was not uniform in its appearance, but irregular in its expansion and individual parts, as its remains clearly show, and which I have reproduced in a close-up in the aforementioned Map of the Roman Forum
1 2024-10-18T13:41:41-07:00 Jeanne Britton e120651dde677d5cf1fd515358b14d86eb289f11 22849 1 plain 2024-10-18T13:41:42-07:00 Jeanne Britton e120651dde677d5cf1fd515358b14d86eb289f11This page is referenced by:
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View of the Remains of the Peristyle of the House of Nero
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Veduta dell'avanzo del Peristilo della Casa Neroniana
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Veduta dell'avanzo del Peristilo della Casa Neroniana.; Piranesi Archit(etto) dis(egnò) inc(ise).
View of the Remains of the Peristyle of the House of Nero; Drawn and engraved by the Architect Piranesi.
During his lifelong research on the reconstruction of ancient Rome, Piranesi dedicated significant time to iconic and highly symbolic areas such as the Campo Marzio or the Roman Forum. In his ambitious Le Antichità Romane, he included a Plan of the Ancient Roman Forum with its own Index, to zoom in on this large site, also including part of the Caelian and the Palatine Hills. The Palatine is the place where, according to tradition, Rome was born; therefore, over the centuries, it had been transformed by adding institutional buildings and structures. As Piranesi explains in the Index to the Map of Rome, each emperor built or made additions to a great complex later known as Palazzo dei Cesari (Palace of the Caesars or Imperial Palaces), which “non era di una ordinata figura, ma disuguale nella sua estensione e nelle sue appartenenze, come ben dimostrano le di lui reliquie, le quali sono state da me riportate in forma più ampia nella summentovata Icnografia del Foro Romano” (Index to the Map of Rome, no. 287).
Piranesi’s reconstruction of what he understood to be the Neronian palace (the Domus Aurea) on the Palatine is the subject of various plates in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, starting from a side view in the background of the Ruins of the arches that brought the water of the Acqua Claudia from the Caelian Hill to the Palatine Hill (D) to the View of the Remains of the Palace of the Caesars on the Palatine (E) seen from the Circo Massimo. Piranesi depicted the ruins of the Peristyle (marked with no. 301 in the Map of Rome), a courtyard surrounded by arcades, in the Remains of the Neronian Theater on the Palatine Hill, where it can be seen from the back (B).
This image shows the view of the Peristyle taken from the Palatine Hill. It emphasizes the impressive height of the curved structure, which was actually the exedra of the so-called Palatine Stadium, a circus mainly used as a garden with beautiful statues and a private riding ground, or Viridarium, which was built by Domitian on the ruins of the Domus Aurea after Nero’s death. Piranesi identified it as the remains of the Peristyle of the House of Nero because he understood it to be part of the works the emperor commissioned to connect the halls of his huge palace from the Oppian and the Caelian Hills to the Palatine, where an addition of the aqueduct which took his name was also built (Map of Rome, no. 300; Topographical Map of the Roman Aqueducts, no. 25-26).
The view is marked by a strong contrast between deep black lines depicting the exedra and light ones delineating the background structures. These lighter features give an atmospheric effect, with a kind of embracing mist that interposes itself between the viewer and the scene. Piranesi’s Venetian training as a vedutista is also revealed by the theatrical trick of including a darker backdrop on the right side (the edge of a high building) and his depiction of a moving sky where Garacci observes that “si gonfiano le nuvole con segni grafici disegnati velocemente, come leggeri scarabocchi e piccole virgole, sull’area intatta del rame che restituisce in stampa un bianco Luminoso” (Garacci in Mariani 2014, 149). (CS)
