its year, four instruments recorded plainly with few period timbres, and the surface has aged slowly. The gap between the songs and the record holds the figure where it is.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Weighed on form, presence and surface. Form: the film as released survives whole, and restoration for home video repairs it without revising it. Presence: thirty years, charged. The film failed on release and was little seen for some years; its circulation since has been continuous but narrow, on home video, in a prestige collection and in revival carried by its maker’s reputation, less than his own later films and far less than the most circulated films of its decade. The years beyond a quarter century nearly offset what the narrow early presence takes, and the axis stands a tenth below the bar. The surface is fixed lightly to the Texas exurbs of the mid-1990s, its cars and clothes, and it ages as period more than as fashion.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about thirty-four years. Form: whole; the canvas is the canvas painted, and nothing of its meaning is known to be lost. Presence: unusual in kind. The image has been continuously present in reproduction for three decades, as a print, a card and a poster, and has stayed in view through the arguments over its standing; fame and sales are presence, not proof, and earn at most a tenth. Fabric: an oil of 1992 with no known history of damage. This is the highest of the twelve. It is held a tenth below the foot of what its span allows for a surface fixed to a fashion: the image’s hold rests on a taste for retro glamour and on a print market whose favourites change, and the canvas has not yet shown it can stand when that taste passes.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
About nineteen years old, and survival can only be weighed on what nineteen years show. The form survives whole: the complete theatrical version is in circulation, and the director’s cut beside it neither repairs nor replaces it. Presence has grown since release rather than faded: the film circulates continuously on home video and streaming, is in steady critical use, and is now commonly named among the essential American films of its decade. That is presence among those who keep film, not the widest presence of a popular classic, and it earns no step above the usual figure. The surface is a period reconstruction, not a period surface, so it does not date with its own moment; the digital capture of 2007 is the one surface that could date, and it has not.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed in order, form, presence and fabric, with no discount for age, every later hand weighed here. The defining form is legible in plan and programme: the terrace, the stair, the Gate, the bases of every hall, the frames, most of the stair reliefs. Lost are the roofs and walls, the enclosure that made each hall of columns a room, dim and filled; that loss is large, perhaps a third of what the work was. The terrace has been in view without a break, named Jamshid’s throne, cut with Sasanian and Islamic inscriptions and travellers’ names, consolidated and partly re-erected. But it has not been used as built for 2,355 years, some 93 per cent of its life. The stone is burned, cracked and weathered, most of the columns fallen.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one cut, surviving as released, with no lost or altered version; the IMAX and 35mm presentations are two showings of the same film. Presence across eighteen years is of the widest kind a film of its decade has had: IMAX re-releases, constant television and streaming, lasting places in popular polls and in the teaching of the genre, quotation in common speech. Widest presence earns its credit, and it is given. Eighteen years are still eighteen years, and survival is credited only for what they have shown. The surface is charged a little: the telephones, the surveillance anxieties and the imagery of the years after 2001 fix it to its time, and its standing is partly bound to a franchise.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and surface. The form survives whole in all three versions; nothing is lost, and restoration is repair only. Presence: twenty-one years, continuous on home video and in repertory, with a standing among critics that has risen from a mixed release; but a public presence that has stayed within the art house, narrow beside the most widely seen films of its years, and that holds the figure at the lower edge of what about twenty years can show. The surface dates little: a period setting and a style not fixed to 2005, though the star casting of the leads belongs to its moment. The several versions are no loss, but they leave the work less singular than a film with one form.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is mixed: forty-two years from the start of making, eleven from completion, with most of the field standing from the first campaign. Form: whole and legible, the plan carried entire since 2015. Presence: little known abroad for the years the work stood unfinished in a depopulated valley, wide in images over the last decade; fame is presence, not proof, and earns little here. Fabric is charged: poured concrete in the open, under Sicilian sun and on a seismic slope, is a material that cracks and stains and must be repaired, and the state of the surface and the extent of repair are not settled here. The figure stands below what the age of the first campaign alone would give, for the youth of the completion and the charge on fabric.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-four years, on form, presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as issued, in print since release. Presence is continuous but narrower than wide: the record is heard whole by listeners of its kind and is placed high when its decade is counted, but none of its songs holds the broadcast presence of the most played records of its year, and the band’s later career carries part of its presence; popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric is little fixed to 2002 in its production, but its closeness to its models fixes it to a revival moment, and the axis charges that as a surface tied to its time.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty years, 2006 to 2026. The film survives whole: one cut, no lost or altered version, in continuous circulation in cinemas, on home video and streaming, and in schools and the study of genre and of Spanish memory. Its presence is wide. Twenty years is a short span beside the centuries behind the oldest works on the desk, and even the widest presence at that span earns no more than a tenth above this figure. The surface charge is small and real: the practical creatures, the Faun and the Pale Man, have aged well, but the digital work of 2006, the fairies, the mandrake’s movement and some composites, shows its date, and that takes the tenth.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over a span of about nineteen years. The form survives whole: tower, door, passage, burnt interior, opening, lead floor and glass stoppers stand as built. The use has been continuous: the chapel is consecrated and visited daily, as a chapel and a place of pilgrimage, though its visitors are more often pilgrims of architecture than devout ones, and the crowds have been a burden on the site. The fabric is concrete and lead, durable, but open to the weather by design, and the charred surface and cast floor are not yet proven over a long span. Presence is wide, which earns at most a tenth. The form and use are whole; the span is short, and the openness to rain is an untested condition of the fabric.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over nineteen years. It has outlived the blog-era indie scene it entered, the CD it was issued on and the war it shadows, and it is still played whole, still placed among the best albums of its decade and still the band’s measure. Its production has aged well, avoiding the bright, compressed sound of its moment: acoustic drums, real strings and horns, a voice recorded close and plain. The surface fixed to its moment is real and light: the Bush years under Fake Empire and Start a War, and the professional Brooklyn of the late 2000s, heard now as a period. The span is short.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over nineteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print on vinyl and CD and in streaming. Presence is continuous and has grown since release: the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted and heard whole by a wide listenership for an underground record, but its presence is far narrower than a popular album’s, and no track has passed into common circulation. The fabric is the interesting case. Made to sound worn, the record has little surface left to date, though its 2-step rhythms and R&B voices are of their years and are heard as such.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over twenty-one years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, in print continuously, translated widely and taught. Presence is wide, but a large part of it is the film’s: readers come to the book through the Coens, and fame lent by an adaptation is presence, not proof. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the border of 1980 and the drug wars as seen from 2005, and Bell’s lament for the young, though the core of the book, a man meeting what he cannot meet, has no date. The axis stands a tenth below the widest mark for its span because the presence is borrowed in part from another work, and two decades demonstrate far less than the centuries behind the summit.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is demonstrated over forty-four years. The text survives whole, as published, with nothing lost and nothing in its fabric to charge. Presence is where it is charged: the book lives among readers of DeLillo and in the criticism, and its standing among them has risen, but it is read far less widely than the most widely read novels of its age, and much of its presence comes through its author’s later reputation. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the expatriate world of Athens in the late 1970s, telex and airport, the political risk of that decade’s regimes; it has worn better than it might, since the matter reads as forecast after 2001. Two charges, presence and a partly dated surface, hold the axis two tenths under the bar, and four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twenty-two years. The form survives whole, altered in nothing, and does not yet read as a period piece. The use has been continuous and intensive since December 2004, as the crossing of a national route, and unchanged in kind. The fabric stands as built: nothing of it has been lost, replaced or rebuilt. Its presence is very wide, and presence earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age. Twenty-two years of survival sit well below the fifty-year band, and the bridge is tied to a technology and a mode of travel, the motorway and the car, that it has not yet outlived. A long life ahead is a prediction, and prediction is not demonstration.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across eighteen years. The film as released survives whole: one theatrical cut, made and kept as digital data, nothing lost and nothing altered. Presence across those years is of the widest kind for a film of its decade: continuous release on home video, television and streaming, teaching in animation and in sound design, and a figure known well beyond cinema. Box office and fame are presence only, and are not proof. The fabric is computer imaging of 2008, a technology that dates. The film’s choice of worn, tactile, lensed surfaces has aged better than most of its contemporaries, but the human figures are already of their moment, and that keeps the axis below the bar. Eighteen years of the widest presence sets it where it stands; more time is what the axis waits for.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirty-five years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole and has been in print throughout. Its presence is continuous but narrow: it is read as one of DeLillo’s novels, taught in courses on him and on fiction after 2001, and less read beyond them than White Noise, Libra or Underworld. Its surface is fixed to its moment more than most books of its age: the Beirut hostages, the cult weddings, the fatwa, the photograph and the fax. Against that, its theme was found more pertinent after 2001 than in 1991. Both charges stand, the narrow presence and the topical surface, and they hold it a tenth below Time’s Arrow and Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and level with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over nineteen years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print since its appearance. Presence is real but not wide: the book is read and named among the major American novels of its decade, its prize keeps it in view, and its author’s death in 2017 renewed attention to all his work; it is less taught and less read than Jesus’ Son, and much less than the war novels it follows. Its surface is not fixed to the moment of its writing: it is a historical novel, and its period is its matter, not an accident of date. Nineteen years demonstrate little beside the centuries behind the summit, and the figure sits at the lower end of the usual for its span.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, each loss in proportion to what it takes. The form survives whole: the grid, the stelae, the ground and the rooms are as built, and the governing idea is as legible as in May 2005. The use is continuous and heavy: open day and night since the inauguration, a fixed point of the capital’s civic life, its ceremonies and its quarrels; it has outlived the arguments that nearly prevented it, though not their surface, which is part of its use. The fabric is charged: within a few years of completion cracking appeared in a large share of the stelae, requiring survey, monitoring and the reinforcement of some, a failure of the first builders’ material and weighed here. Twenty-one years is a short record of survival; the memorial’s wide presence earns a tenth, and the cracking takes it back.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over forty-nine years. Presence is as wide as any film’s: continuous exhibition and reissue, television and home video in every format, a place in the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989, and in common speech. The charge falls on form. Since 1997 the theatrical release has been replaced in authorised circulation by altered versions: added and changed shots, new computer-made creatures in Mos Eisley, a restored scene with Jabba, and Greedo made to fire at Han first, which changes the film’s rogue at his introduction. The film of 1977 survives legibly, in prints and in unofficial restorations, and the changes take small shares of its running time; but its circulation as released is suppressed, and that holds the axis below the bar. The fabric, its effects, reads as period and holds.