Unfolding Piranesi's Aqueduct
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Unfolding Piranesi’s Aqueduct: the Aqueduct Map from Le Antichità Romane, Volume I (1756) Sarah Buck The thirty-eighth print in the first volume of Giovanni Bat- of these objects provides the title for the print: at the upper tista Piranesi’s monumental tome Le Antichità Romane (4 left-hand corner, a cracked stone fragment bears an epitaph volumes, Rome, 1756) probably astounded and delighted stating that the print is a topographic map of Rome showing the eighteenth-century reader (Figure 1).1 Piranesi used at the routes of the ancient aqueduct system as described by least two large metal plates to compose the overall image. Sextus Julius Frontinus, the boundaries of the city’s regions, Each half was printed on a separate sheet of paper; these and the ancient roads.4 were then attached together, folded, and bound by linen tape This paper will argue that the print’s extraordinary into the folio.2 The resulting print, measuring approximately format served to propel arguments put forth by Piranesi three by two feet (33 x 24 inches), encourages both distant in his description of the ancient hydraulic system. The ap- apprehension and close scrutiny. To fully view the print, the proach taken here differs from previous examinations of the reader must first unfold the sheet and then step back from the Antichità. Scholarship on Piranesi and on the Antichità has folio. Presented at this arm’s-length vantage point is a map, only cursorily considered the Aqueduct Map: most scholars depicted as if drawn on the surface of a massive slab of stone. appreciate its size and its ambitiousness, recognizing it as the Rome can be seen in the lower half of the image, positioned first comprehensive illustration of the eleven major ancient as if the heart at the center of a circulatory system: lines of aqueduct lines and the routes of their convergence into various widths snake towards the city from every direction. the city.5 Lacking in these studies is any investigation of the Placed on the surface of the map are several illusionistically degree to which Piranesi was aware of the stakes involved rendered items, comprehensible if examined up close.3 One in composing such an illustration, and the possibility that the This paper furthers ideas explored in my MA thesis and in two humously—may have separated the two sheets: Jonathan Scott, for presentations given in the Fall of 2009 at the Southeast College Arts example, describes the map as in “two sections.” Jonathan Scott, Conference (SECAC) and the Southeastern Society of Architectural Piranesi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 120. Historians (SESAH). I thank Dr. Robert Neuman and Dr. Jack Freiberg for their guidance on this evolving project. I also thank the staff of 3 The other trompe l’oeil objects arranged on the slab are a compass Athanor and the Department of the History of Art at Florida State and four small slips of paper. Counterclockwise from the top left, these University for the opportunity to contribute to the current volume. In pieces of paper provide: a diagram comparing aqueduct heights; a key this paper, all translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. explaining the types of graphic lines used for the various aqueducts; a landscape view of the extant ruins of the system; and finally, a cross- 1 Le Antichità Romane’s other volumes describe the ancient city’s tombs, section of the Acqua Marcia. funerary decoration, bridges, amphitheatres, and other structures. These four volumes contain over two hundred and fifty etchings; 4 Sextus Julius Frontinus was a Roman aristocrat active in the city’s Volume I additionally includes numerous text sections. The complex- administration at the end of the first century CE who oversaw the ity of the Antichità’s organization has been little considered in the renovation and management of Rome’s aqueducts. De aquaeductu scholarship on the artist, and is difficult to adequately express in a urbis Romae (also called De Aquis) was his official account of the his- single essay, but a recent attempt can be found in the first chapter of tory, extent, distribution, and condition of these aqueducts. This paper my thesis “Unfolding Rome: Piranesi’s Antichità Romane, Volume I adheres to the title used in the most recent presentation of the text (1756)” (master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2008). offered by R. H. Rodgers. See Sextus Julius Frontinus, De aquaeductu For reproductions of the Antichità’s individual images, see John urbis Romae, ed. with introduction and commentary by R.H. Rodgers Wilton-Ely, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, 1st ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2 vols. