Following the three previous images that show the actual marble fragments from which Piranesi crafts his own cartographic, historical, and archaeological vision in the “Pianta di Roma,” this image takes a radically close-up look at a structure that is crucial for Piranesi’s approach to Rome. It is a gateway into the volume’s 60 plates of similar sizes, Piranesi’s representation of the city’s ancient remains, and his priorities and methods. It focuses on the construction methods of the Aurelian Wall, a defensive city wall built in the 270s CE and frequently rebuilt and renovated over many centuries. Against a naturalistic background—there is a wedge of a faintly cloudy sky and a hint of vegetation toward the upper left—the plate foregrounds information, with roughly one eighth of its space devoted to a caption that itemizes building materials: tevolozza, opus incertum, and tegoloni. Near the center, five illuminated triangular stones are increasingly exposed along the descent of the wall’s façade. To the right, a large but obscured letter “A” identifies these stones as tevolozza. The wall’s inner material—identified in the caption as opus incertum (B)—is bound by layers of large square tiles (C) that are marked by the master of the kiln (D). In the preface to the Index to the Map of Rome, Piranesi refers to this image for its display of construction methods that were able to render the wall “stabile e ferma” and by which its innards were “nudrite.” After pointing, in a cross-reference, to the following plate, which also depicts the wall, he then begins “our stroll” through the itinerary of the Map of Rome and the contents of the volume.  

A small feature of this plate suggests the development of Le Antichità Romane out of an unrealized project. Based on the black border around its edge, Lola Kantor-Kazovsky has identified this image as one in a series of ten primarily technical illustrations, devoted to the wall and its connection to the aqueduct system, that were likely intended as a separate publication: Piece of Tufa, Remains of the Aqueduct of the Anione Vecchio, Porta San Lorenzo Built by Aurelian, Cross Section of the Giulia, Tepula, and Marcia Aqueducts, Plan of the Buttresses of the Muro Torto, Tomb Chamber in the Casali Vineyard at Porta San Sebastiano, Monument of the Fountainhead of the Antonine Aqueduct, Cross Section of the Aqueduct of Caracalla, Wall Along the Tiber that Secures the Outlet of the Cloaca Maxima, Plan of the Baths of Titus (Kantor-Kazovsky 100). This image in particular demonstrates Piranesi’s method of architectural exposure, which Barbara Maria Stafford has described as “his use of the etching needle as a creative surgical tool to uncover information about an otherwise irretrievable past” (1991, 56-7). Such exposure allows Piranesi to make the wall convey the methods of its construction in a way that resonates with the idea that city walls such as the Aurelian Wall “tend to ‘speak’ with a degree of power and immediacy which few other buildings can rival” (Dey 4). With the linked texts of image annotations and the map’s index, Piranesi makes the crumbling wall “speak” and reveal the strength of its construction with this appropriate entry into the city as he sees it. (JB) 

To see this image in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.