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole, as made, nothing lost or replaced. Presence: continuous and very wide, in a working cathedral that is among the most visited buildings in Germany, where the window is a fixed part of every visit to the south transept; fame is presence and not proof, and lifts the figure only so far. Fabric: mouth-blown glass in a building with a permanent works yard that has kept its glass for centuries, the smallest charge. Against it, a surface that could read as fixed to its moment, the pixel idiom of the 2000s, and only nineteen years of demonstrated survival. The figure is the one nineteen years allows, and not a forecast lifted by fame.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over twenty-one years. The form survives whole and legible as built in 2005, unaltered in any way recorded here. The use has been continuous since the opening, as a concert house with a full programme, and the building has become the identity of the institution that bears its name. The fabric appears to have held, though the record of its maintenance, of the glass and of the weathering of the white concrete is thin, and that thinness is weighed. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is of two decades, where the figures for buildings so young lie below 8.5, and its surface is of its moment, the iconic object of the years after Bilbao, not yet outlived.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole: envelope, foyers, garden, auditorium and organ are Gehry’s and in place, and the steel does not yet read as a period piece, though its manner is the signature of its decade. The use has been continuous and intensive since October 2003, as the home of an orchestra whose identity is now bound to the building. The fabric has held, with one early correction: the polished panels at the Founders Room, which threw focused sun and heat onto neighbours and street, were dulled by sanding in 2005, a small loss made to remedy a flaw. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is of twenty-three years, and the surface is tied to a moment of technology and taste not yet outlived.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty years, on what has been shown. The book survives whole, as published. It has stayed in print, reissued and kept in view as its author’s standing rose, and its title story is anthologised and taught; but its presence is a first book’s, narrower than a novel’s, and owes much to the later books. Its surface is in part a topical satire, the downsized workplace and the theme parks of the 1990s, which is the surface the axis penalises. The charge is lightened because the satire has outlived its occasion and is read now as forecast, not as period. Three decades demonstrate less than centuries, and the narrower presence and the topical surface are both charged.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-three years. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, in continuous print, its order and double titles intact. Presence is wide but second-order. There There and 2 + 2 = 5 are heard and played; the album as a whole less, often held the middle child of the band’s catalogue, and popularity is presence, not proof. The fabric bears its year twice. The title and the frame of the war and the terror alerts are topical satire of 2003, lightened because the songs rarely name their moment; and the laptop textures of Backdrifts and The Gloaming are of their time. With both charges it stands level with Turn On the Bright Lights, of the year before, a tenth below In Rainbows, whose presence is wider, and below Fight Club, the novel, at 8.4 after thirty years.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is wholly intact: the album survives as released, in print and streamed. Presence is steady but not the widest: Slow Hands and Evil remain in circulation and in the band’s live sets, and the record is heard as an album, but it is the lesser heard of the band’s first two. The fabric is in part fixed to its moment: the clean, compressed production and the period’s revival style date it to the middle of the 2000s more plainly than the murk of the first record dates that one. The axis charges a surface tied to its time and a presence below the widest.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty years and nine months, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has stayed in print. Presence in Britain is wide and continuous: Dancefloor, Mardy Bum and A Certain Romance are still played on radio, in clubs and by the band, and the record is heard whole by listeners born after it. That places it at the top of the step for its span. Two charges hold it there: a surface fixed by design to its moment, the ringtones, tracksuits and town of the mid-2000s, though it has begun to be heard as record rather than as dated; and a presence wider in Britain than beyond.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole and legible: the recording survives as released and has been reissued, and nothing of the work is lost. Presence is continuous but narrow. The record has stayed in print and in listening, sustained more by the later fame of M83 than by its own reach, and its public is devoted rather than wide; that narrowness holds the figure below what the span alone would give. The fabric carries its moment: the synthesiser timbres and heavy compression of the home studio of the early 2000s are audible as such, and the cinematic epic manner has since become common, so that parts of the record sound like the anticipation of a later cliché. That is not charged heavily: the form and the feeling have outlasted the timbres.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has remained in print and streamed. Presence is real but bounded. The record is heard and its opening track widely used, but its presence is narrower than that of the band’s first album, and it is held as a strong album in a long catalogue more than as a record heard on its own account. The fabric is light on its moment: guitars, piano, drums and keyboards recorded plainly, with no production signature fixed to 2006, and the dynamic language has aged little. The narrow presence sets the figure at the lower end of what twenty years of whole survival earn.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, legible and unchanged across its versions, complete in its authorised prints and canvases. Presence: twenty-four years, and as wide a presence as any British image of its century; but fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence, and the widest presence earns little beyond the span. Fabric: the work began as a painting on a wall in a place, and the first wall is not known to stand; one celebrated canvas was half destroyed by design and became another work. For a stencil made to be repeated, losing the first wall takes less than it would from a painting, but the stair and its words were part of what the image first meant. A tenth or two is charged for them, and for a sentiment tied to its decade.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Scored, by the convention this page has kept for an unpublished work, at the ceiling for predicted survival; demonstrated survival outranks it, and none can yet be shown. The interior durability is strong. Administrative euphemism does not date; the shift of register is a formal act, not a topical one; muteness, the file and the deprecated child are permanent conditions; the political proposition at the close, that legitimacy rests on recording the exception truthfully rather than on having none, is slow-ageing material. The surface carries more of its moment than before: the brand satire of tickers, consoles and an ancestral voice module, and an office tower brought down with a hundred and seven dead in the September of 2001, a shadow the book never names and a reader will not miss. The figure stands at the ceiling.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifteen years, and the span itself is the limit: the axis credits survival shown, not foreseen. What is shown is steady: continued exhibition, a critical edition, and a second, longer version issued in 2018 because the film was still wanted. The subjects, a child’s death, a father and a son, the question put to God, do not date, but that is promise, not demonstration. The childhood is set in a past already, and the creation’s practical photography carries no date. The costs are two: the digital dinosaurs, fixed to the effects of their year, and adult Jack’s glass towers, the architecture of 2010. It stands a tenth above The National’s High Violet, a year older, on the presence the second version shows, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Each film survives whole as released. Presence has been continuous since each release: in circulation, as a common reference among film-goers, and in the teaching of screenwriting and performance. The span is split across the parts: thirty-one years for the first film, twenty-two for the second, thirteen for the third. Weighted by running time, that span would carry a little more than the figure; the work as one work has existed only since 2013, and its last term has the shortest demonstration, so survival is credited a tenth below the weighted mean. The surface is lightly fixed to its moments, the absent phones of 1995 and the laptops of 2013, but that dating is part of the design.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Seventeen years since publication, between the step for thirteen to sixteen years and the step for about nineteen to twenty two. Form: the text is whole as published in 2009, and the two later volumes are neither credited nor charged to it. Presence is wide: two Booker Prizes in the trilogy, the stage and television adaptations, continuous print, teaching and translation into many languages; and wide presence earns at most a tenth above the step. Fabric: the subject is five centuries old, and the style does not date by technology or topical satire, which argues for durability; but durability forecast is not survival shown. Below The Road, three years older, at 8.4.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Predicted survival only, by the convention the desk applies to an unpublished work: demonstrated survival outranks prediction, and a manuscript has demonstrated nothing. The interior signs are as good as any on the bench. Nothing turns on a technology or a politics; the period markers, a Lévesque victory on a kitchen radio, an FLQ clipping in a clear sleeve, a C.A.O. screen and a Rothsay truck, are handled as dated furniture in a book that is itself a chronicle, so they place it rather than fix it. A father taking a knife back from his son, a dog buried correctly by a man who cannot say why the correctness matters: none of it dates. The mark stands at the ceiling the desk allows a work that has had no decade in which to survive.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print on vinyl and CD and in streaming. Presence is continuous but not wide: the record is heard as an album by those who know the band and placed in the lists of its decade, but it has nothing like the broadcast and public presence of Dummy, and no track has passed into common circulation. The fabric is little fixed to 2008. The record avoided the production fashions of its year, and the analogue palette it chose was already old, so it dates less than most records of its decade. The narrowness of its presence is what holds the figure.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Fifty-seven years, and more than fabric is charged. The latex has yellowed, darkened and stiffened, and the translucency and pallor that carried the work’s light are much reduced: that is a loss of the work’s defining appearance, of form and not only of material, and it continues. Presence is charged as well: the work is shown with care and within limits, travels little if at all, and its future display is uncertain. What survives whole is the structure, the eight sheets, their hanging and their serial order, and the record in photographs and in Hesse’s own words. The decay was foreseen and in a sense belongs to the title, which lightens the charge on meaning but does not prove survival. The figure is set below what the span alone would give, and held loosely.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seventeen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record survives as released, in print and streamed, and its sequence is heard as one. Presence is strong within its field: it is widely held to be the band’s best record, it was played complete on tour, and it has been reissued; its reach beyond metal is narrower. The fabric is little fixed to its year. The production is clean, the playing is by hand, and the record’s models are of the 1970s, so it has not dated as the period’s heavily processed metal has. It stands level with Third at 8.2, above m b v at 8.0 for its longer span, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The work was completed in 2005, twenty-one years ago, its first issue twenty-seven years back, and survival over about twenty years carries the axis to 8.3 or 8.4 before any charge. The form survives whole, as published, in print in the collections and the Absolute editions; the fabric takes no charge. Presence is charged. It is continuous but narrow: read among readers of comics and of the occult, much less across the culture than the most widely read comics of its decades, and owing part of its presence to its author’s name. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, in the millennial temper of the end-of-the-world plot and in the imprint’s science-hero scenery, which reads now as the furniture of a line that has not lasted as the work has. The charge on presence sets it a tenth below the figure its span would give.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form stands whole as built, with no significant alteration on record. The use has been continuous: the building has served as Ningbo’s history museum since it opened. The fabric is a material of salvage, laid by hand in irregular courses, and its durability is a question only time will answer; no failure is on record. The span is about eighteen years, and the figure follows from it. The wide presence of a Pritzker laureate’s building is set against the unproven fabric, and neither moves the figure. The surface is tied to no passing technology, which helps; the manner, a recognisable signature of its decade in Chinese building, has not yet been outlived.