Finding a Lost Piranesi
2002.01.14
The title itself generated the project, and the notion of my having found a lost Piranesi (i.e., the first state of the Ichnographia)...
"Finding a Lost Piranesi" ...with a quite fortuitous connection to the notion that reenactment has a possible relationship with predestination -- "Was I predestined to find the lost Ichnographia because I have been reenacting (redrawing) the Ichnographia?"
...a straight forward acccount of the actual finding [of the circus changes] and its documentation
abstract for Studium Urbis
2003.01.19 17:26
Mnemonically Delineating Veracity
"Authenticity is one thing, veracity another."
Marguerite Yourcenar, "Faces of History in the Historia Augusta" in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays.
An apparent lack of veracity has always been at issue within modern interpretations G. B. Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii (1757-62) despite Piranesi's extraordinary 'scientific' knowledge of ancient Rome and it's remains as evident throughout the four volumes of Le Antichità Romane (1756), as well as throughout Piranesi's other archaeological publications, including the Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma. Contemporary architectural theorists from historian Manfredo Tafuri to architect Peter Eisenman view the Ichnographia as a city devoid of its own history, thus a plan prognosticating autonomous urbanism, yet that is exactly what the Ichnographia Campi Martii is not.
Beginning with comparisons between select portions of the Piranesi's Ichnographia and Giambattista Nolli's Pianta Grande di Roma, it becomes clear that the Ichnographia is an elaborate mnemonic devise. Like the imaginary building plans that Roman orators created in their minds as an aid toward the memorization of their speeches, the Ichnographia is literally an imaginary plan manifest as an aid toward the memorization of virtually all of ancient Rome's history. Thus the Ichnographia is not a fantastical reconstruction, rather, like the art of memory itself, the Ichnographia is a reenactment.
Mnemonically Delineating Veracity concludes with a brief reenactment of how an independent artist from Philadelphia came to discover a heretofore unnoticed initial(?) printing of the Ichnographia Campi Martii.
REPORTAGE- Rhythm & Gender
2004.05.18 10:26
Why do you think Piranesi first deliniated all the circuses of the first printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martius in a stylized manner, and then (unnoticed for over 200 years) changed all the circuses into copies of the Circus of Maxentius in the second printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martiis? Piranesi sure knew how to paint a quaestio abstrusa!
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Re: Ichnographia Romaphilia
2004.12.16 13:56
While working with Piranesi the discussion is often enlightening.
"So why exactly did you produce two versions of the Ichnographia Campus Martius and keep everyone none the wiser?"
"Overall, I just wanted to see who would find the two versions first. They were found, eventually (after more than two hundred years), but it's embarrassing for all the Piranesi "scholars" because it wasn't one of them."
"Why do you think the so-called scholars failed? Why did they not see what was always right in front of them?
"Simply put, they never reenacted the source."
"Kahn reenacted the source, and he didn't see the two versions."
"Well, I'd say Kahn was busy manifesting new versions of his own."
"Perhaps it's just plain destiny that Philadelphia itself reenacts the source."
"You know, I love you guys like brothers."
"That's fine as long as you realize that we're all independent as well."
"Ha, tell that to Romulus and Remus."
Re: NeoClassical Chili
2005.07.09 15:34
Krautheimer published an essay, "Mensa-Coemeterium-Martyrium" 1960, where he earnestly speculates about the very real possibility that the early "Constantinian" basilicas (aside from St. John Lateran and St. Peter's Vatican) acted as covered graveyards where funeral banquets were held. He also noted how the shape of these basilicas was circus-like. When I read this essay (early 2005), I immediately though of the connection to the 'munus' ritual as related by Tertullian. And, after finding out more about the Mausoleum of Romulus/Circus of Maxentius complex (also early 2005), the "pieces" quickly fell together, particularly the connection of Eutropia to all this.
The Circus of Maxentius has been an unanswered question in my mind for a few years now, and now I think I know why Piranesi 'secretly' printed two different version of the Ichnographia Campi Martii--the Circus of Maxentius is the 'key' to the inversion of the pagan Roman Circus into the Early Christian 'basilica'.
[Piranesi, in La Anticità Romane II (which predates the Campo Marzio publication by four years or so), delineated a "reconstruction" of the Basilica of St. Agnes--compare this with a present aerial view.]
What led me to Krautheimer's essay above was a footnote in R. Ross Holloway, Constantine and Rome, 2004.
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It rocked Eisenman in his chair...
2005.11.10 13:30
When I went to the Fine Arts Library of the University of Pennsylvania on 14 May 1999 it was to see an actual etching of the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio for the first time. I felt sure I would see the Ichnographia at the Penn library because within the "Illustration Credits" of Jennifer Bloomer's Architecture and the Text (p. 215) it states:
"Giovanni Battista Piranesi, details from Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma: Ichnographia. Etching, six plates. Used by permission of the Fine Arts Library of the University of Pennsylvania."
I asked at the reference desk about Il Campo Marzio..., and I was told there was no such holding in the catalogue. I mentioned the citing in Bloomer's book, and I even went into the book stacks and got Bloomer's book itself to show the librarian. The head librarian was called and he thought to look in the old card catalogue of the Rare Book Room--Penn was then still in the midst of filling data onto it's fairly new online book catalogue and the Rare Book Room holdings were not yet in the electronic catalogue. Sure enough, Penn does possess a 1762 edition of Il Campo Marzio..., but even that was hard to find because the call number on the card was a typographic error. Alas, I finally had an actual Ichnographia unfolded in front of me and within minutes I discovered that the plan I was now looking at was not entirely the same as the plan reproduction that I had up till then been used to looking at. And architectural history changed a little bit that day.
Then knowing that the Ichnographia exists in two versions, I went back to Bloomer's Architecture and the Text to see which version of the Ichnographia are reproduced in detail there. Strangely enough, the details of the Ichnographia reproduced in Architecture and the Text DO NOT match the 1762 Ichnographia at the Fine Arts Library of the University of Pennsylvania.
It rocked Eisenman in his chair...
2005.11.10 15:03
To be honest, I care very little about what Bloomer wrote or how she intellectually operates. What I do care about is what Piranesi delineated via the two versions of the Ichnographia of Il Campo Marzio.... All I have ever done is analyze the Ichnographia itself, which is exactly what virtually all other contemporary writers on the Ichnographia have not done! I have never been interested in spreading some current/trendy intellectual "thought" by troping Piranesi and the Ichnographia, a course of action begun by Tafuri. What I am interested in is to find out what Piranesi did himself.
2013.12.23 19:47
23 December
By covertly publishing the Ichnographia in a second state was Piranesi himself conducting an experiment to see who would ultimately discover the two different plans?
2015.04.19
The Quondam Piranesi dossier
2016.05.17 09:34
14 May
First state and second state of the Ichnographia Campus Martius side by side...
It remains a mystery as to why Piranesi changed all the circuses into an identical form, except the identical circus form is the only clue.
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