2007 China Prize
The Pantheon in II Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma

Introduction

I am interested in Louis Kahn and his works, who consequently brings on my curiosity in another special figure—Giovanni Battista Piranesi. For me, this motivation is more powerful than anything else that encourages me to learn about him and the city of Rome. As a reconstructed section of ancient Rome, the famous plan of Campo Marzio offered an image of the Pantheon contextualized in relation to many historic buildings. The Pantheon, as one of the best preserved and the most visited monuments in the city, was positioned in a plausible urban fabric. [1] In Piranesi’s version, the building was deprived of its significance by overwhelming it with other splendid architectural works, which were consciously conceived as more complicated structures and impressive formations. To all appearances, the artist tried to clear away some historical interpretations and proposed his own ideas of it. Basically, I chose the Pantheon as a starting point to learn about Piranesi and ancient Rome. This final report firstly introduces Piranesi’s career and his map Campo Marzio; then carefully describes the reconstructed urban fabric around the Pantheon; in the essential part, the focus is on historical debates and the sources Piranesi relied on to create the complex in the map. Through the discussion of reconstruction around the Pantheon in Campo Marzio, I hope I could generally understand and appreciate the magnificence of Rome’s splendor in Piranesi’s world.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) and his Campo Marzio

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born in Mogliano Veneto, then part of the Republic of Venice. He firstly studied with his uncle, an architect and engineer, and then with a Venetian engraver Carlo Zucchi. In Rome, he studied printmaking with Felice Polanzani and etching with Giuseppe Vasi. Although classical ruins became the subject of works of art by the early eighteenth century, never the background of paintings and prints as they were in the Renaissance and baroque periods, the artworks kept the regulation of accuracy in the form of the pedestrian rendering of what they saw. [2] Unlike his predecessors, Piranesi imaginatively reconstructed and interpreted ancient Roman architecture into “a utopian transformation” of the present and the past. [3] By the emphasis on the ruinous aspect of the ancient remains, his depiction of antiquity usually had a sense of inspiring grandeur, especially in the scenarios of strong contrasts of light and dark, as well as the tremendous scale with tiny figures. With a pride of nationality, Piranesi, more than any other artist, promoted and spread the knowledge of ancient Rome and its splendor in the depiction of magnificent buildings and sculptures. [4] Through his production of over one thousand etchings and engravings, and numerous scholarly treatises, the classical past became so well known that tourists flocked to Rome throughout the second half of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, but were often disappointed with the original monuments lacking the inherent qualities of overpowering scale and dramatic power in his prints. [5]

Piranesi’s first independent work—Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettive—was published in 1743 and again with additions in 1750 and 1761. In 1745, he began to etch the first edition of Carceri d’Invenzione or Imaginary Prisons. Beyond stage design and classical motifs, it depicted a dramatic gloom covering a fantastic world of hanging chains, heavy masonry, and piled arches. Simultaneously, he started the work of Vedute de Roma with the expression of several important architectural stages from the ancient to baroque. The plates, including 135 prints, were printed and sold as individual sheets or in collections over the course of his career.

In history, the initiation of the Vedute series was contemporaneous with Giambattista Nolli’s publication of his Grande Pianta di Roma and map. Probably, the relationship between Piranesi and Nolli’s map came from the period when he once worked for the map as a delineator to transpose drawings to the copperplate for engraving. Such fortuity became a powerful coincidence: on the one hand, Nolli’s map, clearly representing the actual physical context, provided a clue to understand how Piranesi combined his imagination with then-current topography in a fantasy that the experience of Rome was falsified consciously; on the other hand, the Vedute series’ evocative magnificence provided an extraordinary example of the built environment. Almost fourteen years after Nolli’s map, in 1762, Piranesi accomplished his drawing of the Campo Marzio, which was thought to be a direct response to Nolli’s map of Rome. [6]