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric. The form is whole and legible as built in 2008: roof, foyer, wall and halls in place and Snøhetta’s, not yet a period piece, though its white planes are of their decade. The use has been continuous and intensive since April 2008 in both its purposes, opera and ballet within and the public on the roof outside, and the roof’s public use is, if anything, its strongest survival. The fabric is the weak point. Some of the marble that carries the idea is reported to have cracked or stained and been replaced in kind, to an extent not established: a small charge, since replacement in kind keeps the form. The span, about eighteen and a half years, with a presence wide but not of the widest and that charge on the stone, sets the figure; the survival shown is short.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twenty-two years, where the figures for buildings under fifty years lie below 8.5. The form is whole and legible: the platforms, the spiral, the skin and the open floors stand as built. The use has been continuous in its own purpose since 2004, heavily, broken only by the closures of 2020 and 2021 shared by every library. The fabric holds, and the raw interior finishes wear visibly. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is of two decades, and the building’s look is bound to the early 2000s, its graphics and fittings already dating. Fame is presence and lends at most a tenth.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twenty-three years. The form survives whole: diagrid, skin, spirals, lens and plaza are as built, and the figure has outlived the boom and the client that made it, now the emblem of the City in images of London. The use survives, changed in kind: offices without a break, but no longer one owner’s headquarters, sold, fallen into receivership and bought again within eleven years, and the top room private for most of its life. The fabric has held. Presence is very wide and earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is short, and the surface belongs to a moment of taste and technology not yet outlived.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print since release, remastered and reissued in anniversary editions that leave the ten tracks intact. Presence is continuous and wide within its kind: the record is still bought, streamed and heard whole, its tracks played in clubs and on radio, its lines quoted in common speech and in later records. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment: the sampler and drum machine of 1993, the muffled low end of the mix, and the crack era and its weapons date the surface, and that surface has become the classic sound of its kind, a survival as the emblem of a period as much as past it. Form whole, presence wide but bounded by its kind, fabric dated: that holds the figure below the bar.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over nineteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and streamed, heard as an album. Presence is real: three of its songs remain in the band’s sets and in wider use, and the record is commonly listed among the albums of its decade; popularity is presence, not proof. It is narrower than the presence of Funeral, in whose shadow it is mostly heard, and the band’s mixed later standing does not lift it. The surface is charged: the record is fixed to the Bush years, to the Iraq war and to the televangelist and celebrity media of the mid 2000s, and Windowsill and Intervention are plainly of their moment, though the apparatus they describe has not gone away.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, is in print and widely streamed, and is heard as an album. Presence is wide for a record of its kind: “White Winter Hymnal” is one of the best-known songs of its decade’s indie music, and the album is a fixture on lists of the 2000s. The surface is fixed to its moment in two respects: the large reverberation on the voices is a production manner of the late 2000s, since widely imitated and so worn, and the pastoral image of the band became for a time the emblem of a fashion. The songs themselves, built on older idioms, have dated less than their dress.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one object, whole as made, the original teeth in place; nothing is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: nineteen years, famous worldwide and shown in public at intervals, but kept for most of its life in private keeping and seen by most people only in reproduction; fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence. Fabric: as durable as a sculpture can be made, platinum and diamond. Held a tenth below what the span alone would give, for a surface fixed to its moment: the argument is bound to its price and to the market of 2007, and as those recede the object must stand without its event, which it has not yet shown it can. The fabric weighs least and does not offset the charge.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: one release version, complete, on every format. Presence is wide: a Best Picture winner, shown and streamed continuously, taught in courses on globalisation and on Indian cinema, its song and its dance still in use. Eighteen years is short evidence, and the figure is set by it, with a breadth of presence that would carry it a little further. What holds it there is the surface: the look of small digital cameras of 2007 and 2008, a game show format fixed to its decade, a Mumbai of that moment, and a reputation that has cooled as the argument over its view of poverty has grown. Box office and prizes are presence, not proof.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighteen years. Form: whole. The image exists in very many prints and in the collage from which it was drawn, held in a national collection; no single loss could take it. Presence: continuous and about as wide as any image of its decade, through the campaign, the Portrait Gallery, the lawsuit, the template and the parodies; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: offset prints fade and stickers perish, but the editions and the collage carry the image. The charge that holds it below the usual figure for its span is the rubric’s own, a surface fixed to its moment: a campaign poster for one election, its word a slogan, which has outlived the hope it named only as the document of it.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nearly twenty-seven years. The form is whole: island, bridge, sail, mast, helipad and cantilevered restaurant stand as built, and the terrace added about 2017, part of the one work, changes little of the figure. The use survives as designed, a luxury hotel in continuous operation since 1999, its purpose the same. It has outlived the moment that produced it, the Dubai of the 1990s, and survives as the emblem of that moment rather than as a model still answered. No loss of fabric is weighed against it, and any refreshing of the interiors makes good rather than takes away. Its presence is among the widest of any building of its age, the city’s sign carried on its licence plates, and presence earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age: under thirty years is a short span, placed below what fifty earns.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, over thirty years. The form is whole: both towers, the river front and the mesh crown stand as built. It has outlived the moment and the client that produced it, the insurer having sold it, and it survives as the emblem of that moment rather than as a model still answered. The use survives and has changed: offices in continuous use, part of the building turned to a hotel, a gallery and a rooftop restaurant opened to the public, so that the building is more entered now than when it was finished. Its presence is the widest a recent building in Central Europe can have, and presence earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age: thirty years is a short span of survival, and the figure is placed below what longer survival earns.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Fourteen years, and survival can be weighed only on what fourteen years show, which against centuries is little; that holds the axis among the film’s lowest. The form survives whole: one release version, photographed photochemically, mostly on 65mm, so that the negative is a better source than most films of its year possess, and nothing is lost. Presence is continuous, in repertory and 70mm revivals, on home video and streaming, in criticism and teaching, but chiefly among the art-house public rather than the wide one, and it earns nothing more. The surface is little fixed to its moment: a period reconstruction of the late 1940s, made on film stock, with nothing in it to date it to 2012 except perhaps the style of its performances.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and is heard as an album. Presence is continuous and wide: streamed, broadcast, and placed high whenever its decade is counted, with Runaway and Power lasting as songs; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The charge on presence is real. The maker’s public conduct since about 2018, and above all his antisemitic statements of 2022, have withdrawn some institutions and listeners from his work, and the record’s reception carries that charge. The fabric is little fixed to 2010, though its Auto-Tune and some guest verses date. It stands below every record of longer survival.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over thirteen years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout; nothing in its fabric is charged. Presence is continuous and, for a story collection, wide: it is taught, anthologised in part and translated, and its stories travel separately. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the brand names, the gadgets and the consumer idiom of the first decade of the century, which is the book’s matter and also its date. Against that, its satire of administered consciousness and of persons made into products has read more pertinently since publication, not less. Wide presence and nothing lost place it at the top of what its span allows; thirteen years demonstrate little, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fourteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released and has stayed in print and on every streaming service. Presence is continuous and wide for its age: Thinkin Bout You and Bad Religion are still heard far beyond critics, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is mostly unfixed: warm keyboards and guitar in a 1970s idiom date slowly. Some surface is of 2012, the brand names of a rich kid’s afternoon and a few production textures. Fourteen years is the whole of the evidence; the width of the presence is what lifts the figure as far as it goes, and the span is what holds it.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifteen years, on what has been shown: form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as published, in print since 2011, and nothing in its form or fabric is charged. Presence is better than usual for a novella of its age: it is taught and translated, read on since Johnson’s death in 2017, and carried further by the film of 2025. Its text had an earlier life in The Paris Review, from 2002, which shows it read before the book but does not lengthen the book’s span. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: it is set in a past already gone when it was written, and nothing in it dates with 2011. Presence above the usual for the span earns the figure and no more: fifteen years demonstrate little, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Fifteen years since publication in 2011. The text is whole and stable, as Edizioni e/o published it. Presence is very wide: continuous reading, teaching and translation, and adaptation, which earns a tenth above the usual figure for a modern book of its age. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: it is a period novel of the 1950s written in 2011, and such a book dates slowly, since its era is already past when it is written. No more can be claimed. Fifteen years show presence; they cannot show the survival that decades and centuries demonstrate, and the axis stands a tenth above the foot of the eights.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eighteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released. Presence is real and narrow: the record is streamed and kept in print, In the New Year is the band’s best-known song after The Rat, and the album has a place in retrospective accounts of its decade’s guitar music; but it is a cult record, heard by a devoted following more than by a public, and the band went on hiatus in 2013, so no active career has kept it in view. That narrowness is charged. The fabric is little fixed to 2008: the production avoids the sounds of its year and draws on older records, and it has not dated as much of its decade has.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, nothing lost and no altered version replacing it. Presence across seventeen years is continuous, in home video, streaming, festival and repertory screenings and family viewing, with the puppets and sets exhibited. That presence is steady rather than the widest a film of its year has: the box office was modest, and the audience grew after release. The surface ages little; the handmade image does not date as the computer animation of its year has begun to, though the soundtrack and the voice casting belong to their moment. Seventeen years is a short demonstration, and steady presence sets the figure at the lower end of what that span allows.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order. The form is whole as built: nothing lost, replaced or rebuilt. The use has been continuous since January 2010, for every purpose the tower was built for, through a debt crisis, a renaming and a pandemic. The fabric, concrete, steel and glass, is in service on a hot, saline and windy site. But the span is sixteen years, and demonstrated survival is short; a presence as wide as any building can have earns a little. The surface is fixed to its moment: much of what the tower is, is its record, and a record is a technology and a date. When a taller building is finished the tower will have to stand as a form without its title, which it has not yet had to show it can.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on what has been shown. The record survives whole, and the expanded edition of the same year added to it without displacing it. Sixteen years of presence follow: its songs stood at the centre of the band’s concerts through the following decade, its closing hymn is sung back by crowds, and one song carried a six-hour work of art. The fabric is intact. What it has not yet shown is survival past the conditions that produced it: the debt of the recession and the comfortable dread of 2010 are still close, and the dense, compressed production belongs to its years, with Terrible Love’s murk a date stamp.