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• 1 2019-02-15T17:39:59-08:00 View of the Temple of Hercules in the City of Cori 21 Veduta del Tempio di Ercole nella Città di Cora, dieci miglia lontano da Velletri plain 2022-08-19T06:26:33-07:00 Title: Veduta del Tempio di Ercole nella Città di Cora, dieci miglia lontano da Velletri Signature: Cavalier Piranesi delin(eavit). e inc(idit). Title: Veduta del Tempio di Ercole nella Città di Cora, dieci miglia lontano da Velletri Signature: Cavalier Piranesi delin(eavit). e inc(idit). Title: View of the Temple of Hercules in the City of Cori, ten miles from Velletri Signature: Designed and engraved by Cavalier Piranesi Following the sequence of Didot’s Opere, this image leads virtual tourists further southwest of central Rome, beyond the subjects of the previous three images in the Cafarella gardens. This image presents the first-century BCE Doric Temple of Hercules in the ancient site of Cori, one of the most ancient cities of Italy, as a site of conflict between natural overgrowth and architectural magnificence. Its full title specifies that Cori is ten miles (or 20 km) from Velletri, which is itself about 40 km from the center of Rome. In this volume’s previous view, of the fountain and grotto of Egeria, the boundary between nature and culture is an explicit issue. Here, Piranesi’s predilection for depicting nature’s reclaiming of architectural structures is on vivid display, with plants sprouting from the temple’s roof and foundations. Piranesi emphasizes its topographical elevation—it is at the top of a hill—with this image’s perspective, and his careful attention to its fluted, crumbling columns contrasts with the smooth surfaces of the modern bell tower behind the cella, the inner chamber of a classical temple, which transformed the temple into a church of Saint Peter.  
  
  In Piranesi’s archaeological volume devoted to the city, Antichità di Cora, printed five years earlier in 1764,  elevations, plans, and detailed studies present a totalizing view of this structure. In that volume, this temple is a site of archaeological inquiry and scholarly debate: Piranesi speculates about its builders, materials, and design by citing and especially interrogating classical and contemporary sources.
  In that volume, the darker, more overgrown view above zooms in on the contemporary structure’s ancient pronaos, omitting the modern bell tower. The volume’s most striking plate is a study of the ancient city wall, which was constructed by what is now known as polygonal masonry. This wall, he claims, demonstrates that “a quegli antichi questa costruttura fu insegnata a fare dalla natura” (Antichità di Cora 2). In this image from the Vedute di Roma, two human figures suggest a different presentation of the natural and, perhaps, the ancient. The human figures in Piranesi’s images tend to be downtrodden, contorted in their broad gestures, and hastily etched. In the sunlit foreground, an upright man with a walking stick looks down on a man who stands out even in Piranesi’s cast of haggard characters (detail 1 below).  He is dressed in rags, kneeling or crawling, and a sinister smile emerges from his pointed beard. A figure with similar features sits on the material that serves as the illusionistic caption, his gaze apparently directed towards the other two men (detail 2 above). They are striking instances of what Bart Verschaffel has identified as a minor type of Piranesi’s staffage figures: “halflings, savages, trolls, some as though halted in the midst of a metamorphosis” (134). Given Piranesi’s dedication to capturing the street life of eighteenth-century Rome in its activity, squalor, and elegance, the confrontation between the two men that is front and center in this image is difficult to overlook and explain. Is this the meeting of a modern man and a noble savage? Is this a confrontation between the present and the past? Standing before a supremely ancient structure that has been modernized by Christian consecration and humbled by botanical overgrowth, these two human figures suggest parallel confrontations between nature and culture as well as past and present. (JB)  
  
  To see this image in the Vedute di Roma, volume 16 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.