This content was created by Avery Freeman.

This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

The Digital Piranesi

Piece of Tufa

This page has annotations:

Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:
Contents of this annotation:

This page is referenced by:

Piece of Tufa
This technical image presents a piece of tufa, a soft, easily sculpted stone that is common worldwide, notably in parts of southern Italy. Dominating the visual field, the block appears against a blank background and, on the left, as it would have functioned in its aqueduct. This early, “rather primitive” (Kantor-Kazovsky 100) plate is likely the product of Piranesi’s workshop assistants (Istituto Centrale per la Grafica). And yet, this image also shows signs of Piranesi’s creative use, in more sophisticated images from later volumes of Le Antichità Romane, of imaginative conjecture.

The details of this plate’s operation and placement within this volume warrant close attention. Here, the caption explains that the block that seems to hover mid-air is restored to its position in the aqueduct in order to illustrate, with greater clarity, how it must have functioned: “Per maggior chiarezza poi del suddetto pezzo s’è mostrato come doveva stare in opera nel suo acquedotto G.” Specifically, the block identified on the left within the aqueduct (G) is the same—“il sudetto”—as the block, already identified, at the center of the image (A). This arrangement relies on a supposition, as the block is shown as it “must have been” situated. This “must” (“dovere”) derives from the authority of supposition—if no other explanation works, then the remaining account “must” suffice. By imaginatively removing the block from the aqueduct, situating it against a blank background, and turning it to expose its surface, holes, and grooves, Piranesi, with his assistants, creates an image that requires a similar imaginative effort in its audience.

Finally, this image is loosely tied, through conjecture, to a specific place identified in the Map of Rome (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 12) for the way that it demonstrates paving used to prevent water entering the joints of the aqueduct (visible, but not identified, at “H”); the index entry points specifically, though, to a barbican built with pieces of tufa that might have been taken from the Aqueducts of the Acqua Claudia and Anione Nuovo. Peter Miller has called attention to “examples of Piranesi using his imagination as a tool of the most concrete reconstruction” (128) in representations of construction methods that appear in later volumes of Le Antichità Romane, such as the two below.
In Piranesi’s image on the construction of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, Miller calls attention to the narrative, imaginative, and conjectural aspects of Piranesi’s lengthy caption. Of that image and others, he asks “Is it a coincidence that depicting some of the most detailed Roman remains […] elicited from Piranesi an explicit reliance on the role of the imagination?” (Miller 134). Even this image, though, attests to the shaping force of the imagination in his work.

That force might also be implied in the blank space that, unlike the realistic background in each of the two earlier technical images, makes this image more diagrammatic. The eighteenth century saw the development of what has been called a “culture of diagram” in which informative images were used to “foster many potential points of view, from several different angles, with a mixed sense of scale that implies nearness alongside distance.” Blank space plays a vital role in such images by providing “support for the composite play of imagery and cognition that is the motor-energy of diagram” (Bender and Marrinan 14, 23). It is in the blank spaces of diagrams, then, that imagination is given space to operate. To be sure, any archaeological study of the distant past entails conjecture and hypothesis. Piranesi’s verbal and visual strategies for acknowledging, conveying, and overcoming that uncertainty mark his works as vital texts in the development of the historical imagination. (JB)

To see this image in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.