Following what has been represented, the map Campo Marzio seems to be etched on stone tablets with several scraps holding together. The iconographic reconstruction describes the elaborate accumulation of old palaces, temples, theaters, porticos, and other buildings in the Campo Marzio area. As referential landmarks, the Tiber River, as well as the blurry contours of topography, could be recognized as a configurational pilot for the site’s orientation. In terms of each single complex, it follows an axis by itself and keeps a sharp geometrical outline, which is systematically organized by subordinate platonic geometries. A mass of compositions are regarded in a similar way as giant baths, marketplaces, or forums that might exist in different imperial times and places, yet deliberately falsified in scales and positions without apparent archaeological evidence. In the map, Piranesi suggested that it was impossible to say which fragment was the original condition, and that there was no one scale, no one time, no one location. In terms of urban fabric, a symmetrical composition links to the flank of the other, in which rooms are aggregated and organized independently according to the subaxes. Consequently, architectural groups are developed along a cascading set of axes with multiple directions. No axis clearly dominates and organizes the fabric as a whole, leaving numerous spaces resourcefully filled by interstitial figures. Finally, the map turns out to be a polemical project full of free imagination.

Reconstruction of the Area around the Pantheon in Campo Marzio

Concerning the reconstructed area around the Pantheon, it resides on a significant crook in the River Tiber. The Circus Agonale and the Altar of Mars, said to be the first structures in the Campo Marzio, occupy dominant positions in the site’s west. [7] The Amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus, as the most distinctive structure in the north, sites in the curve of the Horologium’s pavement. To the south is the Circus Flaminius, in a rectangular plan, almost perpendicular to the Thermae Agrippae. To the east, there are abundant columns in a rigid matrix, separating the complex from other architectonic structures. For the Pantheon, it is attached to the rich complex of the Thermae Agrippae in the south. A row of structures, considered as vaulted porticos, flank the rotunda on both sides, leaving the central plot for the encroachment of the back walls of the Pantheon. An open area on the southern side of the porticos serves as a public garden, enveloped on three sides by a rectangular artificial lake, known as the Stagnum Agrippae. Two hemicircular islands symmetrically inhabit the lake with numerous columns and obelisks around the rims. Between them are two fixed floating rafts. On the southern bank of the lake is the building complex of Thermae Agrippae, within which four circular walls overlap over the center of a rectangular room.

Except for the southern edge of the rotunda attached to the rear walls, the other three sides of the Pantheon are surrounded by a walled vestibule with multiple gates. The yard enclosed is as wide as the rotunda and much longer in the north-south direction. The northern edge of the portico bows out slightly, flanked by two cruciform pavilions on each side. They hold the statues of Hadrian and of Trajan, respectively in the west and east, and serve as elaborate gateways leading into the court. Simultaneously, the pavilions connect two rectangular artificial lakes behind, which are accompanied, on each side, by peripteral temples with three niches on the back wall. The westernmost temple groups are dedicated to Trajan and Hadrian, father and (adopted) son; the easternmost, separately to Matida, Hadrian’s mother-in-law, the mother of his wife Sabina, and to Juturan, the ancient goddess of salubrious waters. [8] The main entrances of those paralleled temples are paired up face to face toward the long lateral side of the Pantheon’s forecourt. Behind the temple groups, there are two basilicas in the rectangular plan, respectively dedicated to Matida, on the eastern side of the Pantheon, and to Marciana, Matida’s mother and Trajan’s sister, on the west. [9] On the narrower sides of the basilicas, four courts are symmetrically enclosed by L-shaped solid walls.

The Pantheon in History

Obviously, this is not the original version of the Pantheon and its adjacent urban fabric. Since medieval times, this area has become the most intensive and consistent habitat with great alteration, which made it difficult for Piranesi to figure out ruin layers of different periods in history. As Susan M. Dixon mentioned, for the Campo Marzio, Piranesi created a pastiche of times, instead of one single or sustained moment in history. [10] In order to get the real situation, let us review the history to see what happened around the Pantheon.

