piranesi
John Wilton-Ely

1983
Utopia or Megalopolis? The Ichnographia of Piranesi's Campus Martius Reconsidered

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pl. XVI


pl. XVIII


2nd frontispiece


In support of the essential validity of his visionary reconstructions in the plates of the Campo Marzio, Piranesi developed certain illustrative techniques from the Antichità Romane; techniques involving a dialogue between his artistic intuition and archaeological facts as revealed by documents like the Severan Marble Plan, together with a close topographical investigation of the existing city.16 A representative example of this fruitful relationship between practical antiquarian study and flights of the imagination in the Campo Marzio is provided by the Theatre of Pompey. Here the surviving remains, embedded in medieval townscape near the Campo dei Fiori, were clarified by reference to the Marble Plan (pl. XVI), then stripped bare of later accretions (pl. XVIII), and eventually reconstructed imaginatively in the Ichnographia which was to be supported by selected aerial perspectives elsewhere in the treatise (2nd frontispiece and pl. XLVIII).




16   The surviving fragments of the Severan Marble Plan had already played an important role in the Antichità Romane where Piranesi reproduced them extensively in Volume I, pls. I-V. For a modern evaluation of the Marble Plan see G. Carretoni, A. M. Colini et al., La Pianta Marmorea di Roma antica, Forma Urbis Romae, Rome 1960.

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