Vincenzo Fasolo, "The Campo Marzio of G. B. Piranesi".
2691f
1956
degrees of representation
1995.01.11
...elaborate on the idea of the Ichnographia being full of degrees of representation.
...the degrees of representation represent the many stages of design methodology and design results that are traversed when in the process of creating a(n original) historical reconstruction.
metabolic imagination
relation of past and present site placement
1995.01.11
On a specific level, I now know the exact location of the Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps in relation to the Ichnographia. The Piazza del Popolo is not represented in any way at all in the Ichnographia, however the Spanish Steps is where the Horti Lucullani was in ancient times, but where Piranesi places the Horti Luciliani in the Ichnographia. Piranesi designed a huge staircase leading up to the Horti Luciliani and this may be an example of Piranesi's critical commentary on Roman urban design.
There is also a connection between the existing remnants of the ancient wall in the vicinity of the P. del Popolo and Piranesi's Bustum Caesaris Augusti. There seems to have been, since ancient times, a large triangular formation in this region and Piranesi has used this ancient formation and created, in the Bustum Augusti, a very original design, and probably even an original program. This may be a good example where Piranesi used the reality of scant remains and metabolized the physical evidence into a rather overwrought architectural creation. It must be said, however, that the physical remains are large and this largeness of the triangular formation does suggest a rather large architectural complex. So, in that regard, Piranesi may be justified in his largeness (and overwroughtness of) "original reconstruction."
This example brings to mind the concept of degrees of separation within the degrees of representation. The Bustum Augusti is perhaps an example where there are a number of degrees of separation within the degrees of representation.
contiguous elements
1996.06.02
Upon looking at the contiguous elements in October 1994, they appeared as fragments or more like ruins. This led to another idea that Piranesi was first inspired by the plans of Roman ruins and then proceeded (in designing the Campo Marzio) to design first plan fragments and then elaborated on the fragments using axial and circular copying motifs (similar to CAD copying techniques).
sex, Mars, reenactment
1997.11.20
...the phrase, "back to daddy's balls, architecture halls"... ...a connection between this line and the Ichnographia. ...Mars being the father of Romulus--the founder of Rome, and the connection of sex and conception within plans... ... the "testicles" of the Templum Martis as generators...
...the prominence of Mars... ...Piranesi actively redesigned Imperial Rome as he came to understand it. Piranesi assimilated all the knowledge about this part of the city, and through that assimilation he delineated an optimal synthesis. Piranesi's plan of the Campo Marzio is not an architectural reconstruction, but an archeological redesign. Piranesi's plan is not a rendition of what was, rather a rendition of what could have been. Piranesi's plan is not a reconstruction, but an historical reenactment.
The Ichnographia is a powerful reenactment of the architectural history of the Campo Marzio. The history, moreover, is not limited to Imperial Rome. Although the buildings are named for those primarily of the late Empire, Piranesi also very cleverly and extremely subtlely reenacts the architectural history of the Campo Marzio beyond the Imperial Age, specifically the inversion/conversion of Rome from pagan state to Christian state.
The opening stage for the reenactment is the Scenographia (whose very title has obvious theatrical connotations)...
...regarding the Ichnographia as a stone fragment: a reenactment of the Forma Urbis--a virtual reenactment of discovering the great missing piece of the "puzzle" that will bring all the other piece to a grand cohesion. (...here reminded of Tafuri's opening comments to The Sphere and the Labyrinth: "There comes a moment (though not always) in research when all the pieces begin to fall into place, as in a jig-saw puzzle, where all the pieces are near at hand and only one figure can be assembled (and thus the correctness of each move be determined immediately)..."
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The City of God
1998.01.27
Through reading Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, The Idea of the City in Roman Thought - From Walled City to Spiritual Commonwealth, I am finding out about The City of God and its place in history.