According to the ancient sources, where the Pantheon stands had been an earlier architectonic structure, built by Agrippa and dedicated around 25 BC, which was evidence by the inscription in the entablature. In 80 AD, the building was destroyed by a big fire but rebuilt by Domitian. [11] After another fire during Trajan’s rule, Hadrian’s Pantheon was restored and probably dedicated between 126 and 128. [12] In the early 600s, the building was donated to Pope Boniface IV (608–15) and subsequently converted into a church dedicated to Mary and the early Christian martyrs. In the Middle Ages, because of the papal strifes in the last half of the 1000s, the Pantheon was turned into a castle. [13] Since the fifteenth century, the papacy began to clear the area around the Pantheon. Eugenius IV (1431–47) removed the piles of earth and small booths around and in the pronaos, and also paved the square in front and adjacent streets. [14] Gregory XIII (1572–85) put the square in front of the building and had a fountain built, which received its obelisk from Santa Maria sopra Minerva. [15] Following Urban VIII’s will (1623–44), two towers, thought to be the work of Bernini but more probably of Carlo Maderno, [16] were erected at the ends of the intermediate block and replaced a single bell tower built in the late thirteenth century. After repairs in the 1620s and 1660s, the fallen part of the porch was restored; [17] however, in Piranesi’s iconography in 1762, the Pantheon was still rendered in a state of deterioration. The work of widening and clearing some of the surroundings continued until the nineteenth century. At that time, buildings attached to the Pantheon’s flanks were removed; the monument was isolated completely.

Historically, around the Pantheon and its history, numerous scholars, antiquarians, and archaeologists were involved in heated disputes. Certain controversies even related to sensitive religious taboos that transcended the scope of purely academic arguments and ultimately incurred the papal authority’s discontentment and panic. In the early 1750s, when Giuseppe Bianchini identified the Pantheon as a pagan artifact reused in Christian ritual ceremonies, the suggestion was considered by some to be heretical because “it insinuated the pagan influence on the rituals of Christianity.” [18] The sequent publication from other antiquarians solicited a highly polemical reaction which led to the eventual intervention of papal authority. On February 18, 1756, a pontifical bull relating the brief history of the building was pronounced, which, according to Dixon’s idea, seemed to try to silence the contentious arguments in the academies. [19] As both an artist and archaeologist, Piranesi was prudent. He was well aware that during that period, any discussion or consideration of the Pantheon was controversial, and would be under scrutiny by papal authorities, especially after the bull. Maybe this was the reason why Piranesi did not publish the collection of twenty-nine prints of the Pantheon until 1790, twelve years after his death. In his view, the Pantheon was never originally designed as part of the Thermae Agrippae, nor in isolation in ancient time. Since his intention of reconstruction was radically different from those of antiquarians in Benedict’s academies, [20] he preferred to present the Pantheon based on his own comprehension, which rooted in several historical sources.

Piranesi’s sources included remains of monuments visible in the urban fabric; Nolli’s map of Rome of 1748, constantly used as an important reference; coins and medallions, from time to time, furnished evidence of facades and elevations; Roman literature with comparatively faint evidence to note fixed buildings’ positions. Besides, Piranesi himself quoted some of the other sources in the commentary to the plan of II Campo Marzio: “What I must fear here is that certain aspects of this delineation of the Campo might seem inspired by mere caprice. . . . But whoever he is, before condemning anyone of imposture, let him observe the ancient plan of Rome (Marble Plan) [21] mentioned above, let him observe the ancient villas of Lazio, the villa of Hadrian in Tivoli, the sepulchers, and the other buildings in Rome that remain, in particular outside of Porta Capena.” [22] Obviously, when evidence ran out, similar ancient Roman structures with various and complex forms, for example, Hadrian’s Villa, as Piranesi had mentioned above, commonly would indicate potential ways to flesh out gaps in the map. After all, the primary goal of Piranesi’s reconstruction was to capture the buildings in their urban fabric.

Conclusion

Piranesi’s dissertation II Campo Marizo dell’Antica Roma was a tremendous task, accompanied by various vignettes and forty-five plates, one of which is the large, comprehensive map Campo Marizo. The achievement offered him a forum to present his ideas and ambitions publicly. He thought modern Rome had become degraded, and even unworthy of its past and that what he should do was to restore the city with its original magnificence. In history, controversies around his work, especially the map of Campo Marizo, never suspend. For one thing, the map has been regarded as inaccurate and even simply labeled with denigration by today’s historical and archaeological standards; for another, it has been appreciated as fanciful and imaginative. Anyway, in the map, Piranesi provided us with a special version of the Pantheon: it served as a member in the ancient Roman fabric even though the memory of Roman greatness had been constantly fading for thousands of years.

