The title of this veduta comes from its first annotation. Following this odd but not uncommon naming convention, the “veduta” is located at a spot, marked “A,” within the image. While the image seems, from this titling convention, to look inward, Piranesi’s discussion of this image in the index to the “Pianta di Roma” points expansively, through his use of cross-references, to connect this structure to his study of aqueducts throughout this volume.    

A viewer of this image is presented with a somewhat unremarkable accrual of arches in a flat, compressed composition with only a minimal suggestion of depth in the procession of arches noted in the caption (C). Like many of the vedute in this volume, it lacks a foreground. There is little definition to indicate the corner that fills the height of the left half of the image. The relative flatness of this veduta is, perhaps, reinforced by the first of three annotations. Labelling one element within a composition as a “veduta” could suggest a confusion of subject with genre: surely the arch marked with an “A” is in fact the arch, and not a view of the arch. Perhaps a consequence of hasty production or imprecise titling, this feature appears in three of the other images in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane and some of the Vedute di Roma. Each of these images in this volume also identifies at least three other structures, making the title one object of interest among many. (“View of the Remains of the Arches that brought the water from the Acqua Claudia to the Aventine Hill” “View of the Arch of Gallienus” and “View of the Ruins of the Palace of the Caesars on the Palatine”). By contrast, a common alternative method of titling an image appears in the “View of the Arch of Titus,” where a trompe l’œil inscription bears Piranesi’s title within the image. If the conflation of title and annotation in this image above can suggest another conflation, of subject and genre, then the image bears an internal logic of compression in its visual composition and its verbal annotation.   
 
In the index entry for the “Pianta di Roma,” though, the image is textually embedded in the aqueduct system that the volume traces. The index entry leads from the indication on the map to entry 210, which identifies the arch, its building material and the consuls under whom it was built. The index then points to Nero’s “predetta” or aforementioned arrangement of arches, which had been introduced in the previous index entry. There, Piranesi points to the Neronian Arches; describes their distribution of water from the Acqua Claudia to the Caelian Hill, the Nymphaeum of Nero, and the Palatine and Aventine Hills; refers to the Map of the Aqueducts; and notes that this image shows, in a plan lying atop a view, where these arches intersect with the Fountainhead of the Acqua Claudia. Differences between encountering this individual image as a viewer and locating it, as a reader, through the map’s index reveal the logics of the annotated image and the cartographic index that operate within the volume. (JB)