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1994); and Luigi Ficacci, Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (Cologne: Taschen, 2000). Arthur Maygar Hind 5 On the map as the first illustration of the eleven major aqueduct lines, offers a helpful but brief description of the work’s organization in see John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Lon- Giovanni Battista Piranesi: A Critical Study with a List of His Published don: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 51. The significance of the Aqueduct Works and Detailed Catalogues of the Prisons and the Views of Rome Map in this respect seems to be appreciated only by Piranesian schol- (1922; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), 83-84. ars, as the illustration is never mentioned in the literature on Frontinus. All observations of this work are based on my study of an origi- With regard to the treatment of the map in the literature on the artist, nal edition kept in the University of Florida at Gainesville’s Special most scholars follow Wilton-Ely’s assertion that the print is a precedent Collections Department. I thank them for their generosity in allowing for Piranesi’s later and equally striking Ichnographia of the Campo Mar- me to examine the folios during two trips taken during the summer zio (1757), an imaginative reconstruction of the Campus Martius that of 2007. measures nearly five by four feet. According to Wilton-Ely, this gigantic print was composed with six plates. See Wilton-Ely, Mind and Art, 63 2 Other editions of the Antichità—particularly, those published post- for his discussion about Piranesi’s illustration of the Campo Marzio. ATHANOR XXVIII SARAH BUCK map’s design serves as a counter-argument to the existing thirty inches that are folded in half and bound by strips of antiquarian studies. linen into the folio. Some etchings cover most of the entire The examination of this map begins by calling attention sheet of paper, whereas others are printed only on the facing to the map as a spectacle within the folio. The purpose of half of a sheet, the Aqueduct Map, by contrast, is printed on this discussion is multifold: it will establish the placement two of these standard sheets of paper, its expanse concealed of the map in the folio itself; it will demonstrate that the when folded.6 map was unquestionably designed as the showpiece of the As astonishing as the print’s size may be in comparison work’s first folio by explaining how the illustration differs with the folio’s other pages and prints, it shares similarities from the volume’s other content; and finally, it will show that in design and function with the second map of the volume, despite its marked difference from other images in the work, the Map of Ancient Rome at the folio’s beginning (Figure 2). the map is a carefully integrated element of the Antichità’s First, both stand on their own as compelling illustrations. Volume I. Following this overview will be an investigation of There is much to pore over in each map: each contains a the ways in which Piranesi’s map conscientiously rivals one plethora of detail and possesses intriguing spatial ambiguities contemporaneous work that sought to achieve a similar goal. in its design. Piranesi has designed them to simultaneously Finally, this paper will illustrate how the remarkable format resemble ancient and degraded artifacts, as cartographic of the print propels Piranesi’s archaeological conclusions illustrations, and as illustrations of illustrations. The details and perhaps disguises uncertainties the artist may have had of these maps continually fluctuate between the artificial about his findings. and the real. Second, both point to other material in the To begin, the placement of the map in the volume and volume. The Aqueduct Map purports to illustrate Frontinus’s its size suggest that Piranesi meant for the map to amaze descriptions of the ancient aqueduct system. It thus relates the viewer encountering it. A brief summary of the folio’s to the text that follows it. But it also concludes the series organization clarifies the map’s placement. The volume of landscape illustrations and in a sense offers a summary begins with front matter providing the title page, preface, of their depictions. Most of these landscape views offer frontispiece, and a list of Piranesi’s works up to the publica- grounds-eye elevations of what Piranesi has determined to tion of the Antichità. Next is a Map of Ancient Rome, three be the extant remains of the ancient aqueduct system. The prints illustrating fragments of the Severan Marble Map, and Map of Ancient Rome includes a map with three-hundred a two-page table (called an “index”) clarifying the partial and fifteen numbered details locating the extant ruins of the inscriptions on the fragments. Following this is a forty-page ancient city. These numbers correspond to the numbered index of three hundred and fifteen numbered entries printed entries in the index that follows several pages later.