In this image, it is easy to miss the human figures that slouch and gesture between giant columns offset by a vivid sky. Varying white tufts and shadowy plumes form a dramatic backdrop for the deep gouges and crumbling surfaces of these seven Corinthian columns. In some places, as in the three close-ups below, the etched lines that render variations in the sky seem to meld with those of the columns’ irregular silhouettes. 
This artistry is, though, a deliberate misrepresentation as well as a skillful illusion. These columns, as his full caption states and his index entry for the structure details, had been built into the walls of various modern structures. Now identified as remnants of the Temple of Matidia, the columns appear in this volume’s “Pianta di Roma” near the Pantheon, at no. 77 (below, L). They also appear, at no. 26, in the Scenographia Campi Martii (below, R).  
In these cartographic representations, Piranesi offers impossible views of Rome’s ancient ruins as if the city remained unchanged after antiquity. In the previous image, Piranesi depicts ancient columns that have been integrated into a modern structure and a contemporary scene, and the images of Le Antichità Romane are faithful, if occasionally exaggerated renditions of antiquity in their eighteenth-century environment. By contrast, this image is a fanciful creation of ancient remains stripped of the modern structures specified in its related texts—the walls of the courtyard of the Confraternity of the Rosary, nearby houses, a soap maker’s shop, and Vicolo Spada. This image’s exposure of embedded and obscured remains suggests Piranesi’s almost surgical visual methods (Stafford 1991, 56-66), and its use of available archaeological evidence also demonstrates “the entwining of imagination with erudition” that Peter Miller identifies as “Piranesi’s fundamental modernity” (137). 
        
Piranesi’s annotations within the image call particular attention to the eighth column on the right (A) and its hollowed-out groove (B), where a pipe directed water from the ancient Acqua Vergine. In the early 17th century, the discovery of a lead pipe near this location that bears the inscription “Templo Matidiae” helped attribute the actual structure, and Piranesi’s description and location of the columns in this image, this volume’s map, and the Campus Martius map strongly suggest that the subject of this image is in fact the Temple of Matidia (Richardson 1992, 516). In this image, Piranesi exposes the evidence of the hollowed-out granite column (the eighth on the far right) rather than showing the eight columns as the caption describes them (“in gran parte interrate nel piano moderno di Roma”) and, as the index entry more specifically locates them, within the walls of buildings and streets. The textural variations in the sky and the irregular gashes in the Corinthian columns serve aesthetic rather than evidentiary purposes; as such, this inaccurately attributed temple and this inaccurately represented ruin can be seen as an image that both fulfills artistic purposes and seeks, without fulfilling, accurate archaeological identification. (JB)