I don't necessarily see a direct connection between The City of God and the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio, but it may develop as I learn about and read The City of God. If anything, right now I am now more aware of the history of the beginning of the fifth century--the time coinciding with the complete picture of the Ichnographia. Could the Ichnographia represent a picture of Ancient Rome taken to a next (spiritual?) level as is suggested possible by The City of God? Is the Ichnographia a picture of a perfected Rome, a Rome that transcended the realm of mortal conflict and material decay, and become a new refreshed and restored Rome in the hearts and minds of the righteous and just? I actually think I may have something here because I can say that, if nothing else, St. Augustine offers a clear alternative to the notion of city, and while this alternative vision may not be a total or complete inspiration for Piranesi, it may, nonetheless, have provided a view of the "city" as something beyond the purely physical or governmental (political?).
This leads me to think of the Ichnographia's eradication of the Aurelian Wall as its most idealized act. It is like the "negative" act that allows the "positive" act of Piranesi's most fantastical plans and "reconstructions". This is the first time that I see the erasure of the walls as equal in "idealization" as the plans--I now want to make clear that both acts (the erasure and the new planning, esp. in the region of the wall) have to be viewed in conjunction with one another, and, furthermore, both represent Piranesi at his most "ideal" or "fantastic".
Garden of Nero
1998.01.27
...Nero used Christians as human torches to light up his garden. ...Roman Catholic tradition/folklore. The Garden of Nero has "survived" throughout history more through text and memorable events than through physical evidence. ...evidence toward supporting the notion of the Ichnographia as a "reenactment", i.e., a narrative and a depiction, rather than a pure archeological "reconstruction".
The City of God - inverse ichnographia
1998.02.15
...The City of God, a connection between it and the Ichnographia. Sue Dixon mentioned a specific quotation where there is even a grammatical inversion used to describe the two natures of the city (the earthly vs. the spiritual). ...hopefully demonstrate how the Ichnographia represents both "urban" paradigms; the Ichnographia is a plan of earthly Rome and it is also an opposite/inverse plan of spiritual Rome. Piranesi was trying to deliver both messages, meaning he was aware of the two "urban" paradigms and thus used the "planning" of the Campo Marzio to express both.
...the time-frame of the Arch of Theodosius (the end of the Roman Campo Marzio), the Visigoth siege on Rome, and the subsequent writing of The City of God--these events occurred within a 40 year time-span. Piranesi was trying to depict, delineate, reconstruct, reenact the inversion from Imperial Rome to the spiritual Rome of the Church. Along with this line of thought there is also the not-so-smooth conversion of Rome from a pagan state to a Christian state.
Hadrian, Plotina, and Paulina Domitia, etc.
1998.06.02
According to the biography of Hadrian, he was a favorite of Plotina. In fact, there is some cause to believe that it was Plotina that got Hadrian named as sucessor at Trajan's deathbed. ...more symbolism along the axis of life.
Hadrian's birth mother's name was Paulina Domitia, and this fact lead to further speculation as to the meaning of the Sepulchra Familiae Domitorum at the end of the axis of death--the counter point of Hadrian's tomb. There is reference to both Hadrian's real mother and to his adoptive mother within the axes of life and death.
...sheds light on Piranesi's overall intention in (re-)designing (not reconstructing) the Campo Marzio. Piranesi was redrawing/redesigning the Campo Marzio, a redesign not at all capricious, but one based wholeheartedly on a vast amouint of historical facts. That is to say, Piranesi set out to improve the ancient Campo Marzio's "urban plan" without changing the region's existing program.
...reminded of Stirling's notion of evolutionary designing, and his statements about what could or should be considered when designing a house for K.F. Schinkel 200 years after Schinkel's birth. I am also reminded of Tafuri's wrongness in calling the Ichnographia of the Campo Marzio an "experimental design and therefore an unknown."
Piranesi operated on a few planes when generating his plan of the Campo Marzio--there is the redesigned plane, the Pagan-Christian narrative plane, and the plane of (composite?) temporal palimpsest. To make matters difficult, however, none of these planes complies completely with the other two, nor can any of the planes be viewed completely independent of the other two. In essence, Piranesi's (design) methodology emulates the very nature of Rome itself. The Ichnographia is a plan of many layers of meanings and messages which ultimately aptly represents Rome the city of many physical and historical layers.
