Piranesi did not share the Romantic attraction to aestheticized figures of ruins, even though his works perpetuated this popular taste (Kantor-Kazovsky 134-5). His images of incomplete ancient structures, such as the previous veduta, usually include the word “avanzi” or “remains” rather than “rovine” or “ruins,” betraying his commitment to the endurance rather than the destruction of antiquity. The remains that are the subject of this veduta are firmly located in the present, and they are testaments to the practices of renovation. The image depicts an instance of Rome’s intermingling of ancient and modern, and Piranesi’s convoluted syntax, and the reading-viewing mixture it creates, matches this mixture.

The largest thermal complex built in ancient Rome, the Baths of Diocletian were, like many similar structures throughout Christian Europe, purified before their Christian reuse in the eleventh century; in the sixteenth century, they were also reconfigured as a basilica under Michaelangelo (1475-1564). Within an expansive two-point perspective marked by drastic alternations between dark shadows and bright illumination, the cupola and gabled roof of the church and monastery of the Carthusian monks are both annotated with two letters that are distinct against the cloudy sky (A). Finding the second annotation is trickier. The letter is hard to spot in the shadows of the ruin’s apse, and the phrasing of the caption requires a mingled process of reading and viewing. It states that the image is a “Veduta degli avanzi delle Terme Diocleziane, e Massimiane, colla odierna Chiesa, e Monastero de’ Padri Certosini, fabbricata fra gli stessi avanzi: l’una indicata colla lettera A, l’altro colla B.” The “one” that is indicated with “A” is in fact, as noted, two: the church, to the left, and the monastery, near the center; the “other” that “B” identifies is presumably the “avanzi” that are twice named in the caption as the subject of the view and the structures “among” which the church and monastery are built. Making sense of the caption means moving between text and image, as well as between remains of the past and buildings of today. He emphasizes the persistence of Roman antiquity in his word choice, and his caption reenacts antiquity’s infusion in the modern city. (JB)