While Piranesi’s goals and methods might be different from those used by the antiquarians of the sixteenth century such as Pirro Ligorio and of the late seventeenth century such as Francesco Bianchini, the sources he used for his reconstruction of ancient Rome were not.46 They include the literary evidence, both from the ancient writers and from their modern commentators, as well as a wealth of visual evidence. Remains of monuments visible in the urban fabric are noted and fixed on the Ichnographia,47 and supplemented by other visual information. Where applicable, the pieces of the Forma Urbis Romae, or Marble Plan of Rome, first found in 1561 and in Piranesi’s day the subject of some study, provided Piranesi with plans of some structures.48 Coins and medallions, or representations thereof, furnished evidence of fagades and elevations.49 Archaeological finds were utilized as well, with preference for those whose location, if only a generalized one, was recorded. When evidence fell short, the gaps were filled with that which could be gleaned from similar ancient Roman architectural types. The symmetrical arrangement, as specified by Vitruvius, was often used to flesh out scanty architectural remains. Last, as Piranesi insinuated in the preface of Il Campo Marzio, he relied on the variety and complexity of Roman forms from south of the Porta Capena, including Hadrian’s Villa, to provide models for his reconstructed buildings.50
The goal of his reconstruction was to capture the buildings in their urban setting, and as such Piranesi seemed less interested in the decorative aspects of the site than he was in the siting and massing of the architectonic. He would have been aware that the Egyptian lions of basalt, from the Horti Agrippae, were unearthed from that site during the reign of Eugene IV (1431-47), but did not render them there.51 The problematic caryatids mentioned in Pliny as a dominant feature of the Pantheon – it is unclear in the literature whether these are interior or exterior features – do not merit the artist’s attentions.52 He did, however, place the bronze sculpture group on the pediment of the Pantheon; fragments of this group – a chariot wheel, a horse’s hoof, a male head – were discovered in the first half of the fifteenth century.53 He also positioned the statues of Marcus Agrippa and Caesar Augustus in niches in the portico. They were often cited from the ancient literature as a means to explain the odd juxtaposition of the Pantheon’s portico to its rotondo; it was argued that the porch was added later to house the statues which Augustus refused to have installed inside the Pantheon. And he acknowledged that Lysippo’s famous Apoxyomenos had been located at the main entry of the Bath of Agrippa.
To begin, Piranesi fixed the extant ruins in their place, and illustrated them in a blank landscape in Tavola II of Il Campo Marzio. These structures or parts of structures include: the Pantheon; a fragment of its vestibule;54 considerable remains of a round structure of the Thermae Agrippae along the Via dell’Arca della Ciambella and some minor remains directly behind the Pantheon; columns from the Temple of Giunturna;55 and a goodly portion of the Temple he identified as being dedicated to Antoninus Pius. (We know this building to be the Temple of Hadrian dedicated by Antoninus Pius, and it is often referred to as the Hadrianeum or the Borsa today, but Piranesi must have relied on a sixteenth-century representation of a coin for its identification.)56 The Temple of Antoninus Pius appears just outside the rectangular block of the Pantheon, slightly northeast of the Basilica of Marciana. In addition, the conduit of the Aqua Virgo was known to end near the Septa Julia although, in Piranesi’s day, it extended only as far as the Trevi Fountain.57
The literary sources identified other buildings for this area, although these were less useful in fixing the monument in place. Martial related that the Porticus Pollae was near the Aqua Virgo.58 The Regional Catalogue verified that a basilica dedicated to Matidia and Marciana was positioned between the Pantheon and the Temple of Antoninus Pius.59 The sources mention a temple to Hadrian in this area, obviously in reference to the one Piranesi erroneously labelled the Temple of Antoninus Pius; without this information, he situated his Temple of Hadrian to the west of the Pantheon. The literature did not specify that a temple dedicated to Trajan was nearby, and Piranesi must have surmised that it belonged there. It was known that Hadrian was one of the restorers of the Pantheon – Piranesi in fact had found stamped bricks from the early second century in the attic area – and also that the Emperor had some reputation for dedicating structures to his ancestors.60 As the Temple dedicated to his mother-in-law Matida was certainly in the area based on some archaeological evidence, Piranesi must have assumed that many buildings in the Campus Agrippae were, in large part, Hadrian’s doing. This conjecture seems astute as it was not at this time known that Hadrian was responsible for the Pantheon.61
The fragments of the Forma Urbis were not useful to Piranesi for his reconstruction in this area, however, there was other visual evidence.62 In particular, a piece of lead pipe with an inscription identifying it as from the Templum Matidae had been unearthed in this area in 1636; Piranesi figured this pipe in Tav. XXX of Il Campo Marzio. Various archaeological discoveries in the eighteenth century insinuated information about the extent and form of the Thermae Agrippae vis-a-vis the Pantheon. In the Palazzo Corsini Palombara, just southeast of the Pantheon and adjoining it in Piranesi’s day, the ruined remains of a grand staircase were recorded as discovered; it was conjectured to be the principal entry stair to the thermae.63 Across the Via Palombra (still extant today) which runs parallel to but apposite the Pantheon’s porticoed fagade was the palace housing the Collegio dei Nobili Ecclesiastici. Large parts of wall composed of very big bricks and travertine, thought to belong to the Bath, were found and destroyed during the renovations to the palace by Tommaso Mattei before 1715.64 And in 1718, while building a sacristy next to the main altar of Santa Maria ad Martyres, the workers uncovered a large niche of the same dimensions as that on the front fagade, in the portico. From this, some thought that the temple at one point had another entryway, possibly from the Baths.65
Numismatic evidence helped with the reconstruction of buildings, and particularly of their fagades, of works such as the Basilica of Marciana and Matida, and the Temple of Antoninus Pius. The unusual form Piranesi gives to the two basilicas – in the Ichnographia, he created one basilica for each of the women rather than just one dedicated to the two – derives from the coin inscribed ‘Divi Matidae Socrui’ on which a multi-storied structure with a taller central area and two shorter flanking open-air wings is figured.66 The fixed raft in the Stagnum Agrippae resembles the spina of many a Roman circus, a design represented in numerous ancient coins and reliefs.