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together, at eighteen years. The form survives whole: shell, roof, bowl and plinth stand as built in 2008, and the weave does not yet read as a period piece, though it is tied to a moment of the iconic building. The use survived with a gap. After the Games the stadium had no resident club, and for years it lived on tours, concerts and occasional events; the World Athletics Championships of 2015 and the ceremonies of the Winter Games of 2022 restored it to its purpose at the highest level, a real if intermittent survival of use. The fabric has held, the temporary seats removed as planned and the building renewed before 2022. Its presence is among the widest of any building of its age, and presence earns little. What holds the axis is the age itself, and the thinness of ordinary use.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Fourteen years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, is in print, and was reissued at ten years. Presence is wide for its span: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards and Elephant remain widely heard, and the record is a fixed point of its decade’s listening, which places it at the head of its row. The surface fixed to its moment counts against it: the loudness of the master belongs to the late years of the loudness war and is already heard by some as a period mark, and a retro idiom risks dating twice. Survival over decades is not yet shown. It stands two tenths above Halcyon Digest, at 7.9, on wider presence.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over twenty-three years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole as published and has stayed in print. Its presence has widened, carried by its rereading after 2008 and by the film, and it lies within DeLillo’s readership and the academy more than across the culture. The charge falls on the surface, which the axis names: a surface fixed to a technology and a moment, hand-held devices and screens, the valuations of the boom, the yen trade, the year 2000. DeLillo set the book at the end of the boom by design, and the design makes it historical; that it became prophetic is a reason it is read, not a reason its surface has not dated. Two decades demonstrate less than centuries, and the dated surface is charged.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over thirty-three years, a short span that is placed below what longer survival earns. The form survives whole: the hall, the sliding roof, the minaret, the platform and the ornament stand as built, and the building has outlived its patron, who died in 1999. The use is continuous: prayer since 1993, with the great gatherings on the feasts, and visiting by those of other faiths on guided tours, unusual for a working mosque in Morocco, so that the building is both entered for its purpose and seen. The fabric is the doubt: corrosion of concrete and steel in the sea air, and substantial repair within its first decades, are reported, to an extent not established here, and a building that needed such care so young has shown its endurance in question rather than in proof. Its presence is wide, and presence earns at most a tenth.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric, in that order, over sixteen years. The form survives whole: the three towers and the SkyPark stand as built. The use has been continuous and intensive since 2010, the hotel in service and the SkyPark in daily use by guests and by the public on its deck. The fabric has held without a known failure. Presence is among the widest of any building of its century, the image of a nation, and presence earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age and moment: sixteen years show little, and the surface is tied to the resort economy and the spectacle architecture of the 2000s, neither yet outlived. Form whole, use unbroken, fabric sound and the widest presence carry it to the foot of the 8s, and no higher.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
The highest of the twelve. Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nineteen years. The form survives whole and as built; nothing of note has been lost or altered. The use has been continuous and of the most durable kind a building can have: the five prayers, Friday and the Eids, with a founder’s tomb that binds the state to its upkeep. The fabric is new and of durable material, marble on concrete, in a hard climate of heat and salt. Its presence is among the widest of any recent building in the region, and presence earns at most a tenth. What holds the axis is age: nineteen years is a short span of survival, and a surface of gilding, crystal and coloured light is tied to a moment of Gulf taste not yet outlived. The odds of lasting are excellent; the survival shown is short.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over fifteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released, in print on every format. Presence is continuous but chiefly among critics and listeners already close to Harvey’s work; the record is placed high when its decade is counted and is heard whole, but no one song has passed into wide use. The fabric is little fixed to its year: autoharp, a church room, light drums and brass carry almost no sign of 2011, and the subject, a war a century old, was history when it was sung; the present wars it shadows are left implicit, which protects it. Fifteen years is the whole of the evidence, and the narrowness of the presence holds this axis at the record’s lowest figure; the clean fabric keeps it from falling lower.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over eleven years and seven months, on what can be shown. The form is whole: the album as released is still the record sold. Presence is wide and continuous for its age, in sale and streaming, in Alright as a song still sung in protest, and in the record’s place whenever its decade is counted; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is little fixed to 2015: live players and older samples rather than the period’s production signatures, though the politics of 2014 and 2015 give its words a moment. What holds this lowest of the twelve is time itself, and a charge: eleven years is a short span, and a share of the presence travels with its maker’s later standing. Far below what has lasted a century.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across fourteen years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, born digital, with nothing lost or replaced. Its presence has been continuous since 2012, in repertory, on home video and streaming and in teaching, wide for an art film of its year though not of the widest kind. The digital image is of its moment and the film is about that moment, so its surface ages as subject rather than as fashion; but a film whose argument is the shrinking of cameras is fixed in part to a technical transition already passed, a small charge. Fourteen years is a short demonstration, and survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Predicted, not demonstrated, and held conservative on the bench’s convention for a work not yet published. The mechanism will not age, because it is a claim about communities rather than technologies: total accounting and total deniability arrive together, and the accurate record is kept by the person nobody consults. Most of the surface is held to the generic, the cameras, the feed, the shared sheet, the thread, a website that needs no account, and almost nothing carries a brand. What dates is visible and chosen: the screenshot Mrs. Donnelly deletes in a utility closet, the vape pen in Mr. Henson’s shirt pocket, the chat’s lol, a dating profile, one Zoom face. Demonstrated survival outranks predicted survival, and survival takes time the work has not had. The mark is the calendar, re-scorable on elapsed time alone.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixteen years and two months, on what can be shown. The form is whole: the album as released is still the record sold. Presence has been continuous but narrower than its reception at release forecast: the record is still sold and played, its title song and Sprawl II above all, but it is heard less than the band’s first album, and much of its presence is as a record of its year. The fabric is little fixed to 2010 in its instruments, a rock band with strings and piano, though its argument about the internet and its modern kids belong to their decade. What holds this lowest of the twelve is that narrower presence over a short span. Far below anything that has lasted a century.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Little here depends on a period, and more depends on a price. The apparatus is unnamed and undated, with no brands and no named platforms, and the domestic half is built from incubators, laundromats, kitchens, a produce floor and hospital corridors, none of which date. Against that the surface carries calendars that place Hold blocks, dashboards, view-only access, twenty-two dollars a day to park, two dollars for thirty minutes of dryer and nine hundred in rent. The core will hold; the figures are the surface the years will reach first. Following the convention this page applies to an unpublished work, the mark reads interior signs only: demonstrated survival outranks predicted survival, and this work has had no time in which to demonstrate anything.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixteen years. The film survives whole, in a single cut, with no loss or altered version. Its presence is continuous: festivals, retrospectives, home release in several territories and teaching, as one of the most discussed art films of its year; the Palme d’Or keeps it in view, which counts as presence and not as proof. Its surface is not fixed to 2010: a farm and a forest, manners borrowed from older cinemas, and one modern interior at the close. There is no charge on the fabric. Held at the step for sixteen years, and at its foot, because its presence, though steady, is that of a festival film rather than a wide one.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirteen years from the first showing in 2013. Form: the film survives whole as released, with nothing lost and nothing replaced. Presence: continuous but not of the widest kind, in repertory screenings, on home video and streaming, in steady teaching, and in a critical standing that has risen since release. Fabric: the digital image is of its making, and the streets, phones and clothes of Glasgow in 2012 will date as surface, though the film’s abstraction protects much of it. Survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and thirteen years demonstrate only a little; a presence that is narrow rather than wide holds the axis at the figure.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Sixteen years old, and survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across that span. The form survives whole: one version, no loss. Presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory and festival screenings, home video and streaming, the teaching of screenwriting, and a few lines in common reference. The surface is charged: the film is fixed to a technology, a company and a living man, the very surface the axis penalises. Against the charge, it is set in 2003 to 2005 and was made as period, and the company’s later history has kept it current rather than dated it; but currency of that kind depends on the company and would pass with it. The figure stands at the foot of what sixteen years can show, because part of the film’s present is borrowed from the news.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on fourteen years. The form survives whole: the recording as issued, with nothing lost. Presence has been continuous, in print and in concert, as the record that began the band’s second period, and it is held as the band’s return rather than its first statement. Its fabric is fixed to no technology of its year; a live ensemble of guitars, drums and violin carries little period sound. The surface fixed to its moment is the titles, a general named before his conviction and a strike of 2012. What holds the figure is the span itself: fourteen years, below works of recent decades that have held a wider public, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across fifteen years. The film as released survives whole, on home video and in digital release. Its presence is steady but not wide: it is taught, kept on home video and streaming, and named among the decade’s American films, but its circulation was small at release and has not become the widest kind. The surface ages little; the cars, the phones and the economy of 2010 and 2011 date it mildly, and the anxiety that followed 2008 is part of its meaning rather than a fixed surface. Fifteen years demonstrate far less than centuries, and the modest presence keeps the figure at the lower end of what that span allows.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over fourteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has stayed in print. Presence is real and continuing: Myth has remained among the band’s most heard songs, and the album is heard whole by listeners who come to the band. That earns the head of the row for its span and no more, since wide presence is worth at most a tenth and this presence is wide within its field. The fabric is lightly charged: the reverb and the slow swell are of their decade to the ear, though the organ and drum machine are less fixed to a year than the production of many records of 2012. The span itself holds the figure here.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over fifteen years. Form: the published text survives whole and in print, but its form is the editor’s, and a later edition added material, so the text itself is less settled than that of a book its author finished; that holds the figure at the foot of what fifteen years can show. Presence: continuous since 2011, translated, taught chiefly in courses on Wallace and on postmodern fiction, and read very largely as the sequel and coda to Infinite Jest; wide for a posthumous book, narrow beside its predecessor. Fabric: nothing to charge. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the tax code and the computerisation of 1985, though the book makes that fixity its subject. Fifteen years demonstrate far less than the decades and centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirteen years. The form is whole: the film survives in its one cut, and the shorter version its American distributor sought was not released as the film, so nothing has been lost or replaced. Presence has been continuous and wide for its kind: international release, home video and streaming, a television series that sent viewers back to it, and renewed attention after its director’s later success. Wide presence earns little, and fame is presence, not proof. The surface ages in places: some digital exteriors of the train and the frozen landscape already show their date, while the built and lit interiors hold. Thirteen years is a short span against centuries, and the dated exteriors keep the figure at the foot of what that span allows.