As an archeologist, Piranesi "redraws" all the layers of Rome's ancient past. As a well educated 18th century Roman Catholic, he "drafts" the narrative of Rome's Pagan to Christian inversion (conversion), and as a highly evolved architect-designer he displays the "Eternal City" with infinite virtuality.
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mistakes
1999.05.17
not Tampa, Florida anymore
2002.01.10 00:40
I'm glad you found some useful information, and I hope it helps toward some resolution to how you see that reenactment (potentially) relates to predestination and psychology. I haven't been coming to reenactment from that angle, so I don't even understand exactly what you're seeing. (But that doesn't at all mean that I think what you're seeing is somehow wrong or misinterpreting.)
I'll try to briefly outline (reenact) how I came to see a strong relationship between reenactment and (some but certainly not all aspects of) design.
I began redrawing Piranesi's Campo Marzio plan with CAD in 1987. I've been fascinated with this plan since the late 1970's, and I saw the opportunity to utilize the automated drawing/drafting capabilities of CAD in (re)drawing all the complicated individual plans of the Campo Marzio, which comprise many repetitive units, and manipulating repetitive units is precisely one of the things CAD is very good at facilitating.
In the early 1990s I begin an intensive redrawing of the plan, and at the same time I became reacquainted with Susan Dixon, a friend from my college days who went on to get a Ph.D. in Art History, and her dissertation was on Piranesi's archaeological publications, of which the Il Campo Marzio is one. Together (via phone conversations) Susan and I begin speculating as to what the meaning of the Campo Marzio plan might be. Many theories were speculatively put forth, but reenactment was never one of them.
The second week of August 1997 I split my energies between doing research on the Campo Marzio and research on the philosophy of history as it might relate to my theory of chronosomatics. In Encyclopedia Britannica (edition 1969) under "Philosophy of History" there is a passage explaining Vico which, while reading it, made me think of Piranesi's Campo Marzio. There is also a list of 20th century philosophers of history and the titles of the works. Collingwood's The Idea of History is among these. I go to Barnes and Nobles that same day and buy Vico's New Science and Collingwood's The Idea of History. I read the passages in The Idea of History that deal with reenactment. It dawns on me that I've been doing a kind of reenactment by redrawing Piranesi's plan.
Thursday, September 4, 1997 (coincidentally the day architect Aldo Rossi died) I find Plattus's "Passages to the City: The Interpretive Function of the Roman Triumph" in Ritual (1983). I finish reading the essay Friday night. Saturday morning I watch Diana's funeral, and it quickly hits me that I am watching exactly what I just spent the last two nights reading about. Since Piranesi himself delineated the path of the Triumphal Way through his plan of the Campo Marzio, I begin to wonder whether Piranesi too was playing some kind of reenactment game in his redrawing of the large urban plan.
It is after this point that much of the prior ten year's work begins tightly piecing together, and the notion of reenactment also aids in better understanding what information I collected further in research.
For me, reenactment was a learning tool, albeit for the most part a tool I didn't even know I was using. For Piranesi, however, (and this is what I've come to understand) reenactment was a design tool, specifically an urban design tool, whereby he generated an entirely new rendition of Rome. A Rome, moreover, that is essentially a conglomeration of many specifically themed environments, i.e., themed environments that relate exactly the history of the very places where Piranesi positioned his new designs. This is why I say Piranesi's Campo Marzio is not a reconstruction, rather a reenactment. By all indications, Piranesi was very conscious of the play of degrees of separation that reenactments involve.
Piranesi also (re)designed the city of Rome as a double (history) theater, namely the double theater of Rome's Pagan and Christian existence.
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.
2013.08.22 10:57
22 August
...the "archeological accuracy" section (which is now entitled "Archeological Mask or Reconstructive Surgery"). ...Piranesi was perhaps giving the Campo Marzio a "face-lift," a second chance where the "faults" have been eliminated and the dormant potential fulfilled. 3304n
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