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The Digital Piranesi

Frontispiece

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Frontispiece with Statue of Minerva [Translation]: [upper left] TO THE SABINE PEOPLES. WHO WILL WITHSTAND [THEM]? THE ROMAN SENATE AND PEOPLE; [middle left] GNAEUS POMPEIUS, SON OF POMPEIUS, MAGNUS, COMMANDER IN CHIEF, HAVING COMPLETED A THIRTY YEARS’ WAR, ROUTED, SCATTERED, SLAIN, OR RECEIVED THE SURRENDER OF 12,183,000 PEOPLE, SUNKEN OR TAKEN 846 SHIPS, RECEIVED THE CAPITULATION OF 1,538 TOWNS AND FORTS, SUBDUED THE LANDS FROM THE MAEOTIANS TO THE RED SEA, DULY DEDICATES HIS OFFERING VOWED TO MINERVA; [lower left] TO ROME AND AUGUSTUS CAESAR, SON OF THE DEIFIED ONE AND FATHER OF THE FATHERLAND; [lower right] PIRANESI DESIGNED AND ENGRAVED (Campbell, 579) [upper left] SABINIS POPVLIS QVIS RESISTET SPQR; [middle left] CN POMPEIVS CN MAGNVS / IMP[ERATOR] / BELLO . XXX ANNORVM CONFECTO / FVSIS. FVGATIS. OCCISIS. IN. DEDITIONEM / ACCEPTIS. HOMINVM. CENTIE[N]S. VICIE[N]S / SEMEL. CENTENIS LXXXIII / DEPRESSIS AVT CAPT [IS] NAVIBVS DCCCXLVI / OPPIDIS CASTELIS MDXXXVIII / IN FIDEM RECEPTIS / TERRIS A MAEOTIS AD RVBRVM / MARE SVBACTIS / VOTVM MERITO MINERVÆ; [lower left] ROMAE ET AVGVSTO / CAESARI DIV F[ILIO] PAT[RI] PATRIAE; [lower right] PIRANESI INV INCI
The Vedute di Roma is introduced by a title page in the first of the collection’s two bound volumes; this fantastical, inventive frontispiece introduces the second. As an introduction to a sequence of works in the realistic genre of the “veduta,” this image is, Susan Stewart has said, “incongruous” (191). Will the ostensibly accurate “views” that follow instead offer similar imaginative reconstructions? What, we are invited to ask, is fact, and what is fantasy in this image and those that follow? Just as fact and fantasy merge in this image, so, too, do past and present, culture and nature, and even foreground and background: rising clouds of smoke obscure both the physical distance within the image and the conceptual distinctions between its material and thematic concerns (Zorach, 124).

Frontispieces are generally images that face a printed title page. This frontispiece also suggests certain features of the illustrated title page, an art form that flourished in the Renaissance and often included architectural designs and coded symbols. The title pages for collections of prints of ruins offer apt comparisons. For example, title pages published by Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi (1627-1691) and Antonio Lafreri (1512-1577) for the collections of prints of Rome known as Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae introduce series of ruin prints with triumphal architectural forms. While it is unsurprising for other architectural works such as Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture to be introduced with an architectural image, the motif also opened works on other subjects, such as Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) or the Latin Vulgate, also known as the Clementine Bible. Piranesi’s image is of course quite distinct from those orderly title pages: asymmetrical and stymied, it lacks the symmetry of the parallel columns in many illustrated title pages that neatly framed the names of title and author, beckoned readers through an open entryway into the following text, and “figured initiation into its intellectual world” (Fowler 22). The columns in the background of this image, inaccessible behind the accumulated rubble in the foreground, serve to enclose rather than open space. While its expanse seems broad, the disordered jumbles of fragments both real and imagined throughout the image suggest a fundamental challenge to the notion of physical space itself. Manfredo Tafuri has argued that, throughout Piranesi’s œuvre, this kind of imaginative architectural assembly parallels Michel Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia, which entails the disturbance of the “syntax” that connects not only words in language but also buildings in space (40).

