This page was created by Diem Dao. The last update was by Jeanne Britton.
View of the Tomb of the Plautius Family
Such theatrical effects are achieved by the sharp diagonal in the center of the composition, which puts the partially obscured inscriptions outside the tomb in relief. Cutting across the upper left of the plate, the parallel line of the shadow acts almost like a curtain, where the tomb itself seemingly provides more of a theatrical backdrop. Through the diagonal block of shadow, the right inscription is submerged in darkness. In the central inscription, letters are illuminated but slanted, as if to imply that the past can never be fully reconstructed, even when inscriptions—considered one of the most important sources of archaeological knowledge—are found intact. Highlighting this fact is the imitation of the monument’s ancient lapidary slabs in the print’s modern title on the bottom right. Yet the title, by appearing in italics and a modern script, rather than ancient capitals, disorients viewers as to what belongs to the past or to the present, or even to the realm of reality or representation.
Piranesi’s tricks of light and perspective call attention to the legibility, or rather illegibility, of the ruins, which convey a fragmentary and remote past, and the different lettering styles he uses in this image—ancient and modern, carved and engraved—suggest an instability in the very foundations of archaeological attribution. Piranesi, like his Renaissance predecessors, recognized that inscriptions and the architectural fragments that contained them were also images (Barkan 27). Through the genre of the veduta, he emphasizes the visual, as well as verbal, dimensions of interpreting antiquity. (ZL)
To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.