Ancient Circus

This fantastical image is an imaginative reconstruction of the Circus Maximus, a lost ancient site devoted to public spectacle. Framed by a foreground teeming with statues, inscriptions, and architectural rubble, a path recedes at a sharp diagonal alongside a precipitous drop that can be glimpsed to the left and, to the right, a dense row of obelisks, temples, and columns in view of ornate palaces perched above. Set off against a tempestuous sky, a spindly tree creeps into the space above distant pyramids. 

This frontispiece comes from the third volume of the Antichità Romane, a magisterial four-volume work published in 1756 that presented the ruins, tombs, bridges, and stone-work of ancient Rome through alternating vedute, cross-sections, plans, close-ups, and maps. This image follows a title page declaring “sepulchral monuments” as the subject of the volume and precedes 54 etchings of tombs along the Appian Way. Piranesi’s approach in these volumes constitutes a landmark in the development of archaeology as a discipline. Taken together, the individual images in these volumes, many of which juxtapose different genres (plans and views) or multiple perspectives within the same visual field, present architectural history as a composite of heterogenous elements that are best understood through the engaged and interactive approach to historical reconstruction and visual knowledge that Piranesi’s inventive compositions and reconstructions require.

Between imaginative reconstruction and pure invention, this image exaggerates what was by all accounts, in fact, an unbelievably lavish site for public spectacle. The Circus Maximus was devoted to horse and chariot racing, and Piranesi’s reinterpretation faithfully shows that it centered around a central barrier, or spina, whose length was indicated by two markers on its far ends between which monuments, temples, censers, and statues were assembled. Positioned on the plain between the Palatine and Aventine hills, the circus came to be surrounded by opulent structures from which emperors could observe the spectacle. The image’s foreground, positioned in what would be the public seating area, includes among its rubble sarcophagi, busts, urns, statues, and a small column, many with at least partially legible inscriptions.

As an inventive historical reconstruction, this image borrows heavily from the capriccio or caprice, an established genre that reinterpreted, assimilated, and accumulated architectural elements and fragments. Many of Piranesi’s capricci include descriptive titles and captions that specify the type of structure or site being depicted: they are labelled, for example, as “a” rotunda, rather than “the” rotunda of the Pantheon, or “camera sepolcrale inventata” [imaginary sepulchral chamber]. The biographical and publication history of this imaginary recreation of an actual site, however, further complicates its generic status. 

That history is a scandalous tale of artistic revenge. Piranesi was always seeking patronage for his lavish publications that couldn’t rely on the consumption habits of grand tourists. In Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, (1728-1799), he seemed to have found the perfect patron: wealthy, unrestricted, and well-travelled, Charlemont was capable of the providing the funds and flattered by Piranesi’s promised dedications, which were to appear in frontispieces of each of the work’s four volumes. But when Charlemont’s support fell through, Piranesi expressed his rage by producing an edited version of their correspondence in which he also used the tools of his medium to argue in visual details for the power and permanence of the print medium. 

The short column or rostrum at the center of the rubble in the foreground bears the signs of an effaced inscription and, below that, a dedication to Mars Ultor. In this space, about 40 copies of the Antichità Romane that were printed before Charlemont’s commitment fizzled include Piranesi’s original dedication to his would-be patron. For the printings that followed, he reworked the copper—a malleable metal—and included rectangular shapes that resemble printers’ trays. Instead of erasing all signs an inscription or dedication, he points to his own medium, the printed etching, and publicizes his frustration. In the pamphlet published the following year, Lettere di giustificazione scritte a Milord Charlemont [Letters of Justification written to Milord Charlemont], Piranesi also includes scaled-down versions of the work’s four frontispieces, each of which show the missing inscriptions. Annotations in these smaller versions also point out each insult that Piranesi leverages against Charlemont and his retinue, including effaced and satirical dedications and degrading epitaphs. In the pamphlet’s version of this image, the rostrum is captioned as “Colonna rostrale colla iscrizione di Milord” [Rostral column with the dedication to milord]. In the reworked version of the original larger image included here, the dedication to Mars, credited as ultor [avenger] with the assassination of Julius Caesar, is another swipe at Charlemont, who is replaced and implicitly equated with a traitor. 

The smaller version of this image continued to have a further life outside of the pamphlet, as Piranesi reworked the copper plate again and began publishing it in copies of his Opere varie [Various Works] in 1760. The original annotation markers remain within the image but there is now below the image, instead of their explanations of the quarrel with Charlemont, a new title that effectively erases it. Now titled “Veduta d’uno de’circhi antichi con altri monumenti al dintorno” [View of one of the ancient circuses with other monuments around it], the smaller version of this image is removed from its original context of withdrawn patronage and revenge and assimilated into Piranesi’s practice of the caprice genre. Titled so as to be understood as a veduta or “view” of one of the city’s many ancient circuses, the smaller version becomes suggestive rather than representational, a generalized type rather than an individual specimen. This final revision suggests the caprice’s combination of invention and documentation by accumulation and juxtaposition is, in Piranesi’s work, central to archaeological and historical study. 

This fancifully reconstructed lost archaeological site testifies to a future aesthetic that is based on but not limited by the past, and the lasting power of print as opposed to marble. This image certainly represents Rome’s imperial plunder of obelisks, but its inclusion of these monuments within its architectural accumulation also points to a future of ornamental design and aesthetic combination that Piranesi proposes in Diverse Maniere d’Adornare i Cammini (1769), according to which Egyptian architecture can offer, in addition to delicacy and inventiveness, rather than hermetic mysteriousness. This image’s assimilation and, especially in the later reduced-size version, its sublimation of financial quarrels, attests to the pervasive power that Piranesi’s sought and generated in visual art that is both imaginative and documentary.