This page was created by Constance Caddell. The last update was by Jeanne Britton.
Plan of Rome and the Campus Martius
With his vedute [views], Piranesi instructs his audiences in the art of seeing. He does something similar but more expansive with his maps and the references they contain. This map, “Pianta di Roma e del Campo Marzo” [“Plan of Rome and the Campus Martius”], serves as something of an advertisement to Piranesi’s other works. But it also resembles an elaborate table of contents for distinct publications. Numbered items in the central map refer to the surrounding index, which includes over four hundred buildings and monuments. From this index, he then directs viewers to his other works, instructing them, often with abbreviated directions, such as “see Antichita Romane” (“V. Aa. Re.” [Vedi Antichita Romane”]) or “see Views of Rome” (V. Ve. Ra. [Vedi Vedute di Roma]). Piranesi’s system of references can be quite complex—certain buildings, such as the Pantheon, are glossed in the index with short essays, and many, such as the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Castel Sant’Angelo, and Saint Mary of the Angels, point to a series of images that spread, in some cases, across different volumes. These varied printed references guide viewers both within one image and across multiple volumes of Piranesi’s works.
His earlier “Plan of Rome” from his Roman Antiquities also refers to an index that then points to individual engravings. This map, though, which is almost three times as large, includes its smaller index within the same visual field. To move from the cartographic image to its linked index means shifting a glance, not turning numerous pages. The visual appearance of the index emphasizes illusions that are fundamental to cartography itself. This map’s index begins near the top of the image, where it is simply ink on the page bound in the book. But, as the index proceeds down the left side of the page, it becomes part of a scroll that, at the bottom of the left side of text, seems to curl up onto itself. Piranesi often calls attention to the medium of print in similar ways. Here, this illusion of curling paper calls attention to the fantasy that the entirety of Rome might be represented within the limits of one large piece of paper.
The limits of this map extend, though, far beyond those of this individual image. With its index and references, this map is thoroughly embedded in Piranesi’s colossal body of work. Unlike the map from Roman Antiquities, this map refers to images in seven different volumes—the two volumes of the Views of Rome, Campus Martius, the four volumes of Roman Antiquities, Ruins of the Fountainhead of the Acqua Giulia, and On the Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans. Although this map was more often sold individually, Piranesi did intend it to be bound with the other plates of the Views of Rome. According to Mario Bevilacqua, it is “a vast, elaborate, and summational map, a maturation of the topographical and architectural achievements that had pervaded the expressive economy of his entire œuvre” (58). Jessica Maier has claimed that Piranesi’s maps in general “provide the larger urban context” of his individual views (224). This map represents a context so vast as to be disorienting.
Disorientation is usually not the desired effect of a map. Orientation, in the directional sense, was in flux during the eighteenth century’s Age of Reason, when the Christian tradition of pointing maps towards Jerusalem (and North appearing to the left of an image) gave way to the newer practice of positioning North at the top of a map. While Piranesi orients the earlier “Plan of Rome” from Roman Antiquities with north at the top of the page, in this map, north lies at the bottom of the image. Giambattista Nolli’s “Nuova Topografia di Roma” (1748) had already established the secular convention of orienting maps of Rome with north at the top of the page; as a collaborator of Nolli’s, Piranesi was certainly aware of this shift away from the religious orientation towards Jerusalem. Bevilacqua has said that this map’s speculative Campus Martius region and its orientation “subvert rationalist Enlightenment cartography” (58). Additionally, its extensive cross-references enact this subversion: the various, inconsistent cartographic orientations of his maps mimic the navigational gestures that his references solicit from beholders of his images and holders of his books. By reorienting his viewers, Piranesi presents a different kind of itinerary—through books rather than terrain—along which one view persistently becomes another. (JB)
To see this map—printed across three pages—in the Vedute di Roma, volume 16 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here for the top image, and here for the bottom.
