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The Digital Piranesi Main Menu About The Digital Piranesi is a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced digital edition of the works of Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Works and Volumes Genres, Subjects, and Themes Bibliography Glossary

View of the Campus Martius

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Maps Although he is known primarily for his illustrations of Roman ruins, Piranesi also produced many striking and innovative maps of Rome. His maps are often exercises in counterfactual history just as much as they are documents of Enlightenment cartography. In his massive map of the Campus Martius region of ancient Rome, the "Ichnographia," he includes only its ancient monuments—real and imagined, and consistently in just slightly inaccurate positions. In another view of the same region, his "Scenographia," he presents only the ancient monuments that still stand in the eighteenth century, as if the intervening centuries didn't happen. The maps included here, from the Campus Martius volume and the Views of Rome, employ different methods of information display.
Those from Campus Martius include several layered images, each of which represents a stage in the evolution of this region of Rome. The large "Plan of Rome and the Campus Martius" that was included in a volume of the Vedute di Roma in the Opere represents buildings and monuments in various ways--as numbered items in the map itself, as items in the surrounding index, and as views that appear in other volumes of Piranesi's works. The hyperlinked version of this map attempts to reproduce these varied means of representation.
View of the Palace of the Illustrious Barberini Family on the Quirinal Hill
Like a colossal mountain erupting from the ground, the imposing three-tiered façade of the Barberini palace seems to loom over all of Rome in this image. The palace’s strategic location on the Quirinal Hill, close to the Papal Palace, demonstrates the extensive and powerful reach of the Barberini family. In the early seventeenth century, Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, (1568-1644) commissioned several famous architects, including Carlo Maderno (1556-1629), Francesco Borromini, and a very young Bernini, to design his family palace. Piranesi seldom mentions other architects in the Vedute di Roma and credits only Bernini in this image’s caption, which suggests his admiration for Bernini’s innovative yet classic design. While Bernini incorporates traditional elements of Renaissance palace architecture, such as the rusticated ground floor and symmetrical and flat tripartite façade, the grand arcades of arches and open loggia at the center anticipate the restrained opulence of the late baroque style, or barocchetto, of eighteenth-century Rome.

The turbulent clouds in the background as well as the steep diagonals of the cornice heighten the monumentality of the façade. The church of the Capuchin monks and the highly ornamental entrance to the palace from the piazza are rendered in shallow lines, fading softly into the background, while the Palazzo seems to be carved out like a three-dimensional sculpture from the deep pressure of the biting of the copper plate. Atmospheric perspective creates even further depth, inviting viewers to explore the grounds and details such as the ancient inscription on the right and the secret bridge that grants privileged access to the second floor. On the left, remnants of an ancient fountain give way to the piazza below and distant landscape. While the foreground is in the deepest shadow, the sheer variety of figures, spidery trees, and broken fragments draw viewers into its dynamic action.

Taking up almost half the length of the foreground is a large fallen obelisk. Figures stand, sit, and lean on top of it, gesture energetically, and engage actively with its massive stone blocks. By pushing the obelisk to the foreground, Piranesi places viewers in similar direct contact with the object. His sixth annotation notes that it was transferred from the Circus of Elagabalus outside the Porta Maggiore to its current location at the Barberini Palace. He renders the hieroglyphics with the utmost precision, as he does in his view of the obelisk erected in the piazza of San Giovanni in Laterano. There was also a fallen obelisk beside the Lateran, which Piranesi illustrates from two different perspectives in his views of the Basilica San Giovanni Laterano and its Piazza. In these views of the church the obelisk is barely visible, requiring more work for the viewers to look closely at every detail. Here, by contrast, the Barberini obelisk is on dramatic display as it is in the map of the Campus Martius below.

In both the view and map, Piranesi shows the obelisk broken and on the ground, with the individual blocks and their hieroglyphics clearly visible. The Campus Martius map takes the obelisk out of its contemporary setting into a fantastical reimagining of the most ancient part of Rome. While Piranesi represents the current position of the obelisk accurately in the Barberini print, in the map he envisions the obelisk in an ancient context. For his contemporaries Nolli and Vasi, who also portray this obelisk, “antiquities are of particular importance insofar as they relate to the active, lived-in part of the city” (Ceen 36). For Piranesi, by contrast, the recurring motif of the fallen obelisk conveys his antiquarian interests and fascination with the design, movement, and history of these ancient structures. (ZL)

To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 16 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.