Pianta di Roma

In this map of modern and ancient Rome, Piranesi includes an index with over 400 numbered items, many of which, after naming a monument, refer to his own etchings in other publications. Its illusions of curled paper allow past and present to overlap in a very literal sense, and the illusion of broken stone fragments authenticates Piranesi’s cartographic inventions by making them look like pieces of historical evidence. 

Etched on three individual copper plates, this map carries divergent implications in its various printed forms. Combined, as it is in the digital image here, into one large (122 x 71cm) sheet, it simulates as a single engraving, which might serve as something of an advertisement to his other works, with references to “see” other images serving as incentives to buy them as well. Printed and bound, as it is in the University of South Carolina’s copy of the Didot edition of the first volume of the Vedute di Roma, it also serves as something like a complicated table of contents for this two-volume work. He intended the map to be bound in this way, with the other plates of this series, which includes a title page and a frontispiece which predate most of the images. However, its three sheets are bound in the volume individually, making any view of this oversized image a work of imaginative (or digital) reconstruction. Turning pages, though, is one of its many intentions. 

Piranesi’s vivid and suggestive use of trompe-l’œil joins what appear to be a stone slab with curling paper as well as copious textual information with meticulous cartographic detail. The “indice” [index] or key begins near the top of the image, where it appears as hand-etched script on paper, but moving down the left side of the page, it morphs into a curling scroll that reveals a scene of architectural fragments that includes a large slab bearing the name of Piranesi’s benefactor, Clement XIIII (1705-1774). To the right, a small inset map shows only ancient structures that remain standing. Its curling corners, like the bottom of the index, call attention to the medium of print in ways that appear frequently in Piranesi’s works. 

Numbered items in the central map refer to the surrounding index, from which he then directs viewers to his other works, instructing them to see plates in the Vedute di Roma, directing them to another volume with abbreviations such as “V.A.aR.e,” or “Vede Antichità Romane” [see Roman Antiquities], or pointing them to a range of images, such as “Antichità Romane Tomo II Tavola 7 fino alla 15.” Included in this specific reference to nine etchings is the image in this exhibit, “Veduta di altra parte della Camera Sepolcrale di L. Arrunzio.” If we follow this reference to the image in Antichità Romane, we shift perspectives from the bird’s eye view of the map to the interior views of an ancient tomb and the close-up view of its ornamental details, domestic objects, and crumbling frescos. Viewers toggle between the map’s objective, bird’s-eye view of urban space and the view’s sunken worm’s eye view of individual monuments. The large map displays what is present and preserved; annotations in its referenced vedute describe and speculate about what is absent and lost. This movement produces a non-linear reading experience and a scattered visual experience that resembles hypertext. 

Piranesi’s use of trompe-l’œil validates his eccentric cartographic methods while also suggesting that any cartographic image is built on illusion. In his “Nuova Topografia di Roma” [New Topography of Rome] of 1748, Giambattista Nolli had established the convention of orienting maps of Rome with north at the top of the page; as a collaborator of Nolli’s, Piranesi was certainly aware of this shift away from the religious orientation towards Jerusalem. And yet, south appears at the top of this image. This orientation runs against the objective, secular aims of Enlightenment cartography.

The map’s expansive scope and miniscule detail invoke the sublime, which, for Edmund Burke arises from either extremity of scale. Its compression of information, visual and verbal detail, and bibliographic references, suggests a version of the sublime that links information through shifting perspectives—from the cartographic to the interior or the close-up, from the bird’s eye view to the worm’s eye of the vedute. With his conspicuous play of trompe-l’œil, Piranesi suggests that the medium of the reproductive print can only legitimately represent the reality of Rome if this imaginative act is represented as the illusion, sublime in both scale and scope, that it is.