Encyclopedia Ichnographica | Ichnographia Campi Martii | 1 |
Ichnographia Campi Martii | ichnographia : a ground-plot, plan |
|
|
G. B. Piranesi, Ichnographia Campi Martii, 1757.
|
I am rather afraid that some 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 plan of the city [Forma Urbis] which I have just mentioned, he should examine the villas of Latium and that of Hadrian at Tivoli, the baths, the tombs and other ruins, especially those beyond the Porta Capena, 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 license in creative expression as in other things, but we should not be surprised to see that ancient architects have done the very things which we sometimes criticize in buildings of our times. Here then, my dear Adam, is the Campus Martius, not as perfect perhaps as you wanted but as complete as I could manage, given the complexities of the subject and the lapse of time.
|
|
20th Century Interpretations of the Ichnographia: |
Even if one grants a certain artistic license, the eighteenth-century engraving by Piranesi of the Campus Martius at the height of the Roman Empire gives a clear indication of the curious reversal of the Hellenistic urban ideal. Piranesi was a serious student of antiquity, and much of his engraving appears in the fragments of the forma urbis, a plan of the imperial city engraved on marble slabs. It shows that official Rome was a collection of stupendous exercises in conspicuous wealth and whimsical individuality. Public spaces--even the basic amenities of broad thoroughfares and interconnecting streets--were totally ignored.
|
|
The original plan with the dedication to Robert Adam is a huge plate in six sections which unfolds to about four feet eight inches by four feet ten. It is similar to the early baroque fantasies of the Forum and the Capitol at the end of the first volumn of the Antichità and bear as little resemblance to the actual layout of the old city. It is easy to see why the preface is so defensively worded in order to forestall the criticism which had probably been leveled against his over-enthusiastic imagination in the earlier maps. There is a medallion in one corner showing the joint heads of Adam and Piranesi.
|
|
Dedication of the Ichnographia
It is not for another five years, however, that the missing climax of the Antichità, the plan of Rome, finally appears as the Ichnographia of the Campus Martius in a folio dedicated appropriately to a fellow architect. The tour de force of six contiguous plates had almost certainly been completed in 1757, the date of the dedicatory inscription to Adam, whose head appears with Piranesi's, as if forming a diumvirate, in one of the two medallions. This visionary Marble Plan, which most be considered together with those other 'fragments' depicting the Forum Romanum, the Capitoline Hill, the thermae, the Nymphaeum of Nero and the Praetorian Barracks, complete the calculated sequence of the Antichità. Thus, starting with the primal sources of evidence, the master-plan of the surviving remains within the city walls, the reader is taken on a journey of discovery in terms of the Roman genius for construction, planning and ornamental design, until presented with the final act of reconstruction--the vision of a new Rome.
|
|
Medallion depicting G. B. Piranesi and Robert Adam
The archeological mask of Piranesi's Campo Marzio fools no one: this is an experimental design and the city, therefore, remains an unknown.
|
In the autumn of 1757, Giovanni Battista Piranesi completed a postscript to his previously published Antichità Romane. The six contiguous plates depict an arrangement of stone fragments on which are incised the master plan of the Campo Marzio. The fragments appear to be remains of a plan of ancient Rome, the footprints of layer upon layer of antique Roman buildings. A few diagrams leap out in familiarity: here the Pantheon, there the Theater of Marcellus, and the Piazza Navona; the Mausoleum of Hadrian (the Castello Sant' Angelo) sits in its proper place beside the Tiber, which snakes through the drawing in its "tibertine" way. Upon closer inspection, however, the reader of the drawing will find that it bears little resemblance to any factually recorded reality, either of ancient Rome or of eighteenth-century Rome, although it continues to look distinctly Roman and certainly ancient.
| A complete analysis and critique of both Tafuri's and Bloomer's full interpretation of the Ichnographia Campi Martii are planned as part of the Encyclopedia Ichnographica. |
A 21st Century Interpretation of the Ichnographia:
|
ichnography : a horizontal section (as of a building) showing true dimensions according to a geometric scale : GROUND PLAN, MAP
|
Quondam © 2007.09.23 |