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across fourteen years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, with no loss and no altered cut. Its presence is steady: home video, streaming and television, and a durable reputation as its director’s most popular film and as part of the story of its star’s change of direction. It is not presence of the widest kind; it is not taught or revived as the period’s landmark films are. The surface ages little: the river, the houseboats, the pickup trucks and the motel are near timeless in their setting, and the film’s period is the region’s, not fashion’s. Fourteen years demonstrate far less than centuries, and ordinary presence keeps the figure at the lower end of what that span allows.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirteen years. The form is whole and fully legible: the record exists as it was made, nothing of it is lost, and it has remained in print. The surface fixed to a moment is small and odd. The breakbeats of the last third are sounds of the mid 1990s, not of 2013, so the record was dated in one respect on arrival and in another never belonged to its year, and that has protected it. What holds the figure is the span itself, thirteen years, and a presence that is real but narrower than that of the band’s earlier work, below works of its decade with a wider public and far below what has lasted centuries.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirteen years. Form: whole and legible; the room is shown as made, and nothing of its defining plan is known to have changed. Presence: wide and continuous since 2015, in a museum built to hold it, among the most visited single works in its city; presence earns little, and fame is not proof. Fabric: charged. The work depends on a lighting technology and its control; the diodes, the drivers and the water are perishable and must be replaced, and the room that can still be shown is a room kept running. A surface fixed to a technology is a charge, and electric light of this kind is one, though the plan survives a change of diode as a fresco does not survive a change of plaster. Presence and fabric cancel, and the figure stands at the foot of what its span allows.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across fourteen years, a span too short to demonstrate much. The form keeps its governing idea, and nothing in the record shows it altered. The use has been continuous since 2012, in exhibitions, concerts and state events, but it is bound to the state cult of the man the building is named for, and its survival in that use depends on a regime rather than a public. The fabric, white composite panels in a windy, dusty coastal city, demands constant cleaning and care, and fourteen years is no test of a composite cladding. Wide presence earns little, since fame is not proof of permanence, and the surface is charged as fixed to its moment: the white parametric icon of the boom years of the 2000s is already read as period.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form survives whole as built: the bands, the atrium, the stairs, the roof and the cantilever stand as the office made them, and the barracks block remains in place. The use has been continuous since 2010, in its own purpose, as the national museum of contemporary art and architecture, and the building has outlasted a period of financial crisis in the institution that runs it. Nothing in the record shows the fabric failing, and none is supposed. What holds the axis is age. The survival shown is of sixteen years, too short to demonstrate much, and the surface is tied to a moment of technology and taste, the parametric fluidity of the 2000s, which it has not yet outlived.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over about fourteen years. The form survives whole: every plane, every fissure and the open tip as built, with nothing added or lost. The use survives and has grown: the offices let, the hotel and restaurants open, the gallery a fixed public destination, the residences the slowest part of the use to be taken up. Its presence is as wide as any recent building’s in Britain, and presence earns only a little. What holds the axis is age. Fourteen years is a short span of survival, and the glass surface is tied to a moment of technology and taste it has not yet outlived; this is survival predicted more than shown.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirteen years, and thirteen years cannot be scored as decades. Form: whole and fully legible; the record exists as released, in print, with nothing lost. Presence: continuous and real, its songs still in steady listening, but the span is short and the record’s presence sits inside the band’s, so presence adds nothing to the usual figure for its age. Surface fixed to a moment: small. The sound is warm and acoustic in timbre, bound to no production fashion, and it charges the record with no date stamp. The figure is the one its span allows, earned whole and without discount, and it will rise or fall only on what the coming decades show.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over forty-four years. The form is legible and whole in its governing idea: the new skin carries the colours, the order, the keystone and the garlands, and Portlandia kneels where she was set. The building has outlived the style that made it, as that style’s emblem rather than a model still answered. The use continues: city offices since 1982, broken by three years of closure. The fabric is charged. The original surfaces are entirely gone; the building leaked and failed early in its life, its structure needed strengthening, and the city weighed demolition before choosing to rebuild it at many times its first cost. That failure of the first fabric is charged here. A building that survived by being remade, its survival a decision rather than a fact.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over twelve years. The form is whole: shaft, podium, parapet and mast stand as completed, and the image has held its place as the skyline’s figure. The use has been continuous since November 2014, office tenancy and an observatory open to the public. No failure of the fabric is charged. Two charges are made. The span is short, and demonstrated survival is what the axis credits; presence, however wide, earns little. And part of the surface is fixed to its moment: a founding date as a height, a former name, a fortified base answering a particular threat. The tie to the attack will keep the tower in view, but that is the event’s survival, not yet the building’s.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over seven years. The form is whole. The album has outlived its occasion as news, its chief risk, and kept its standing as the peak of the band’s trilogy; Wild God (2024) returned to a fuller sound without displacing it. The surface is less fixed to its moment than most popular records: no topical vocabulary, no period drums, no dated guitar sound, and a subject that does not date. The fabric’s risk is untested, since synthesiser timbres carry their decade in the end. What holds the figure is the span itself: the axis credits survival shown, not foreseen, and seven years leaves the record below works of twice its age and far below what has lasted centuries.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ten years and nine months, on what can be shown. The form is whole: the recording as released is still the record sold. Presence has been wide and continuous for a record of its age, in sale and broadcast, in the stage musical, and as the last statement of an artist whose earlier work is everywhere. The fabric carries little of its year: a jazz band recorded clean, without the production signatures of 2016, though the drum-and-bass patterns place it in a lineage. Charged: part of that presence is the presence of the death and of the career, which is not proof that the record will be kept for itself. A decade is a short span, and the figure sits far below anything that has lasted a century.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Seven years, and survival can only be weighed on what seven years show, which against centuries is very little; that is what holds the axis lowest. The film survives whole as released. There is no loss of version, and the later black-and-white version is an addition to its life, not a repair. Presence is as wide as a film of its decade has had: worldwide release, the Palme d’Or and Best Picture, continuous circulation on home video and streaming, use in classrooms. Wide presence earns a little and is given. The surface is partly fixed to its moment: smartphones and group chats, Wi-Fi borrowed from a neighbour, a delivery-pizza franchise, a Taiwanese castella shop as a bubble that burst. The semi-basement, banjiha, reads as record rather than period.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one cut, shot on film, no lost or altered version. Presence across twelve years is continuous and, for an independent film, wide: home video, streaming, teaching, and a place in critics’ lists of the century so far. The surface is fixed to its moment in every frame, a Game Boy, a Wii, the 2008 campaign, Facebook in a teenager’s talk, but that is the record the film set out to make, and the period surface is its content rather than an accident of its making. What dates is the late talk about phones and social media, which ages as opinion, not as record. Twelve years is a short demonstration of survival.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Predicted survival only, as for every unpublished work on the bench: demonstrated survival outranks it, and there is none to weigh. The apparatus is contemporary and more present than before, credential terminals, highway cameras, a tablet, a reporting line with account numbers, and it will age at the surface. It will age slowly, because the log is written in fields that belong to no one platform, and much of the book’s equipment is already old: a dial telephone, a paper register, a furnace once fed with coal, a Plymouth kept under a cover. Beneath it the arrangement is permanent: a community that will not give the state its name, a woman who will not say what she knows, a trade handed from a dead father to a living son through a pair of gloves. The mark is held.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across ten years from 2016. Form: the film survives whole, in its only cut, digital in origin, with nothing lost or altered. Presence: wide for its age, in a theatrical release and a re-release after the Academy Awards, continuous availability on home video and streaming, teaching in film courses, and a standing that has held since release. Fabric: the surface of the third chapter is fixed to its moment, its phones and cars and the Atlanta trap music and dress of the mid-2010s, though the first two chapters are set earlier and read as period. Survival is credited for what a decade has shown, and a decade shows little; the prize is presence, not proof of permanence. The gate is not met.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released, in print and streamed. Presence is continuous but narrow: the record is known chiefly within indie listening and criticism, and no song has passed into wide use. The fabric is partly fixed to its moment: the reverb and tape haze, the treated drum machine and the blurred voice are a production signature shared by much indie music of 2008 to 2012, the surface this axis penalises, though the old song forms under it date slowly. Narrow presence and a period surface are what hold the figure under the usual step for its span.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over a span far short of fifty years. The form is whole: the loop stands complete as designed. The use has been continuous since about 2012 as the headquarters of China Central Television, the purpose it was built for; the public route through the building, part of that use, has not been shown to run as a regular route, and the doubt is charged. The fabric is sound after fourteen years; the fire next door is context and is not charged. A surface fixed to its moment is charged: the building is bound to the Olympic years, to the age of the iconic building and to one institution, and has stood since in official disfavour as a type. Wide presence earns at most a tenth, and it is taken.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The four canvases are kept together and unaltered, and the finished covered surface, which is what the work consists of, stands as the painter left it. Presence: continuous since 2014 and wide for so young a work, though fame is not proof of permanence. Fabric: oil on canvas, twelve years old, with no damage, restoration or replacement known. Twelve years is a short record, and the span sets the figure: with nothing charged, it stands at the top of what so short a record allows. One fact is noted and not charged: the work survives as this work, and not as four late abstractions, only while its title stays attached to it.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across thirteen years. Form: the film as released survives whole, one cut, nothing lost and nothing altered. Presence: continuous and wide for its span, on home release, television and streaming, and in common reference for space and for the long take. Two things hold it where it stands. The surface is fixed to a technology and its moment: the film was composed for 3D and IMAX 3D, presentations home viewing does not carry and that have receded from exhibition since, so the film most viewers now meet is a reduced form of the one released, and part of its astonishment is the astonishment of new effects, the surface that ages. And presence beyond its technique is narrower than its fame. Thirteen years is a short demonstration.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over thirteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, in print and streamed. Presence is real and narrowing: the title track, Afterlife and Here Comes the Night Time are still heard, but the album is played whole less than the band’s earlier work, and attention to the band’s catalogue has narrowed in later years. The fabric is fixed to its year in parts: the 2013 disco sound of its production and the costume campaign that launched it belong to their moment, though the hand-played percussion ages better. The span sits at the bottom of its row, and the charges on presence take it a tenth under that row’s usual figure: a tenth under m b v, at 8.0, of the same year.