1996.09.04
Wilton-Ely text
From: John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).
p.73-77: "Among these polemically directed treatises of the 1760s, there is one which stands apart by virtue of its originality as well as by its intimate connection with Piranesi's artistic development--Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma. Although published in 1762, like Della Magnificenza, its preparation extends well back into the previous decade, originating as a rejected part of Antichità Romane. Certain implications in its general approach, however, anticipate a significant change taking place in Piranesi's intellectual and artistic life by the mid-1760s.
The Campo Marzio had grown out of the Ichnographia, the large map reconstructing the monumental quarter of Rome between the modern Via del Corso and the Tiber. This itself was envisaged as complementary to the "fragments" containing Piranesi's reconstructiond plans of the Nymphaeum of Nero, the Forum Romanum and the Capitoline Hill in the Antichità. The preparation of the Ichnographia, moreover, was closely related to the tense if productive relationship between Robert Adam and Piranesi between 1755-7. Before Adam's final departure from Rome in April 1757, Piranesi had already begun work on the dedicatory plate at the top of the map (actually dated that year), presumably having a basic conception of the portion overlaid by the inscription. By then he had also decided that the map should form a part of a complete treatise devoted to this area of monumental Rome.
As characteristic of the Enlightenment, the Campo Marzio set out to record the physical evidence of historical change and the patterns of urban growth determined by the interrelation of physical factors and political forces. The polemical function of the work, therefore, depended on the sheer weight of evidence and the immence span of time covered in reply to those evolutionary theories advanced by Winckelmann in support of Greece.
In his dedication to Adam, Piranesi described the thorough investications undertaken since the idea first arose from their discussions when exploring the site. He also justified the conjectures and the hypothetical reconstructions necessary in an area where many important structures remained embedded in or below the medieval townscape. The thirty-three pages of text that follow contain a display of erudition based on literary authorities and later scholarship, but, as in the other folios of these years, it is the sequence of plates which constitutes the key element in this celebration of Roman magnificence.
Initially, the geography of the physical setting is provided by a map which also locates the sites of the principle remains. Then, almost to rival views of the ruined Palmyra set in the sterile expanse of the Syrian desert as illustrated by Wood and Dawkins in 1753, this is followed by the Scenographia -- an awesome aerial panorama of the entire site with the remains starkly isolated onthe plain, as if the Middle Ages had not intervined. A sequence of maps follows plotting each phase in the evolutionary story from the virgin site via the contributions of Romulus, the Tarquins and the early Consuls to the dramatic flowering of an urban plan of great complexity under Augustus. The finale, however, is reserved for the Ichnographia--a giant plan of six plates reconstructing Rome during the later Empire. Piranesi, adopting the same illusionistic techniquesas the master-plan of the Antichità, shows the Ichnographia as a vast fragment of an even larger work.
In the thirty-seven plates which follow, Piranesi produces the raw material from which this speculation originated, developing further the various didactic techniques of the Antichità with a comparable rhetoric. Medieval accretions are removed from the fragmentary structures like the Theatre of Marcellus. Elsewhere, the aid of the marble plan is involved in recovering the remains of the Theatre of Pompey from its urban conglomeration, and its seating system is reconstructed from surviving fragments. Engineering facts are given prominence in such overwhelming plates as that of the Ponte Molle. Even more intractablematerial, such as the battered remains of the Mausoleum of Agustus, is given significance by the deployment of lighting and texture in order to isolate significant components in its masonry core.
For the first time in his archeological career, Piranesi provides perspective renderings of his reconstructed plans in the Campo Marzio. Selecting certain portions of the Ichnographia for this treatment, he depicts the area of Hadrian's Mausoleum in the second frontispiece, together with the other bird's-eye views of important zones: those of the Theatre of Marcellus and Balbus, the Pantheon with the Baths of Agrippa, and the Ampitheatre of Statilus Taurus adjoining the Orologium, or the giant sundial, of Augustus. Piranesi's reasons for this new approach can be seen as part of his increasing concern with a mode of architectural design growing out of antiquity rather than with the mere reproduction of the past. While he was influenced to a minor extent by earlier perspective reconstructions by Kircher and Fischer van Erlach, Piranesi's individual buildings in these aerail viewa show a new conception of design which departs from his 'Baroque' compositions of the 1750s. Despite lingering traces of Paladian formulae, his buildings are now composed of distinct geometric forms with frequent emphasis on plain surfaces and abrupt superimpositions of one element of Classical decoration on another.
It is in the Ichnographia, above all, that Piranesi's formal originality is brought to a sudden maturity. The idea of a total reconstruction of Rome belongs to a tradition dating back to the large engraved map of 1561 by Pirro Ligorio, the principal forerunner of Piranesi in the field of visionary archeology. But whereas Ligorio's Rome was an aggregate of individual building, symbolizing literary references and largely indifferent to interrelationships and setting, Piranesi's ingenuity is stimulated by the physical limitations of the site. The architect and antiquarian are now joined by the topographer.
