Object Details
Artist
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Date
ca. 1774
Medium
Etching
Dimensions
Frame: 58 1/4 × 37 1/16 × 1 1/2 inches (148 × 94.1 × 3.8 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Margaret and Frank Robinson
Object
Number
2010.079.004
Piranesi’s large-scale map of Rome juxtaposes the “modern” Rome of his own day with a memory o(…)
Piranesi’s large-scale map of Rome juxtaposes the “modern” Rome of his own day with a memory of its ancient grandeur in Pliny the Elder’s time. The Colosseum, whose construction began under the emperor Vespasian when Pliny was forty-nine, is visible as a white oval near the top of the map. To its left, labeled “98”, are the ruins of the Baths of Titus, where the famous Laocoön sculpture described by Pliny was discovered. At lower right, the U-shaped Piazza Navona sits on the site of the Stadium of Domitian, built in the year after Pliny’s death. At bottom right, Piranesi includes a topographical map of ancient Rome, emphasizing all of Rome’s seven hills and the circuit of the Aurelian wall surrounding the city, built between 271 and 275 CE.
The map also exemplifies Piranesi’s shrewd marketing practice as Rome’s preeminent creator of city views; numbers on the map correspond to a vast list of over four hundred Roman sights, both ancient and modern, of which many naturally were available as Piranesi prints.
(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder,” exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Verity J. Platt, presented at the Johnson Museum January 21–June 11, 2023)