Piranesi’s annotated views frequently suggest relationships between the order of language and the spaces of architecture. His individual views of Rome contain copious references in the form of captions and keys that identify architectural structures and their particular features. This image, though, contains references that direct its viewers in a different way: its imaginative combination of slightly altered iconic monuments prompts viewers—perhaps tourists fresh from the sights themselves—to recall the actual remnants of antiquity and, possibly, Piranesi’s depictions of them in print. Its indirect method of communication is an evolution from the illustrated title pages whose emblems and symbols, Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown argued, aim to find “a middle path between the occult impenetrability of the enigma and the tedious obviousness of the familiar” (34). Knowledgeable viewers of this image’s reinterpretations of familiar Roman monuments would likely identify the statue of Minerva in the center of the image, visible in this view of the Piazza Campidoglio, even though it appears here in reverse and without the Renaissance-era restoration of her raised arm. Also invoked are the Farnese Hercules, which Piranesi’s son Francesco depicted here and the famous foot fragment of the Colossus of Constantine. With their spiraling narrative friezes, the columns resemble those of Trajan or Antonine, which Piranesi takes as the subject of individual engravings as well as an entire volume (Nevola 2009, 132-4).

While an illustrated title page can include coded references, a frontispiece “shapes the act of reading” by raising expectations about a text’s genre and content (Calè 29). As such, this image could be particularly instructive for a viewer who is preparing to turn the pages of any bound edition of the Vedute di Roma. Often the only visual image in a printed book, a frontispiece lies between image and text, leading a viewer to become, with the turn of a page, a reader. It is not surprising for Piranesi, given his commitment to merging image and text, to devote such energies to this genre. This image raises expectations that what follows will be viewed and, possibly only with effort, read, and that that the ancient past is available for imaginative appropriation. A striking image on its own, Piranesi’s “Fantasy of Ruins with a Statue of Minerva” (an alternative title for this image) carries different implications when it is considered as an introduction, or an initiation, to the manipulated realities and word-image composites of the Vedute di Roma.

The image contains four inscriptions that further instruct a viewer to become the kind of reader who is sensitive to the visual elements of written language. One inscription inspires a scene of reading with special relevance for the images that follow. As in the reworked version of the title page to Piranesi’s Prima Parte, the human figures standing before an inscription amplify, with gestures that seem to point to partially-obscured text, the “deictic power” of the image (Stewart 171). The obscurity of such an inscription summons our attention, as Richard Wendorf has also said of the Prima Parte’s title page, and the two figures before it “force us to follow the vector of their gaze and thus confront the puzzle of the fragmented inscription ourselves” (174). Broadly speaking, Piranesi’s representations of inscriptions emphasize the act and the effort of reading ancient texts, and his graphic methods for representing text also betray a sense of transience and the labor of preservation. Specifically, the long inscription, on the left side of the image, is an enumeration of Pompey’s extensive conquests and his dedication to Minerva. Taken from Pliny, this statement of military domination appears here on a cracked surface, surrounded by broken architectural remnants; as such, Malcom Campbell has argued that it suggests “the ephemeral nature of human achievements and the impermanence of the monuments raised to celebrate them” (579). Heather Hyde Minor has illuminated that ways that Piranesi manipulated the visual appearance of textual media, rendering letters that were carved into stone as, instead, raised letters resembling type. His foregrounding of textual media—print and inscription, paper and stone—is an apt gloss on his dedication to preserving, on paper, the stone monuments of the past (2015, 87, 93).
Perhaps the most significant text in the image, though, is Piranesi’s signature, found in the lower right of the image and shown in the close-up above. Prefatory images in other works that are sometimes referred to as frontispieces are also called “dedicatory images” because these images (in the second and third volumes of his Antichità Romane and, as noted, the Prima Parte) include his dedications to patrons. This image is unique in this group because Piranesi announces himself as an individual artist rather than the gracious beneficiary of the generosity of an aristocrat or pope (Bevilacqua 54-5). In an imitation of the ancient inscriptions elsewhere in the image, he emphatically unifies the creativity and labor of his craft: “PIRANESI. INV. INCI.” Below this inscription, outside of the plate’s boundary, is another signature: “Piranesi inventò, incise a Roma.” With the verbs that signal his invention—“inventò,” “invenit”—which appear again only in the title page to the series, Piranesi is also signalling his status as a creator in a medium that, traditional signatures indicate, is more often associated with the mere copying of drawing (“disegnò,” “disegnavit”), the labor of carving (“scopsit,” “incise,” “incidit”), or, most commonly, the simple act of making (“fecit”). Repeating his status as a creator across image and margin, in Latin and Italian, with inscription and manuscript, he returns to the boundaries that this image obscures between past and present, fantasy and reality, and culture and nature. With these two signatures, Piranesi seems to suggest that his art, though, is unambiguously part of both the fantastical world the image depicts and the commercial art market that, after all, allows him to announce his independent status as an artist and author. (JB)

To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.