Veduta del Monumento

Known as the Porta Maggiore or Porta Prenestina, this magnificent gate lies at the convergence of eight aqueducts and two ancient roads. In the full title of the image, Piranesi explains that this monument was erected by Titus Vespasian to commemorate the restoration of two aqueducts—the Anio, or Aniene nuovo, and Claudia. Inscription, itself a valuable type of evidence in antiquarian research, in this image invites a consideration of the contemporary medium of print. 

Filling the height of the plate, but neatly contained by its margin, this gate resembles a triumphal arch, but one that celebrates the control of nature through hydraulic engineering rather than the domination of people through military exploits. Piranesi vividly renders the rusticated style of the monument’s travertine, using sharp relief to create seemingly undulating surfaces. People peek out from a door, draw water from the fountain, and gesture beside and, it seems, in tandem with, the annotation marker (5) that points, through the arch on the left, to the Via Prenestina. Throughout Piranesi’s works and especially in the Vedute di Roma, miniscule people engage in daily activities, contort themselves in pain, or gesticulate forcefully. They have been seen to serve varied purposes and produce a range of visual effects: they can establish and exaggerate scale, provide documentary evidence of eighteenth-century Roman life, suggest pervasive decay, hinder identification, gesticulate towards nothing in particular, or, by pointing to an image’s caption or title, call attention to its deictic effects.

A complex intersection in antiquity, this site becomes in Piranesi’s rendition an intersection of different media. The text of the monument’s inscription, when joined with that of Piranesi’s caption, draws attention to the significance of inscription itself. In this image, the visual appearance of the heavily-shadowed and carefully rendered inscription reinforces an ambiguity that Renaissance antiquarians appreciated about inscriptions and that can be identified in typography: a legible word, whether inscribed or printed, is both visual and verbal. If Piranesi’s vedute often ask to be experienced verbally and visually, the dramatic detail, lengthy inscription, and substantial caption in this word-image composite virtually make it an assault on its beholders’ interpretive methods. Piranesi’s Italian caption, which includes a long title and key, serves the practical purpose of condensing and translating the Latin inscription. It notes, of the monument, that carved into it is the name of Claudius, who built it, and Vespasiano, who restored it (“… scolpito in esso il nome, di Claudio, che lo edificò, e di Vespasiano che lo restaurò”). Additionally, though, as a piece of three-dimensional stone, the caption takes on an illusionistic materiality that highlights the physical presence of the inscription. Through the effects of trompe-l’œil, Piranesi’s caption seems to reinscribe the construction and renovation of the aqueducts, arches, and gate into their natural setting. 

Piranesi’s captions are often embedded in similar ways into the scenes his images depict: banderoles curl around and between pedestrians or weary men rest on large stone slabs. Additionally, his renditions of inscriptions, especially his own fictive inscriptions in title pages or dedication pages, manipulate and transform the method of ancient epigraphy in order to call attention to the media of engraving and print.

Inscriptions on natural surfaces are frequent topics—and indeed written media—for a number of William Wordsworth’s poems, and their considerations of poetic and typeset lines foreground the materiality of the printed page. Piranesi’s inscriptions touch on similar concerns in his own manipulations of print. In this image, even with its magnificently legible inscription, Piranesi seems, though the content and appearance of his caption, to attend to the ways that inscriptions can call into question relationships between materiality and meaning. Piranesi’s captions—engraved in copper but also inscribed into metal before being inked and printed—amplify such interrogations.