This page was created by Alexis Kratzer. The last update was by Jeanne Britton.
Ruins of One of the Soldiers’ Barracks in Hadrian’s Villa
Piranesi frequently includes trompe-l’œil effects, but the Vedute di Roma are somewhat more restrained than his other works in this regard. The specific illusion of the broken image frame, though, occurs only ten times in the total 137 views included in the Vedute di Roma. There is only one other human figure who transgresses—just barely—the boundary between image and margin in the series. Breaking the visual frame of an image playfully hints that the flat two dimensions of visual art might morph into the three dimensions of real life. This image’s leisurely street musician calls attention to the deceptive nature of visual representation, and the perspectival arrangement of this view, with two implied vanishing points, is shattered by his casually reclining right arm. This musician’s seemingly oblivious disruption of the conventions of representational art conveys confidence in the engraver’s power to make three dimensions emerge out of paper’s two-dimensional surface. (JB)
To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.