Notes

[1] Susan M. Dixon, “Piranesi’s Pantheon,” in Architecture as Experience: Radical Change in Spatial Practice, ed. Dana Arnold and Andrew Ballantyne (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 57.

[2] Thomas Julian McCormick, Piranesi and the New Vision of Classical Antiquity in the Eighteenth Century (Norton, MA: Watson Gallery, Wheaton College, 1991), 6.

[3] Luigi Ficacci, Giovanni Battista Piranesi : selected etchings = eine Auswahl der Kupferstiche = une s lection des eaux-fortes, trans. Bradley Baker Dick, Verena Listl, and Isabelle Baraton (New York: Taschen, 2001), 9.

[4] McCormick, Piranesi and the New Vision of Classical Antiquity in the Eighteenth Century, 6.

[5] Ibid., 6.

[6] Peter Eisenman, “Piranesi and the City,” in Piranesi as Designer, ed. Sarah E. Lawrence and John Wilton-Ely (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2007), 302.

[7] Dixon, Architecture as Experience, 66.

[8] Ibid., 67.

[9] Ibid., 68.

[10] Ibid., 65.

[11] Kjeld de Fine Licht, The Rotunda in Rome: A Study of Hadrian’s Pantheon, Jutland Archeological Society Publications VIII (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968), 185.

[12] William L. MacDonald, The Pantheon: Design, Meaning, and Progeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 13.

[13] de Fine Licht, The Rotunda in Rome, 240.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] MacDonald, The Pantheon, 18.

[17] Ibid., 19.

[18] Dixon, Architecture as Experience, 63.

[19] Ibid., 64.

[20] The academies were: Accademia dei concili, dedicated to the history of the Church councils; Accademia della storia ecclesiastica dei romani pontefici, to the lives of the popes; di liturgica, to the Church’s sacred rites and liturgy; and della storia e della antichita romana, to the study of ancient Roman history. The academies were suspended at the Pope’s death in 1758.

[21] The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan is a massive marble map of ancient Rome, created between 203 and 211. It was carved into 150 marble slabs mounted on an interior wall of the Temple of Peace. It was gradually destroyed during the Middle Ages and only about ten percent of the original surface are recovered, in the form of over one thousand marble fragments.

[22] From the text accompanying the Campo Marzio plan. The English translation quoted is from Manfred Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

Fellow Experience

Rome is always full of mystery to me, not only for its long history, but also for its splendid cultural heritage. No doubt, the city is doomed to relate its magnificent splendor with numerous talented artists and engineers in the past thousands of years. Based upon the layering of sources in successive historical periods from antiquity to modernity, the city became an enormous museum, about politics, religion, art, and architecture. In the summer of 2009, I decided to visit Rome to carefully experience its actual sense of history.

When I stood on the historic sites, the sunlight, the wind, and the scent constantly reminded me that this was Rome, with its cultural and social aspirations spanning thousands of years. In general, the city comes through several important historical stages: the growth and decline of the ancient Roman Empire; the creation of new architectural forms and urban meanings in response to the Christianization of the empire; the practice of pilgrimage as urban experience; and Bramante’s big design for New St. Peter’s. Except for its history, what else does Rome hold? I compare the actual Roman city consciously and unconsciously with the one I imagined before and find the city also displays a vivid urban life in the present age. I think even contemporary urban life is an essential part of the city.

Rome is a pastiche, in which ancient, medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern times coexist. Medieval buildings grow on Roman structures; automobiles run across old lanes; under church bells, people enjoy wonderful dinners with their families or friends. The old-new opposition shapes a physical tension within the city’s urban life. History is alive. It is not a delicate antique kept safe in the museum, but a dynamic river full of life. Nolli’s map teaches me how to recognize and understand the spatial relationship within the urban fabric; but it never tells me how people live within the city. Probably, it is for this amazing point that I enjoy Rome, though it also meets the challenges from the conflicts between urban development and protection of its historic sites. Similar situations also happen in China, especially in old cities with hundreds or thousands of years. But for China, it meets extra unique problems. Large populations flood into urban areas without productive infrastructure systems of transportation, supply, and refuse. In such circumstances, the sense of historic protection usually becomes so fragile that sudden and tremendous modernization could devour anything. Anyway, this trip gave me the opportunity to think about such issues.