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Ruin of the Temple of the Speranza Vecchia
1 2020-04-10T20:59:15-07:00 Avery Freeman b9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cba 22849 1 from Volume 01 of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Opere plain 2020-04-10T20:59:15-07:00 Internet Archive piranesi-ia-vol1-027.jpg image Avery Freeman b9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cbaThis page is referenced by:
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2021-03-30T11:16:10-07:00
Remains of the Temple of the Speranza Vecchia
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Avanzo del Tempio della Speranza Vecchia
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2024-11-04T07:20:56-08:00
Avanzo del Tempio della Speranza Vecchia.; Piranesi Archit(etto) dis(egnò) inc(ise).
Remains of the Temple of the Speranza Vecchia; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi.
The so-called Temple of Speranza Vecchia, or Temple of Ancient Hope’ drew its name from its location in the Horti Spei Veteris (Gardens of Ancient Hope), a splendid imperial complex on the outskirts of Rome near the Aurelian Walls and the modern Porta Maggiore. However, the defining monument of this area in Piranesi’s time was not the temple, but rather the large Catholic basilica adjacent to it, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. As one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome, this basilica was one of the city’s most-visited and most frequently-reproduced sites. In Piranesi’s own “View of the Façade of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme,” below, from the Vedute di Roma (c. 1750), the church’s pristine Baroque façade recedes dramatically from right to left across the sheet, with the crumbling remains of the “temple,” labeled “C,” just visible in the distance.
This print instead places the temple squarely in the foreground and outside of the context of its surrounding buildings, granting the ruin both independence and monumentality.
There is very little text on the plate: no key with letters indicating various details within the larger image, and no description beyond the title. Piranesi employs a scena per angolo perspective, with a dramatically low horizon line and vanishing points appearing to the right and suggested to the left of the image. The semicircular apse looms over the staffage figures, with its north wall rising the whole height of the image and superseding the plate mark at top. Despite the oblique way the temple is angled, the opening of the apse seems to face the viewer directly. With these manipulations of perspective and scale, Piranesi has made the ruin resemble an ancient centrally-planned temple later incorporated into a walled structure, similar to the octagonal “Temple of Minerva Medica” from the Vedute di Roma.
As an architect, Piranesi understood the profession’s repertoire of impossible views, including sections, such as this cross-section of the Pantheon, which imaginatively cut through a building vertically to show its interior and exterior in a single image. Here, he seems to argue that time and decay have done the architect’s work of revealing the innermost structure of the building, with front, side, interior and exterior all visible simultaneously. At the same time, Piranesi’s rendering illustrates Rome as a city of monuments “turned towards the visitor … an open and scarcely populated theater scene directly connected to the viewing position of the beholder” (Verschaffel, 122). (AH)