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across twelve years. The form survives whole: the theatrical release is complete and in circulation, and nothing is lost. Presence has been continuous and wide since 2014, in theatres, on home video and in streaming. The fabric charges a little. The recession, the cable anchor, the camera phones and the media apparatus of 2014 are the film’s subject and fix it to its moment, though its satire of televised true crime has so far grown more pertinent rather than less. Survival is credited for what elapsed time has shown, and twelve years show little. The span is short and the surface is topical by design, and the figure takes both.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over sixteen years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and remains available. Presence is real but narrow. The album is kept by the band’s listeners and by its critics, its songs are not in wide broadcast, and the band went on hiatus in 2013, after one further album, so that the record has had no continuing career of performance to sustain it. The fabric is less fixed to its moment than most records of 2010, because the sound it chose was already old-fashioned on arrival, and that protects it. On the desk’s survival scale sixteen years would stand at 8.0 or 8.1; the narrow presence is charged a tenth or two. It sits a tenth below m b v, at 8.0.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored, by the convention this page uses for an unpublished work, on interior signs, and marked by the calendar rather than by a verdict: demonstrated survival outranks predicted survival, and a manuscript has demonstrated none. The core is durable. Administrative euphemism and bureaucratic tenderness will not date, and the mechanism disclosed, malice laundered through procedure until no one did anything, is structural rather than topical. The surface is another matter. The opening and the dinner-party chapters are fixed to their moment in a density the later parts shed: smartHubs, a mohair Gucci suit, Louboutins, a second Michelin star, a VR company named for a video game, a candidate called Trudeau, a man explaining pickleball at a bus stop. The classical naming system will hold; the brands will not. Re-scorable on elapsed time alone.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across ten years. The film as released survives whole: there is one version, and none has replaced it. Its presence is continuous and wide for a film of its age, in cinemas, on home video, in broadcast and streaming circulation and in steady teaching use, though box office and nominations are presence, not proof of permanence. The surface dates mildly: the news screens, the military laptops and the geopolitics of 2016 are of their moment, while the grey light and the domestic scenes are not. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is elapsed time: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and ten years, with that surface charged a little, demonstrate little.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eleven years. The film as released survives whole, in its theatrical colour version, with nothing lost; the black-and-white edition issued in 2016 with the director’s approval stands beside it and replaces nothing. Presence has been continuous and of the widest kind: home video, television, streaming, repertory and anniversary screenings, and a place in teaching. The fabric carries a mild charge: a digital production whose heavy grading in orange and teal and whose composited skies and storm are marked by their decade. What holds the axis at the bottom of the twelve, level with The Encompassed, is elapsed time: eleven years demonstrate survival only a little, however wide the presence.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
One principle: survival of what makes the work, here the painted image across four halls. Whole fields are gone in every hall, bare rock or ground where painting was, in a proportion that cannot be fixed, and much of what remains is abraded, flaked or darkened. But the parts that carry the meaning come through: the layout of each programme, the figural style and the great single figures, Padmapani and Sundari among them. The record knows no outside viewer from the abandonment until 1819; the halls have been in view since. The ground is earth and vegetable matter behind a skin of lime, on a damp scarp, under the breath and lights of visitors. The rock and the sculpture survive whole; the painting survives in part, and in its best fields superbly.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across eight years. The film survives whole in its one version, with nothing lost and nothing altered. Its presence has been wide: a global streaming release, festival and cinema runs, prizes, teaching and continuing reference, though wide presence earns little on its own and fame is not permanence. The surface is set in 1970 and 1971 and dressed as memory, so little dates it to 2018. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Bottomless Well, is elapsed time, eight years of survival predicted rather than shown, and a presence that depends largely on one platform’s catalogue, with a large-format image few viewers have seen in the conditions it was made for.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Its presence over nine years is continuous, in repertory screenings and steady discussion, wide for an art film, though wide presence earns little on its own. There is no charge on the fabric. The surface is fixed to a period, the 1950s, but as setting rather than as the film’s own moment, and that dates less than a contemporary surface would. Part of its present standing is bound to its star’s retirement, announced at release, which is a circumstance and not the work, and is not weighed. Survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and nine years is a short demonstration.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across nine years. The form is whole: one cut, surviving as released, the same in every format. Presence is wide: IMAX re-releases, home video in every format, television, and continued circulation in the study of sound and editing. Nine years are still nine years, and survival is credited only for what they have shown. The surface is charged: the film’s fullest form depends on IMAX 70mm projection, a technology already rare and narrowing, and in ordinary exhibition the image is cropped and the sound smaller, so part of what the film is lives in conditions that may not last. The subject and the anonymity of its figures age well.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-three years, as made and as recorded. Form: the defining form is legible in the record, and the photographs carry the inversion, the mass and the site clearly. But much of what made the work was its presence on the ground, its mass and its weather, the walk round it; the record holds the image and loses the encounter, a larger loss than for a work that consists in a choice. Presence: continuous in British art’s account of itself since the 1990s, carried by one book, photographs and the story of its destruction; that fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: wholly gone, by demolition within weeks. The span alone would place the figure well above this one; the clear and abundant record holds it near 8.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on eleven years, and under thirteen years a work stands at 7.9 or below. The film survives whole as released, at 121 minutes, born digital in its delivery, with nothing lost. Its presence has been wide and continuous: theatrical success, three Academy Award nominations, home video, streaming and television, and a sequel. Its surface is somewhat fixed to its moment: the drug-war policy debate of the early 2010s, the Juárez violence of around 2010, the tactical gear and night-vision look of its period. Wide presence and whole survival place it near the top of what eleven years allow, and the topical surface keeps it a tenth below. None of this is survival in the axis’s full sense; it is the beginning of it.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over ten years and no more, and the axis credits survival shown, not foreseen. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print since 2016, in one volume and in three. Ten years is short evidence, and it stands below what a longer test would allow. Presence is charged: the book is known by name far more widely than it is read, its length keeps it out of teaching, and its readership is concentrated among Moore’s admirers. The surface is little fixed to a technology or a topical moment, since its subject is a past already gone, and that lightens the charge. A whole text in print with a steady readership is not lower than this; a decade does not show more.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over nine years and nine months. The form is whole: warehouse, Plaza, glass, roof and halls stand as built, with no later change of consequence. The use has been continuous and intense since January 2017: concerts in both halls, a public Plaza visited in great numbers, a hotel and homes occupied, interrupted only by the pandemic, which closed every hall. The fabric has held on a marine site, though the printed glass and the roof’s surfaces are untested by decades of salt and weather. The warehouse’s brick has stood some sixty years, but it survives as the plinth of this work, its first use gone and its interior replaced. Its presence is among the widest of any recent building, and presence earns little here. What holds the axis is age: the survival shown is short, and the surface is tied to a moment of glass and computed form that it has not yet outlived.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eleven years. Form: the film as released survives whole, digital at source, with nothing lost or replaced. Presence is very wide for its span: a large worldwide release, continuous availability at home and on streaming, prizes that keep it in reference, and a performance and a bear sequence that stay in common memory. Wide presence earns a tenth and no more, and eleven years demonstrate little: the span sits below the thirteen years at which the figure could open further. The surface fixed to its moment is small but present: the computer-made bear and some digital compositing belong to the technology of 2015, though they are less exposed than most effects work of that year.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over ten years. The form is whole: the record survives as issued, its order and mix unchanged. Presence is continuous in the brief time it has had, kept in view by its makers’ standing and by streaming, but narrower than the band’s earlier records: it reached its audience as a late work and has not passed into general awareness as those did. The fabric favours it: strings, piano, choir and restrained electronics date less than most production of its year, and nothing is topical except, faintly, Burn the Witch. But ten years demonstrates little: it stands a tenth below Blackstar, of the same year, whose presence is wider, and below the thirty-year books, Fight Club at 8.4 and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline at 8.3.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about eight years and eight months, in the row for works under thirteen years, which runs to 7.9. Form: whole as painted; nothing is lost, replaced or restored. Presence: as wide as a portrait made in this century has had, on view in a national collection with free entry and reproduced without end; but fame is presence, not proof, and presence earns at most a tenth. Fabric: a recent oil in a national museum’s care, as safe as fabric can be; the bright greens are the one surface whose ageing over decades is unknown. The surface is fixed to a moment, the suit, the open collar, the first Black presidency as event, and nothing yet shows it can stand without its event. The widest presence in its row, a tenth below the row’s ceiling.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across about eight years, and eight years is what holds the axis lowest: survival that short can be forecast and barely shown. The film as released survives whole. A shorter version made for Japanese television is a derivative, not a replacement, and no loss or altered release is known. Presence is wide for an art film of its years: theatrical release across Asia, Europe and North America, home video and streaming, festival and repertory revivals, teaching. A wide presence earns a little and is given. The surface ages a little: smartphones, a Porsche and the loudspeakers on the border fix the film to its year, though the farm, the light and the fire do not date.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across about ten years. The form survives whole: one version, released digitally, nothing lost and no altered cut. Presence has been continuous through a decade of streaming and television, and the film is better known now than on release, kept present partly by its writer’s later work; but it is not of the widest presence, and it is not long tested. The surface is somewhat fixed to its moment: the foreclosure signs, the reverse mortgage, the graffiti about Iraq and the bailout. They are the film’s subject rather than its fashion, and a period piece about a crisis can outlast the crisis, but a surface tied to its years is charged a little, and a decade demonstrates little.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the theatrical cut survives complete, and the alternate ending released on home video stands beside it as a variant that takes nothing away. Presence across nine years is as wide as a film of its decade has had: a large box office, four Academy Award nominations and the award for the original screenplay, continuous circulation on home video, streaming and television, teaching in film and in courses on race in America, and a phrase in common speech. But fame is presence, not proof of permanence, and nine years show little. The surface is fixed in places to its moment, the end of the Obama years, the smartphone as weapon and witness, the liberal party talk of 2016, and it is not yet shown that it will read as history rather than as topical satire.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nineteen years. The work as made is gone: the crack was filled in 2008, and the walk beside a broken floor and the look down into the fence are no longer available to anyone. Form survives as record: the photographs and film carry the line, the widening and the mesh legibly, but not the scale and the walking, which were the work. Presence: nineteen years of steady citation, and a line left in the floor where the crack ran. Fabric: nothing of the work survives but its trace. A whole work of this age would stand at 8.3 to 8.4; the loss of the made work takes six to seven tenths, since nothing carries its form but pictures and a seam.