This page was created by Avery Freeman.  The last update was by Jeanne Britton.

The Digital Piranesi

View of the Remains of the Ancient Buildings on the Slopes of the Aventine Along the Road Called the Marmorata








This image is one of many in this volume that is both referenced in the index to the Map of Rome and connected to the Map of the Roman Aqueducts. Those ties, which span the full expanse of the volume, are as much a part of the image above as its visual details: the deep gouges of vegetation and weathered stone, the seated man on the left whose arm breaks the margin, and the large letters across its surface that signal identifying information in the key. 

One of those letters (B) marks a dark rectangular opening in the Aventine Hill that Piranesi identifies as the outlet of the Acqua Appia. Scholars before and after Piranesi’s time have placed it elsewhere, at a point further along the Aventine. Centering on this image, Sarah Buck has unraveled the connections between Piranesi’s visual, textual, and cartographic evidence to conclude that the complexity of his web of references makes any disagreement with his claim virtually impossible: he overwhelms users of his book with scattered evidence in different media, all loosely interwoven through indexical references from one map to its index, and then to another map and other illustrations, all of which simply becomes too much to handle (Buck 2008).  

In the Index to the Map of Rome, Piranesi refers to this image and its information. Number 184 on the map (below), he explains in the index, identifies the terminus of arches that carried water of the Acqua Claudia to the Aventine.  

[image here] 

He then points readers to footnote 21 of his Explanation of the Map of the Aqueducts (a translation of Frontinus rather than an actual explanation of the aqueduct map), and points to details in that map, where he indicates the Neronian Arches at numbers 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37 (in the circled area below).  

[image here] 

Finally, in the same index entry, he directs us to this image, whose annotations point out the ruins of the Neronian Arches and those of the castellum of the aqueduct (A, B, C). In his pursuit of the granular details and the totalizing systems of ancient Rome’s water management, Piranesi, through the excessiveness of his printed references, tests the limits of both printed and digital media. (JB) 

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