This path was created by Constance Caddell.

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The Digital Piranesi

Cartography

Although he is known primarily for his illustrations of Roman ruins, Piranesi also produced many striking and innovative maps of Rome. His maps are often exercises in counterfactual history just as much as they are documents of Enlightenment cartography. In his massive map of the Campus Martius region of ancient Rome, the "Ichnographia," he includes only its ancient monuments—real and imagined, and consistently in just slightly inaccurate positions. In another view of the same region, his "Scenographia," he presents only the ancient monuments that still stand in the eighteenth century, offering a historical view that is out of history, an imaginary vista that is based on a selective view of present-day reality.

The maps included here...

Contents of this path:

This map, “Pianta di Roma e del Campo Marzio,” serves as something of an advertisement to Piranesi’s other works. But it also serves as something like a complicated table of contents for distinct publications. With numbered items in the central map, Piranesi refers viewers to the surrounding index, which includes over four hundred buildings and monuments. From this index, he then directs viewers to his other works, instructing them, often with abbreviated directions, such as “see Antichita romane” (“V. Aa. Re.” [Vedi Antichita Romane”]) or “see Views of Rome” (V. Ve. Ra. [Vedi Vedute di Roma]). Piranesi’s system of references can be quite complex—certain buildings, such as the Pantheon, are glossed in the index with short essays, and a few, such as Castel Sant’Angelo and Saint Mary of the Angels point to a series of images. Animating these varied printed references, which guide viewers both within one image and across multiple volumes of Piranesi’s works, is the goal of this hyperlinked map.