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, as a performance surviving as record. Form: the performance ended on 31 May 2010, by design, and what made it, two bodies present to each other in time, is exactly what a record cannot carry. The record shows the form legibly, the two chairs, the gaze, the queue, the duration, and does not transmit it. That is charged in proportion: less than a lost painting, since the work was always to end, but really, since the thing it knew is the thing lost. Presence: continuous and wide since, through the film, the portraits and the image of the two chairs, and given little weight. Fabric: the record is unusually complete and well kept, every sitter photographed and the run filmed. The span is sixteen years.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, across nine years. Form: the film as released survives whole, one cut, nothing lost or altered, and it circulates widely on disc and streaming. Presence: continuous and fairly wide for an art film, in repertory and festival screenings, in streaming, and in every discussion of its director and of the decade’s horror; but it is the presence of a cult and a filmography, less than that of the director’s later films. Fabric: the surface ages little, since the hospital, the house and the phones are deliberately anonymous and the recited speech has no period slang to date it. Nine years can predict survival more than show it, and the figure is held there.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twelve years. The film survives whole as released, in one version, made digitally; nothing is lost. Presence is wide for its age: the Academy Award for Best Picture brought exhibition, television, streaming and teaching, and the film is still discussed, but presence earns little and fame proves nothing of permanence. The surface is charged: the film is fixed to 2014 in the superhero franchise it mocks, in the viral clip, in social media as Sam explains it, and in a particular actor’s career, much of which already reads as period. Twelve years can only be weighed on what twelve years show, and the charged surface holds the figure below the top of what that span allows.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eleven years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one cut, with nothing lost or replaced. Presence has been continuous and, for an art film of its year, wide: theatrical release in many countries, home video and streaming, steady critical attention, and a presence renewed by its director’s later and larger films, which send audiences back to it. The surface is little fixed to 2015: the Hotel and its rules are placed in no year, the costume and design belong to no decade in particular, and the phones and the dating economy the film satirises are kept off the screen, which protects it. A whole form and good presence earn the upper part of what eleven years can show; the shortness of the span is what holds the axis where it is.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over about eleven years. The form is whole: the tower, the skin, the atria and the crown stand as built, with no later additions of consequence. It has not outlived the conditions that produced it; it stands within them, a building of the late boom in Chinese supertall construction, its surface the glass of its decade. The use is continuous, and charged by reports of low occupancy in the years after opening. The fabric shows no failure of consequence on the record, and its condition is not stated beyond that. Presence is wide, and presence earns little. What holds the axis is age: about a decade of survival, against thirty years for the Dancing House and twenty-three for Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, one digital version with nothing lost. Its presence over three years is wide for a German-language film, in cinemas and on streaming services, carried by the prize at Cannes and two Academy Awards, though wide presence earns little on its own. There is no charge on the fabric. The surface is less fixed to its moment than most new work: a plain look, a period of 1943 and 1944, and one reach into the present, to a museum that will go on being cleaned. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is elapsed time: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and three years demonstrate little.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, and this is the axis that holds lowest. Form: whole. The film survives complete in its one cut, held digitally by its distributor, with no loss of any kind. Presence: continuous since 2019 on a streaming service of very wide reach, but contingent on that service; its theatrical presence was limited at release and remains occasional. Span: seven years, which the step for age holds at 7.9 or below. And the surface carries a charge fixed to its moment. The de-ageing is a technology of 2019 and already reads as one, young faces on bodies that move like old men’s, most plainly when Frank stamps on the grocer’s hand. What holds the axis here is the three together: a short span even for its band, a presence lent by one service, and a surface of the kind the axis penalises by name, a technology.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, in print and streamed, and nothing of it is lost. Presence is wide for its span: a number one album in Britain, played whole in concert, much listed at the end of its year, with a remix album following; wide presence earns at most a tenth. The surface fixed to a moment is small: the sound is the band’s own long-held mode rather than the production of 2024, and ageing and loss do not date; the loud, dense master is the feature most likely to age. The span governs. Two years sit near the foot of the scale, below m b v at 8.0 over thirteen years and Blackstar and Ghosteen at 7.9 over ten and seven.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across seven years. The form survives whole, in the version released, digitally made and held. The presence is narrower than the film’s standing among critics would suggest: it opened in a limited release in December 2019, reached streaming soon after and lost the cinemas within three months, and since then it has lived on critical return, on church and seminary audiences and on home viewing rather than on continuous exhibition. The surface is fixed to little of 2019: the film is set from 1939 to 1943, and its digital image, though of its decade, does not date as a topical surface would. A span under ten years and a narrow presence together set it below the top of what a film of its age can show.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over five and a half years, and a span so short can show little. Presence has been wide for a record of its kind: continuous listening and circulation since 2021, a place in many accounts of the decade so far, and the added weight it took on as Sanders’ last major statement after his death in September 2022. The form survives whole; the recording is the work and is intact. The fabric is not fixed to a production fashion: acoustic strings, saxophone, harpsichord and organ, with synthesisers used sparingly, date slowly. But demonstrated survival at this span is short by definition, and the axis stands well below the works with decades behind them.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixteen years. Form: the work as made, a hundred million seeds as one field in one hall, does not stand and cannot be shown again as made. It has been divided, portions sold by weight and others acquired, Tate keeping a share. A portion still carries the idea and can be laid as a field or a heap, but the scale that made the plain, and the hall, were defining. The walking was lost within two days and is record only. Presence: wide, and leaning on the artist’s fame and on the events of 2011, which is presence, not proof. Fabric: fired porcelain, about as durable as a material can be; each seed survives, and the fabric charge is nil. The division and the lost walking take the figure well below what the span alone would give.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole and legible in all three editions, because the work was built to survive the loss of its matter; the certificate carries it, and the eatings have shown that losing the banana takes nothing from the form. Presence: seven years, about as wide as any work of its decade, in the press, the art world and the auction room; fame and price are presence, not proof of permanence. Fabric: wholly perishable by design and replaced many times, which the work’s own law makes the smallest charge. The span is short, and the axis is held near the top of what it allows, and below that top for a surface fixed to its moment: the joke is bound to the fair of 2019 and the money of the 2020s.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film survives whole as released, in one version, digitally made and held. Its presence has been continuous and wide since 2021, chiefly through a streaming service, which is presence, not proof of permanence. The surface is not fixed to its making: set in 1925 and composed classically, nothing in it dates to the 2020s beyond its means of distribution. Against all this stands the span. Five years is a very short demonstration of survival, and at five years, with wide presence and a surface free of its decade, 7.5 is the top of what the elapsed time allows. Presence of five years proves very little.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across five years. The form is whole: one cut, released as made. Presence has been wide from the start, a large theatrical release, streaming the same day, IMAX revivals, constant home viewing, but wide presence earns little and five years is very short. On the step for survival, five years sits where the rows for under five and under thirteen meet, about 7.5. The surface is mixed: much of the making is physical, sets, locations and sand-coloured screens in place of green, and ages well, while the digital worm, ships and shields are of their moment. And Part One may come to be seen chiefly as half of a pair.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over five and a half years, which is all the record can show. The form is whole: the record as released is the record sold, with no rival edition. Presence is continuous for its age, in streaming and in film, wide among Cave’s large public and narrower beyond it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is charged twice. White Elephant fixes part of the surface to the summer of 2020, its toppled statues and its protests, and the programmed rhythms and synthesiser pads are timbres of their decade. The charge is lightened because the record never names the pandemic and its tenderness is not topical. A young record’s survival, in the lower middle of what its age allows.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across ten years. The film survives whole: the theatrical release, unaltered, in a recent and complete recording on disc and streaming. Ten years demonstrate far less than decades, and the figure stands within what that span allows. Presence is modest: a small release, and a steady but narrow following among viewers of the genre and of its director, with no wide continuous presence to credit. The surface is charged slightly: the closing digital effects are the element most fixed to their moment, and they carry the climax. Form whole, presence modest, one fixed surface: the figure sits a little below the usual one for its span.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Three years old, so survival is predicted, not shown. The form survives whole: the film is held by its producer, and nothing is lost. Presence is three years of availability on a streaming platform after a brief theatrical run, continuous but dependent on one company’s catalogue, with no demonstrated circulation beyond it in schools, repertory or quotation. A span under ten years holds the axis below 8.0. Within that range the surface counts against it. The film is fixed to its moment by design, its texture made of the services and devices of 2023, the coworking office, the delivery locker, the smartwatch, and a surface tied to a production era and a technology is charged even where, as here, that surface is the subject. That it is the subject keeps the charge small.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, for the work as it can still be shown. Form: the installation was removed after sixteen days, by design, and what stands is the record, the photographs, the film, the book, the drawings and collages. The record carries the image well, the line of saffron through bare trees, but not what the work was for those who walked it: the passage under thousands of moving panels, the duration, the cold. That the loss was intended is credited elsewhere, as form and as law; this axis measures what survives, and intended loss is still loss. Presence: twenty-one years, famous, met now in reproduction, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: none survives as the work. The span alone would place the figure well above this one.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over five years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, in print and on the streaming services. Presence is real and narrow: it is heard by the band’s following and by listeners to shoegaze and post-rock, and has had no life in broader circulation. The fabric is charged a little. The clean, wide, polished production is of its moment to the ear in a way the band’s rawer records are not. A span of five years, a narrow presence and a surface fixed to its time place it in the middle of what a young record can show, below m b v at 8.0 after thirteen years.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed over four and a half years, which is all the record can show, and the axis is the lowest of the twelve. The form is whole: one edition, one track list. Presence is continuous for its age, in streaming and in the trio’s concerts, but it rests largely on its makers’ standing: the following is the parent band’s, and two later records by the trio now compete for it. Popularity is credited as presence, not proof, and borrowed presence is charged. The fabric is less fixed to a moment than many records of its year: live drums, guitar and bass, strings and horns, no production signature of its season, and the television song’s target is a type rather than a name. What holds it is the span and the borrowing.