The existence of a forecourt for the Pantheon seems not to have preoccupied the antiquarians in Piranesi’s day as no literary evidence existed at that time. But Piranesi noted that he had seen some of its remains. And he seemed to have found that the odd composition of the tripartite
Pantheon – the short portico, the taller intermediary space and the grand rotondo – suggested that its frontal view might have been controlled in some manner. Piranesi’s version of the vestibule to the Pantheon is conjecture, as is his assumption that Hadrian was responsible for it. Although this was well before the age when archaeologists had confirmed that Hadrian was the architect of the Pantheon, Piranesi was sensitive to identifying Hadrian’s hand in the construction of the buildings in the area.
When all other sources of information ran dry, architectural theory and example fill the gaps. Symmetry is often employed as a guiding design principle in the reconstruction, as is evident in the entire arrangement of the rectangular area around the Pantheon. In questions of unknown forms, other Roman architectural examples were called upon to supply prototypes. Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, in particular, on which Piranesi lavished his attentions nearly all his adult life, provided many models. The caldarium of the Baths of Agrippa, wherein a circular structure impinges upon a larger space, might be derived from an ancient structure near the building known as the Accademia of Hadrian’s Villa. This pattern of spatial impingement is also the conception behind the interior colonnades of the famous Island Enclosure from that villa. The row of columns screening the semicircular nicchione which creates two engaged but separate spaces, as seen in Piranesi’s Agrippan caldarium, is common on Hadrian’s grounds. And the Tivoli bath sites provide a wealth of examples for the interlocking of different shapes – square, circular, semicircular, cruciform, circus-shaped – in a constrained space; Piranesi mimicked such combinations in the plan of the thermae and elsewhere in the Ichnographia.67
Piranesi, of course, often had to resolve inadequate or conflicting information in order to compile his reconstruction. Of all the problematic issues in this area, the relationship of the Pantheon to the Baths of Agrippa complex behind it required the most attention. We have already seen that this question had been a matter of timely and ideologically driven discussion in the mid-eighteenth century. How did Piranesi weigh in on the issue?
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3.5 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Opere varie… vol. 7: Campus Martius. Rome, 1762. Tav. XXIV, Ichnographia. View of Pantheon from the southwest |
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As noted above, Piranesi did not leave behind any substantial text outlining his understanding of this relationship, either in Il Campo Marzio or in Seconda parte. His illustrations are suggestive, but noncommittal. In the Ichnographia, the rear wall of the rotondo encroaches upon the space of a structure he labelled a xystus, or open portico, in this case one covered with a groin-vaulted ceiling, even though many scholars before him had identified it as the Basilica of Neptune.68 By referring to it as a xystus, a structure whose traditional function was to accompany a gymnasium or exercise ground, Piranesi linked it to the exercise pool and the gardens designed for recreation
and conversation and, in the process, identified the building as an annex to the Baths of Agrippa. Piranesi knew that the walls of this xystus abutted the exterior of the Pantheon, and he depicted them in plan, as well as in a related veduta in Il Campo Marzio.69 In this image, he envisioned the remains of the area as if all the accretions and renovations of the second through eighteenth centuries had been removed, while he retained the then-current ruinous state of the monument (Figure 3.5); he did the same with the fagade of the Pantheon (Figure 3.4). Two sections from the Seconda parte represent the interstice more carefully. In a section taken from the south, Piranesi illustrated the range of chambers of the thermae complex which adjoin the Pantheon (Figure 3.6). He distinguished three levels. In the lowest level, there is a great semicircular nicchione from Agrippa’s caldarium, and, to each side, niches from the flanking rooms. On the second level, there are the arched openings of some corridors that do not penetrate into the Pantheon. In the accompanying key, Piranesi noted that the building on these two levels was tangential to, but not integrated with the structural brick wall of the rotondo, and that this proved that the baths were built at a different time from the Pantheon.70 Having related this, however, he noted that on the third and uppermost level – and this is confirmed in a section taken from the east (Figure 3.7) – the walls and passageways of the baths were built of brick in courses which are contiguous with those in the Pantheon. This signalled that there was once another building there, designed as an annex to the rotondo and somehow related to the baths. He believed this mysterious building was constructed after the baths.71 Piranesi’s images might demonstrate that the Pantheon was never originally designed as part of the Thermae Agrippae, but they also destroy the idea that the building was in isolation in ancient
3.6
Francesco Piranesi, Seconda parte de’tempi antichi. Rome, 1790. Tav. VIII. Elevation of Pantheon from the rear
3.7
Francesco Piranesi, Seconda parte de’tempi antichi. Rome, 1790. Tav. X. Section of Pantheon and attached ruins from the east
times. What he projected ultimately with this collection of images was the sense that the Pantheon was just one among the many magnificent and grand structures in the Campo Marzio.