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• 1 2021-03-30T11:16:08-07:00 Plan of the Ancient Roman Forum 21 Pianta dell'antico Foro Romano, comprensivo delle Valli esistenti fra i Monti, Capitolino, Palatino, Celio, Esquilino, e Quirinale plain 2024-10-25T12:33:42-07:00

  One of very few large images spread across two pages in this volume, this plan of the ancient Roman Forum presents a tremendous amount of miniscule visual detail within its frame. As with many of Piranesi’s elaborate annotated maps, the surface is a stone slab with shaded, three-dimensional edges, a visual illusion which likens his inventive maps to the Marble Plan. As with the volume’s other architectural plans, the Didot edition separates this map from its typeset index, which appeared on facing or consecutive pages in the original edition of 1765. In this plan’s index, the 275 structures marked in the image are briefly identified. But the image itself also separates text: the illusion of the slab extends beyond the visual frame and bisects the caption, dividing “PIANTA” into “PIAN” and “TA,” then distancing “antiche” from “fabbriche.” This protrusion of the slab shows structures which include the Libreria Ulpiana, a famous ancient library whose Greek and Latin collections faced each other across a courtyard where the Column of Trajan stood.   
  
  This image foregrounds reconstruction through its distinction between what Piranesi calls darker and lighter tints of ink. In the caption, he describes what were becoming customary visual codes of antiquity’s reconstruction on paper: he positions structures according to “la traccia de’ loro odierni avanzi” [the traces of the remains that still exist today], which are represented by “la tinta più nera” [the blacker tint], and “il supplimento ai medesimi” [the supplement to the same] is indicated by the lighter tint. These traces and supplements denote the components of archaeological practice: architectural fragments and their imagined completion. Such supplements, along with the signs or “segni” of absent or altered structures in other images, are also, broadly speaking, suggestive of the language of representation theorized by Jacques Derrida. As John Pinto commented of this image and others in this volume, this visual trick distinguishes between evidence and artistry, between antiquarianism and creation (Pinto 2012, 142). And as Maria Grazia Lolla has said of trompe l’œil in antiquarian prints, such illusions render them works of art rather than objective reproduction (Lolla 20-1). In light of these claims, Piranesi’s play with visual representation in trompe l’œil can be seen to align with his methodical distinction between evidence, in blacker tints, and conjecture, in lighter tints. (JB)