The Digital PiranesiMain MenuAboutThe Digital Piranesi is a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced digital edition of the works of Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).Works and VolumesGenres, Subjects, and ThemesBibliographyGlossary
View of the Temple of Bacchus
12020-02-20T06:55:34-08:00Avery Freemanb9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cba228491from Volume 16 of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Opereplain2020-02-20T06:55:34-08:00Internet Archivepiranesi-ia-vol16-061.jpgimageAvery Freemanb9edcb567e2471c9ec37caa50383522b90999cba
12019-02-15T17:15:38-08:00View of the Temple of Bacchus26Veduta del Tempio di Bacco, inoggi Chiesa di Sant' Urbano, distante due miglia da Roma fuori della Porta di San Sebastiano. Esso è il più intero di questa forma che sia rimaso a Roma ai giorni nostri, sì nell’esterno che nell’interno. La sua Ara si conserva peranche nel Pronao colla iscrizione εCTIAI Δ IONYCOY AπPωNIANOC IζPOΦANTHC: Ara di Bacco, Aproniano Sacerdote.plain2024-02-23T11:36:39-08:00Title and Description: Veduta del Tempio di Bacco, inoggi Chiesa di Sant' Urbano, distante due miglia da Roma fuori della Porta di San Sebastiano. Esso è il più intero di questa forma che sia rimaso a Roma ai giorni nostri, sì nell’esterno che nell’interno. La sua Ara si conserva peranche nel Pronao colla iscrizione εCTIAI ΔIONYCOY AπPωNIANOC IζPOΦANTHC: Ara di Bacco, Aproniano Sacerdote. Key: 1. Muri fra gl’Intercolonnj del Pronao, e barbacani fatti da Urbano VIII per riparar la rovina del Tempio. 2. Chiavi delle catene di ferro impiegatovi per lo stesso fine. 3. Avanzo dell’antica casa dell’Edituo. Signature: Presso l’Autore a Strada Felice nel palazzo Tomati vicino alla Trinità de’monti Signature 2: Gio(vanni). Batt(ista). Piranesi Arch(itetto). F(ecit).Title and Description: View of the Temple of Bacchus, today the Church of Sant’Urbano, two miles from Rome outside the Porta San Sebastiano. This temple is the most intact of this form that remains in Rome today, both in its exterior and interior. Its Altar is also preserved in the Pronaos with the inscription: εCTIAI ΔIONYCOY AπPωNIANOC IζPOΦANTHC: Altar of Bacchus, Apronian Priest. Key: 1. Walls in between the columns of the Pronaos, and fortifications built by Urban VIII to repair the remains of the Temple. 2. Anchors for the iron chains employed for the same purpose. 3. Ruin of the ancient house of Aedituus. Signature: Published by the Author on the Strada Felice in the Palazzo Tomati near the Trinità de’ Monti. Signature 2: Made by the Architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi.Each volume of the Vedute di Roma can be experienced as an imaginary itinerary. The second volume in the Didot edition (volume 17) concludes outside the city, most notably with images from Hadrian’s Villa; likewise, this volume heads beyond the city’s gates with this image. Except the Portico di Ottavia (itself one of the gates to Rome), each of the structures that follow in this volume is noted for its distance from the city. Passing through the Porta di San Sebastiano along Rome’s former southern boundary, Piranesi takes his viewers to the Temple of Bacchus in this etching before proceeding, in the following images, to what is now the Caffarella Park, the city of Cori, and elsewhere. Here, two miles outside of Rome, Piranesi draws attention to the temple’s state of preservation: it is, the caption notes, “il più intero di questa forma che sia rimaso a Roma ai giorni nostri, sì nell’esterno che nell’interno.” The image, though, foregrounds ruin, with heavy shading drawing viewers’ eyes to the deep gash in the façade, and a visual boundary of rubble, including a bust and another fragment that interrupts the caption, fragmenting the word “Tempio” in an effective use of trompe-l’oeil. Individual annotations point out sections of repair, most prominently the walls between the columns of the pronaos, which Piranesi specifies were built under the restorations by Urban VIII and his family, the Barberini, in the 1630s.
In his Raccolta de’ Tempj Antichi (1780), included in the Didot edition of the Opere, Francesco Piranesi devotes a total of eight plates to this monument, including a conjectural elevation of its original state (below). (Following later theories about the identity of the temple, he calls it the Tempio dell’ Onore e della Virtù fuori di Porta Capena, which is now considered to be a different temple of which no remains survive.) Among Francesco’s plates is an image of the ancient altar that includes the inscription.
Giambattista, by contrast, does not duplicate this inscription visually in the following image of the interior. Instead, the annotation in this image renders the altar’s text in ways that characterize his persistent combination of visual and verbal evidence, as he does in his view of the Temple of the Sibyl. Among the temple’s intact details, he notes that a Greek inscription survives on the ancient altar, duplicates the Greek in a tidy script, and offers a Latin translation in a similar upright lettering. His own Italian text simulates manuscript with its italicized slant. Similar visual differentiation between languages and texts appears Piranesi cites the inscription verbally rather than depicting it visually, as Francesco does in his etching of the altar itself. Giambattista’s choices indicate the centrality of his own written texts to his presentation of the city and its ruins. The monk who seems, in the following view of the temple’s interior, to read closely on the altar might demonstrate Piranesi’s own dedication to careful visual examination of either textual or visual evidence. (JB)
To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 16 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.
