Here Piranesi is both architect and engineer in his presentation through plan and section of this enormous third-century imperial building project. The scale is conveyed not only by the inclusion of a measurement scale within the image but also by both the detail and precision with which each column is indicated and the copious annotations required to make sense of the structure that appear in an individual index, referenced in the caption, that is located earlier in this volume). Against this sense of enormity, Piranesi’s obsession with the details of water supply is nonetheless noticeable: carefully shaded examples of pipework, which conveyed water to and within the bath house, flank the upper image to each side. We can see the whole and, at the same, time zoom into these small elements. The cross-section beneath, too, plays with the scale, showing this large structure in fine, shaded detail, but it also emphasizes the ruined state of the baths in Piranesi’s own lifetime and is thus dissonant with the precision and completeness of the meticulous plan. 

None of the other images of bath houses in this volume operates in quite this way: there are views of remains (Baths of Sallust, Baths of Titus, Baths of Diocletian), or plans of the original (Baths of Titus, Palatine Baths) but not this combination of elements. His plan of the Capitoline Hill, though, follows the same composition technique, which Kantor-Kazovsky has termed “two-storied” (Kantor-Kazovsky 2006, 86; and plate12). In this arrangement, plan and section or plan and view are included one on top of the other on the same plate. This technique, in turn, appears to have drawn deliberately on the approach of Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635 – 1700) and expanded here from views of tombs to this bath house. 

In the twentieth century, the Baths of Caracalla have been the subject of ground-breaking research as both an example of an emperor’s patronage of construction and a case study for understanding the energetics, labor dynamics, and economics of a large commission (DeLaine 1997). It has thus been shown that important buildings like this could be built within a relatively short time, commanding a concentration of labor and materials, if the patron had sufficient wealth and status. This new kind of research has set the bar for understanding Roman construction over and above the more traditional focus on arrangement of elements, appearance, patronage, and implications of the design choices. Piranesi’s combinations of art, evidence, and book-making might productively be seen as a similarly vast enterprise involving extensive labor and materials. (PC)