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• 1 2021-03-30T11:16:08-07:00 Marble Fragments from the Ancient Map of Rome (1 of 3) 9 Frammenti di Marmo della Pianta di Roma Antica plain 2024-11-01T11:02:32-07:00 Framm(en)ti di Marmo della Pianta di Roma antica scavati saranno due secoli, nelle Rovine del Tempio di Romolo, et ora esistenti nel Museo di Campidoglio.; Piranesi Archit(etto) dis(egnò) et inc(ise). Marble Fragments from the ancient Map of Rome excavated two centuries ago from the Ruins of the Temple of Romulus and now in the Capitoline Museum.; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi

  Over three engravings, Piranesi unveils to us fragmentary segments of the same ancient map of Rome, the Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan, that is the basis of the previous image. This huge marble plan (roughly 18m by 13m), carved around 203 – 211 CE, details specific buildings as well as neighborhoods within the city. It originally graced the walls of the Flavian Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace), which was rebuilt following a fire in 192 CE. More than 1000 pieces survive to the present day; almost 100 more are known from Renaissance engravings but are now lost, were left to crumble, or are simply missing (Maier 2015, 136-137). Though numerous, these fragments are widely variable in size and represent only around 10-15% of the Roman-period map. In the captions to Piranesi’s three images, which are found on separate pages of engraved text, he emphasizes the process of excavating these fragments over two centuries from the Roman Forum and indicates that they were kept in the Capitoline Museum. Rome is here represented as fragment, as remains that can be neatly tucked away, although not accurately arranged, in a museum drawer, while the rest of the volume carefully highlights the life and continual integration of the ancient within the contemporary. 
  
  Heavily annotated, Piranesi’s engravings endeavor to identify and locate ancient edifies. Each fragment on the three images is numbered, and these relate to entries in the indices here and here, but some buildings also carry the carved Latin text from the original Roman plan, indicating horti, theatri, as well as the linear ghostly outlines of other architecture, such as the unmistakable footprint of a temple towards the bottom of the image and a theater near the top. He appears to have selected some of the more identifiable pieces, and so public spaces, curving colonnades, and temple footprints may be distinguished from the more concentrated private structures (see below). 
  This identification of the buildings and arrangement of the pieces has inspired and frustrated scholars, cartographers, and archaeologists through the centuries since the rediscovery of the marble fragments in 1562 (Maier 2015, pp. 136-137). Most recently, a digital humanities project at Stanford University, working under the aegis of the Sovraintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali del Commune di Roma, has successfully documented and catalogued in an accessible digital database all the surviving pieces. Such tools allow better understanding of the identifications of certain structures. This work is ongoing, and several pieces—often small, less diagnostic fragments—remain unidentified. 
  
  The extent to which each of these pieces is numbered over the three engravings offers elucidation of the objects while also obscuring their identifications. The viewer needs to track down the corresponding index entry to understand what is seen and might feel as frustrated as a sixteenth-century scholar in struggling to piece everything together. The potential to understand is enticing, but Piranesi’s beholders could also experience the fragments as an impression of the mixed, layered archaeology of the eternal city itself.  
  
  Piranesi here shows the pieces haphazardly, rather than seeking to present a contiguous reconstruction of the ancient plan of the city as he attempts in the Map of Rome, which seems to emerge from fragments of this map. In this and the following print, the fragments are separated into three, equal segments by dividers, which give the appearance of a taxonomic approach, though there is no further attempt to group them. Towards the bottom of the first two prints, several pieces are rested atop the dividers, perhaps signaling uncertainty about the segment to which they belong.  
  
  This image immediately follows the “Pianta di Roma,” which Piranesi renders as if it has emerged from the fragments of the Marble Plan in a further allusion to his method of using the fragments as evidence. From the previous imaginary map and this image of the Marble Plan’s actual fragments, Piranesi moves from conjecture to evidence. In the two following images, his representations of evidence continue to blur boundaries between imagination and fact. (PC & SAH) 
  
  To see this image in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.