Among the sources of inspiration for this enormous network antiquity itself provides a major element, especially in the ancient Roman procedure of aligning groups of monumental buildings on a common axis, as already shown by Piranesi's plan of the Forum Romanum. Moreover, his contempory survey of Hadrian's Villa, published posthumously in 1781, clearly offered him even more complex planning patterns in terms both of combinations and individual forms. But in Piranesi's global concern with the Roman architectural inheritance, the character of the Baroque city should not be overlooked with its scenic planning of monumental townscape in relation to structures like the Colosseum and the early Christian basilicas.
| |
In the design of individual components in the Ichnographia debts can again be traced to Ligorio as well as to Montano; also to the Baroque predilection for clusters of spatial forms. These influences excepted, the actual mode of composition--as already noted in the aerial perspectives--departs from Baroque style in the arrangement of distinct geometrical components. Here Piranesi is far closer to the emerging ideals of European Neo-Claaicism, even if at this date no other designer had pushed this logical process of pattern-making to such extremes.
Throughout the Ichnographia antiquity provides a mine of elemantal shapes for this novel process pf elaboration. For instance, such an unorthodox concept as the group of radial corridors which fan out from Hadrian's Mausoleum clearly derives from the plans of amphitheatre construction. Elsewhere, thermal planning is combined with other systems of design involving complexes of multiple units such as those found in the Imperial palaces on the Palatine. In such a procedure the ramifications are limitless, and Piranesi is at pains to justify this with reference to nature, who never repeats herself. For him variations and multiplications are major symptoms of creative architecture.
This celebration of the virtues of complexity, already evident as a peroccupation ib Piranesi's early work, is clearly directed at the growing influence of Winckelmann. The German scholar, as the leading exponent of unadorned simplicity, had praised the beauty inherent in the proportions of Greek buildings. While accepting the theoretical justification of ornament in buildings in his Remarks on the Architecture of the Ancients in 1762, Winchelmann had traced a progression from Paestum to Athens followed by a sharp decline under the Romans, especially as exemplified by Palmyra and Baalbek. An increased use of ornament and, by inference, general complexity, were associated with a decline in taste:
Architecture suffered the same fate as the old languages, which became richer when they lost their beauty; this can be proved by the Greek as well as the Roman language, and as architects could neither equal nor surpass their predecessors in beauty, they tried to show that they were richer.
For Piranesi on the other hand, whether in planning or in ornament, complexity and variation meant life, and the unorthodoxy of modern designers was often anticipated by the ancients themselves. As he observes in the dedication to the Campo Marzio:
I am rather afraid that parts of the Campus which I describe should seem figments of my imagination and not based on any evidence: certainly if anyone compares them with the architectural theory of the ancients he will see that they differ greatly from it and are actually closer to the usage of our own times. But before anyone accuses me of falsehood, he should I beg, examine the ancient [Marble] plan of the city . . . he should examine the villas of Latium and that of Hadrian at Tivoli, the baths, the tombs and other ruins outside the Porta Capens and he will find that the ancients transgressed the strict rules of architecture just as much as the moderns. Perhaps it is inevitable and a general rule that the arts on reaching a peak should decline, or perhaps it is part of man's nature to demand some licience in creative expression as in other things which we sometimes criticise in buildings of our times.
Not without point the Ichnographia is shown as a fragment of a new Marble Plan, implying that the fecundity of Roman inspiration is limitless, not only in space but in time. Less than his previous works a document for the antiquary, Piranesi's map is supra-historical, both as a polemical weapon and as a vigorous exhortation to contempory architects such as Robert Adam.
With this affirmation of belief in the creative stimulus of antiquity and his active concern with modern design, Piranesi's polemical activity had begun to move away from the narrow issues of stylistic debate. He had already shown interest in Egyptian designs before his discussion of such matters in Della Magnificenza, and, despite his satire at the expence of Le Roy, had begun to adopt Greek elements just as the Romans themselves had done. In fact a minor indication of this shift in position is found in the aerial perspective of the Pantheon in the Campo Marzio where he introduces a colonnade of caryatids, features previously dismissed in Della Magnificenza as symptomatic of the Greek trivialization of architecture. Of far greater significance is the bold combination of Greek and Egyptian motifs with Roman forms in a set of ten small imaginary compositions added to the Opera Varie sometime in the early 1760s. In one he uses the part fluted Doric columns of Delos and in another the squat archaic colonnades of Agrigentum. The tendency to break with a Baroque fluency of transition in favour of abrupt joxtoposition of forms, together with discordant superimpositions already hinted at in the Campo Marzio perspectives, is developed here more boldly than ever."
| |
|