The freestanding column depicted at the center of this print is known as Trajan’s Column. Completed in AD 113, the column bears spiral bas relief sculptures that commemorate Roman Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. In this print, Piranesi is attentive in his depiction of the spiral structure, including the fact that the sculptures become less distinct the higher up they appear on the column. In a volume dedicated to this and another triumphal column, this attention extends to identities, armor, and facial expressions of the soldiers depicted in the sculpture. 
 
Here, the column is surrounded by a wall, which is broken precisely at the point of the viewer’s perspective, creating a dramatic opening of the space that enables visual access to the column. This break is a fiction, as the contemporary view by Giuseppe Vasi illustrates. The detailed line work on the crumbling wall in the left and right, which is even clearer than the depiction of the sculptures on the column, emphasizes the column’s isolation in the center of the frame.  
 
Staffage figures that line the walls gesture towards the column or the buildings around it and convey its scale. Piranesi’s annotations that identify the two churches to the right of the column, Chiesa di Santa Maria di Loreto (“B”) and Chiesa del Nome di Maria (“C”), as well as early modern restorations undertaken by Pope Sixtus to the surrounding wall (“A”). Notably, Piranesi does not include the top of the column within the print. Although a statue of Trajan was once positioned at the top of the column, it was eventually lost and had been replaced in the sixteenth century with a bronze figure of Saint Peter the Apostle by Pope Sixtus V, which is still visible today. By excluding the bronze figure from the print, Piranesi encourages viewers to focus on the monumental column for its antiquity rather than its assimilation into modern, Catholic Rome.
  
Piranesi takes a different approach in the Vedute di Roma. There, in an image aimed primarily at tourists, he places his viewers, and a spectator in the image, on ancient ground level. He dispenses with the illusion of the broken wall that exposes the full column and instead takes us closer and lower, to the column’s base. While the image from his Vedute di Roma celebrates the response of an enraptured spectator, this image is instead guided by an archaeological impulse that the fiction of the broken wall exposes. (CBA)