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twelve years. Form: the work cannot be shown. The sphinx was destroyed at the close by design; the boys softened during the run and some collapsed; the building was named for demolition in the title. What can be shown is the record, which is extensive: photographs from every angle, video, and the artist’s own film of her viewers. Because the loss was built into the work, losing the matter takes less than it would from a sculpture meant to stand; but an installation is weighed on what can still be shown, and the scale, the smell and the site cannot be. Presence: wide in 2014 and steady since, and fame is not proof. Fabric: none, by design. This is the lowest of the twelve: a form held in record only.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over three years. The film as released survives whole, in its original version, with nothing lost; the monochrome Minus Color, issued by its makers in January 2024, is a variant of grading that does not replace it. Presence across three years is wide: theatrical success in Japan and abroad, the Academy Award, circulation on streaming services. Wide presence earns a tenth, and is given. What holds the axis is the span: three years is a short demonstration of survival, and a life under five years cannot carry the axis far. The surface is fixed partly to its moment in its digital effects, which will be the first thing to date; the period setting protects the rest.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole: one released version, made and distributed digitally, in continuous circulation on streaming services and in home release, with no loss or alteration to charge. Its presence is wide for its age, but prizes and box office are presence, not proof, and earn nothing above the step at which a span under five years stands. The surface is not fixed to a topical moment: the period setting, the absence of any contemporary reference and the fable form protect it, and no production era is charged. What holds the axis is elapsed time alone, and four years demonstrate little.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over four and a half years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording exists as released and is in print and streamed. Presence is charged. Within four months of release the allegations against the band’s singer were reported, the tour went on in a changed climate, and the record has since been heard less as an album than as part of a contested catalogue. That charge is to presence, not to form, and it is weighed as such. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment: the feed, unsubscribing and the isolation of the pandemic years are topical surfaces, though the production does not date in sound. Span and charged presence together hold the figure.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eight years, a span at which the survival step gives a little more to a film of usual presence. Form: the film as released survives whole, held by its distributor in the master it streamed. The longer premiere cut, never released, is a variant not taken from the work, and is noted and not charged. Presence is the charge. The film exists to the public chiefly as a title on one streaming service, available at that service’s discretion, so that its circulation depends on a single catalogue, and attention after its first season fell away quickly. The surface, a streaming star vehicle of 2018, is fixed to its moment in a way the history it tells is not.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over one year. The film survives whole as released, with nothing lost, and its presence has been as wide as a new film’s can be, in cinemas and then at home; wide presence earns little on its own. Two things hold the axis lowest of the twelve. The first is elapsed time: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and one year demonstrates almost nothing. The second is the surface: a present of immigration raids, detention centres and armed nationalist clubs, with a satire aimed at its own year, whose edge may dull or change meaning as the moment passes. The parent’s fear and the inheritance of struggle beneath that surface are not dated, and they are what is credited.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, and this is the lowest axis with The Encompassed. Some 117 years from completion is a span at which a building whole and in use would stand at 9.0 or 9.1; the charges here run far below it. Form: the exterior is still legible in the shell, the north studios’ openings, the west oriels as empty frames, the cliff of the south; the interior form, the library, the section, the stair, the museum and the Hen Run, which carried half the work’s meaning, survives only in record. Use: lost since May 2014, twelve years without teaching. Fabric: the interiors are gone and the stone is burnt. The vertical voids through which both fires spread belong to the building’s endurance, and that failure is charged here. Wide presence earns at most a tenth.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the film as released survives whole, with no loss. Presence: three years of distribution through a studio, availability on streaming services and continuing attention; the presence is real and short. Fabric: a recent release, its master in no physical danger worth charging. The surface: the songs and the decor of the 1980s are the film’s subject and not a dating of it, and the tower and the city of the 2020s are kept spare enough to date lightly. What holds the axis is elapsed time: a span under five years stands at 7.5 or below, falling with the span, and three years sits a little below the top of that row. No survival can yet be credited beyond presence.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric; for an installation, the work as it can still be shown. Form: lost as a thing that can be shown. The installation was dismantled after 158 days, and as a work made for one hall it cannot be shown elsewhere in its own form. Its defining form, the experience of the lit and doubled hall, survives only in photographs, film and accounts, which keep its image and not its knowing. Presence: wide and continuous as an image and a reference, which is given little weight. Fabric: dismantled. The span is twenty-three years, which for a work that stood whole would place the figure well above this one; the loss of the showable work takes the larger part of what the work was.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed over four years and eight months from the full release, which is all the record can show. The form is whole: one edition, though first heard in four parts. Presence is continuous among the band’s following, in streaming and in concert; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is charged: the reverb-heavy dream-pop sound and its synthesiser timbres belong to a recognisable style of the 2010s and early 2020s, and a surface so identified with its moment is what the axis penalises. Nothing in the record is topical, which lightens the charge. A young record’s survival, a little below the middle of what its age allows.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the film as released survives intact, a recent digital production, with no altered version replacing it. Presence over four and a half years is continuous through streaming, home video and a devoted audience, though modest against its cost in theatres. The surface is not tied to a topical moment, and the period design was built to resist dating; if anything dates it, it will be the digital compositing of the visions and the volcano. What holds the axis is elapsed time: under five years demonstrates little survival, and the figure stands at 7.3.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, and two and a half years demonstrate little. The film as released survives whole, in a single cut, with nothing lost. Presence across its span is wide for its moment: theatrical release, streaming on a major platform, continuing circulation of the score and of the film’s images. The surface carries a charge. The film is tied closely to the star persona of Zendaya and to a fashion moment it helped make, and its look and soundtrack are of a piece with their year in a way that may date it. Survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and the figure sits just below the ceiling that so short a span allows.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric, across two years, and the span is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. The film as released survives whole: a digital work, complete, in one cut, with nothing lost. Presence has been of the widest kind for its span: wide theatrical release, re-releases in large format, home and streaming circulation; wide presence earns at most a tenth. The surface carries some risk of dating: the digital effects, restrained and integrated, belong to their production era, and the franchise context, a third film announced, ties part of the meaning to a series not yet complete. Under five years a work stands at 7.5 or below, falling with the span; at two years the figure stands well under that.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over two and a half years. The film survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Presence is continuous over a short span: a wide theatrical release, steady circulation on streaming and home video, and attention well beyond film criticism. A span under five years holds the axis at 7.5 or below, falling with the span, and two and a half years sits low in that range. The surface is charged as well: the film was made and received inside one American election cycle, and its power to unsettle depends in part on the present it imagines. Whether it outlives that present is the open question, and nothing yet shown answers it.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: a recent release in one cut, with no loss, no alteration and no competing version, and no charge falls on it. Presence is under two years, in cinemas, on home release and on streaming services: presence, not proof of permanence. The fabric is not tied to topical matter, since the period frame protects it, though its handling of a woman’s desire is in part a reading of the 2020s that may date. What sets the figure is span: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and a film this new demonstrates little, so it stands near the bottom of the step for work under five years old.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Its presence is a year and a half old: release in cinemas, then streaming and home video, and continued critical argument; wide, and not yet tested by time. The surface is fixed to its moment in one way and freed from it in another. Its subject is one day of one war, and its topical charge, the afterlife of the Iraq War and the argument over the film’s politics, will alter as the war recedes; against that, the refusal of music, style markers and star roles lets it date slowly. What holds the figure is elapsed time: survival shown outranks survival forecast, and eighteen months show little.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, over two years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, recently made, with nothing lost. Its presence is that of an art release of some prestige: festival, limited theatrical release, streaming and home video, and a share of critical attention, but not the widest presence. A film under five years old is held at 7.5 or below, falling with the span, and at two years, with modest presence, the figure sits below that. The surface is less fixed to its moment than many recent films, since the period setting and the declared artifice keep the film at a distance from its own date; the casting of a star at the end of a famous role, and songs of the 1990s heard as a sign of the 2020s’ taste, may date it.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, one digital version held complete by its studio, with nothing altered and nothing lost, so nothing is charged for loss. Its presence is wide: theatrical release, streaming and home circulation, and a large audience of families, though wide presence earns little on its own. The span is about two years, and survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted; two years demonstrate little. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, in the cast of star voices, the production idiom of the studio feature of the mid-2020s and the quick-cut comic business. The painted look and the nature story are the parts least tied to their year.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Weighed as record, on form, then use, then fabric, and this is the lowest axis on the page. Form survives only in record, in plans, engravings, the lithographs of 1851, the photographs of Sydenham and the first sketch; legible and whole in its governing idea, and outliving the conditions that made it as a model copied and answered, the strongest of the three. Use is lost: about 83 years as a public hall in two places, and 90 years gone. Fabric is lost almost entirely: Hyde Park’s iron went to Sydenham, and Sydenham’s burned in a night; what remains records the site, not the building. Survival was weakened from within, since the timber and glass that made the system made it burn. Presence, a district, a football club and a type, earns at most a tenth.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about a year. The form is whole: the film survives as released, digitally made, with nothing lost. Presence is a cinema release and continued circulation on home formats and streaming services, with the attention a continuing series brings; that is short presence, not yet tested. The fabric carries a charge: the phone image, the television of 2002 and its celebrities in the prologue, and the political moment the island echoes fix the film to its date more than most of its kind, and its standing is bound to a trilogy whose later parts will reshape how it is read. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the span itself: a year demonstrates almost nothing, and the dated surface is charged on top of it.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over seven and a half years, a span far shorter than the desk usually weighs, so the figure is set by evidence and not by extension. Form: the lattice, bowl and copper undersides stand as built, but the governing quality of the form, an open bowl with the climber exposed to the void and the view, has been changed by the mesh over the upper climb. Use: lost for nearly half the work’s life, through two closures that followed deaths its form made possible, and restored only under supervision. Fabric: sound, with no charge beyond the barriers. Presence is very wide and earns at most a tenth. Its survival was a decision taken twice, and the work survived by being altered.