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The Digital Piranesi

View of the Remains belonging to the Golden House of Nero

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View of the Remains Belonging to the Golden House of Nero
While most prints in this volume of Le Antichità Romane have a similar size of roughly 120 x 195 mm, this veduta has a more horizontal focus, sized 102 x 266 mm. In this heavily annotated oblong print, the caption blends into the image, which encourages the eye to wander towards its depths, but the medal included on the right, which bears minimal detail, distinct edges, and a smooth texture, contrasts with the merging of the caption with the image by protruding towards the viewer. The medal also stands out because it signals the visual incorporation of evidence in the web of this image’s referential complexity. This is an image about identification; the structure with three vaults in the background has been identified as the Golden House of Nero, the Temple of the Peace, and the Basilica of Maxentius (Constantine).

Unlike the vast majority of the annotated images in this volume, the corresponding text for this image appears only in the Index to the Map of Rome. There, across three entries, his explanations do not clarify what we see (no. 282, 283 and 284. N.B. The index numbering in the Didot edition is off by one here; the text refers to 283-285). The title states that the print shows the remains of the tablinum of Nero’s Golden House. The tablinum (no. 283) was adjacent to the open atrium (no. 284) connected by five entrances. Three of these entrances were still visible during Piranesi’s time and are identified in the image (A, B, and C). Piranesi continues explaining that the remains of the façade are labeled with letter D and the lateral jambs with the letters E and F.
When he speaks about the remains of the tablinum (G and H), he expresses frustration with “moderni Scrittori” [modern Writers] for incorrectly identifying the building as the Temple of Peace. Without any indication of a cella, portico, or pronaos, the structure could not, he specifies, have been the Temple of Peace. Moreover, to make his argument, he incorporates material evidence into his image – the medal (“Medaglia dell’Erizzo”), probably based on a real medal, with a reconstruction of the structure’s façade. He also points from the Index to the Map of Rome towards the Plan of the Ancient Roman Forum, where the tablinum (58) and the open atrium (57) are shown, which coincide with the structures indicated by 283 and 284 in the Map of Rome.
Even though Piranesi was correct that this building is not, as his contemporaries alleged, the Temple of Peace, he had previously shared this very same belief, when he titled a veduta of the same building, with its distinctive aesthetics of the three vaults, “Veduta degli avanzi del tempio della pace.” Somewhere between the publication of this print (probably c. 1749-51) and that of Le Antichità Romane in 1756, Piranesi realized that both he and modern writers were, in fact, wrong. He determined the correct location of the Temple of Peace, as evident from the Map of the ancient Roman Forum (nos. 258-260), behind the tablinum (detail below), and he reprinted the early veduta with an altered title: “Veduta degli avanzi tablino della casa aurea di nerone, detti volgarmente il tempio della pace.” From Le Antichità Romane onwards, he consistently refers to these buildings as the Golden House of Nero, as in the large veduta from the Vedute di Roma later in his career.
In Piranesi’s disagreements with modern writers, he uses an abundance of evidence by cross-referencing between the Map of Rome early in the volume and the Plan of the Ancient Roman Forum towards the end, and from those images to their separate indices. While pointing us to all the evidence that his contemporaries were wrong, his own evidence in support of identifying it as the Golden House of Nero, from the medal in the image to the two maps and their indices, remains inconclusive. And even after all his effort, he identified the building (G and H) incorrectly, since it was all along the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine. As is apparent from the close-up below, Piranesi would have disagreed with that identification of the building, as he listed the Basilica di Costantino on the Map of Ancient Rome under numbers 239-240. Rather than accuracy, what Piranesi’s evidence demonstrates here is artistry—that of visual composition and book organization. (ML)