Originally presented as a lecture for the Unione internazionale degli istituti di
archeologia, storia e storia dell’arte in Rome in 2002, Joseph Connors’
study of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Campus Martius (1762)
is a lively and wide-ranging study in a small package. Connors’ primary focus
is the centerpiece of Piranesi’s volume: his famous
Ichnographia or plan-map of the Campus Martius, the low-lying
ancient Roman district nestled in the curves of the Tiber River. Piranesi’s
grand and intricate foldout etching has fascinated scholars from John Wilton-Ely to
Manfredo Tafuri (Wilton-Ely 1983; Tafuri 1987). The Ichnographia
has also drawn polarized reactions almost since the time of its publication.
Observers have framed it variously as an outrageous miscarriage of archaeological
method — full of glittering architectural fiction posing as factual
reconstruction — or as the foremost statement of Piranesi’s visionary
genius for design and printmaking. Connors paints a subtler picture, defending
Piranesi’s reputation as an interpreter of Rome’s ancient monuments
without discounting his eccentric brilliance and flights of invention. In sum,
Connors outlines a process by which personal observation and archaeological research
fed Piranesi’s imagination rather than being at odds with it. Along the way,
Connors gives a singular glimpse into the mind and thought process of this most
alluring of paper architects.
Surprisingly, the Ichnographia and the larger Campus
Martius volume of which it forms part have not previously been the
target of such an in-depth interpretive study. This state of affairs stands in
striking contrast to the attention that has recently been lavished on Giovanni
Battista Nolli’s large plan of Rome (1748), the complement and inverse of
Piranesi’s Ichnographia in its sober, documentary focus on
the existing built environment of the eighteenth-century city (Bevilacqua 1998, esp. bibliography). That said, admittedly there
is no shortage of scholarship on Piranesi. Countless volumes, exhibition catalogues,
and essay collections have been devoted to him, many of which include entries on the
Ichnographia and the Campus Martius —
and Connors rightly singles out the excellent work of Mario Bevilacqua in placing
Piranesi alongside his contemporaries and competitors Nolli and Giuseppe Vasi
— but the contextualization that Connors provides has until now been lacking
(Bevilacqua 2004). His study is rich yet
compact: the expanded English text is approximately one hundred pages, while the
Italian version, which is closer to the original lecture in breadth, is shorter, at
roughly forty pages (this review thus primarily concerns the former, although the
dual-language edition is commendable).
Connors’ ostensible point of departure is an incongruously narrow problem:
Piranesi’s unorthodox and ultimately misguided redrawing of the ancient Via
Lata — today’s Via del Corso — which in the
Ichnographia winds a strange, jerking path toward the Trevi
Fountain and up the Pincio Hill, not the direct march from the Capitoline north to
the Porta del Popolo that it did in his own day. The Corso was one of the only
intramural ancient thoroughfares that still survived in recognizable form, and it
was the spine of Renaissance and Baroque Rome. To observers both in Piranesi’s
time and now, the route he outlined must have seemed implausible at best, arbitrary
and ignorant at worst, but Connors engages in his own reconstructive project,
retracing the steps by which Piranesi arrived at this configuration.
That said, on the map, the Corso is inconspicuous, its wanderings all but lost in the
welter of surrounding architectural marvels. The Ichnographia is
really not about streets, and in a sense this is Connors’
point. The map is the quintessential product of an architect, and it privileges
buildings above all else. As Connors demonstrates, Piranesi diverted the path of the
Corso in part so it would skirt the sprawling architectural complexes that he
fabricated from ingenious readings of archaeological evidence combined with
imaginative conjecture. Through case studies of some of the most prominent and
outlandish of these vast complexes, such as the Septa Julia and Bustum Caesaris,
Connors shows that Piranesi was indeed motivated by an impressive store of
antiquarian and archaeological knowledge. But he took license with that knowledge,
shaping it — like the Corso — to serve his own ‘grand
vision’.
The Lost Corso examines the Ichnographia in the
larger context of the Campus Martius volume — plates as well
as text — and situates the whole within the long tradition of reconstructing
the ancient city. Connors provides a comprehensive survey of Piranesi’s
precedents from the early Renaissance to his own time, and one of the book’s
concluding sections brings this history up to the late twentieth century. Many
surprises emerge from Connors’ narrative. This reader, for one, was entirely
unaware that Piranesi’s glorious archaeological fictions were ever taken
seriously. In the dedication of his Campus Martius to Scottish
architect Robert Adam, Piranesi himself wrote, ‘I am rather afraid that some
parts of the Campus which I describe should seem figments of the imagination and not
based on any evidence… [but] perhaps it is part of human nature to demand some
license in creative expression as in other things’ (from the introduction by
John Wilton-Ely, in Piranesi 2002:
27–30). One does wonder just how much of his
Ichnographia Piranesi expected to be received as concrete
archaeological hypothesis, how much as testament to his own powers of invention. Yet
Connors shows many of Piranesi’s clever ‘figments’ to have
retained some influence on archaeologists well into modern times — at least,
they were influential enough to merit discounting.
Connors’ discussion of the twentieth-century reception of the Campus
Martius and Ichnographia is one of the highlights of
his book, addressing some of the more recent successors to Piranesi and others who
tried to reconstruct the ancient city, including Luigi Canina, Rodolfo Lanciani,
Christian Hülsen, and Guglielmo Gatti. The latter emerges as a secondary
protagonist (or perhaps foremost antagonist) of The Lost Corso, for
Connors devotes a full ten pages to this ‘Samson who would knock down the last
pillars’ of Piranesi’s Ichnographia. Thus this book,
which begins as an intriguing mystery — what has happened to a missing street?
— ultimately embraces a half-millennium of scholarship and imagery dedicated
to the ancient Roman cityscape, along the way tracing changing approaches to
antiquity, archaeology, and invention. Indeed, one of Connors’ most valuable
contributions here is to demonstrate once and for all that Piranesi, more than a
solitary genius indulging in his own proto-Romantic imaginings, was participating in
a centuries-long dialogue.
If there is any fault to be found in The Lost Corso, it is that the
illustrations do not always keep pace with Connors’ text. The
Ichnographia is well represented, of course, but some
comparative material is not reproduced, such as Francesco Bianchini’s 1738
reconstruction of the Palatine — a work the reader longs to see after Connors
describes it in such vivid terms. This is a minor point. Other technical details are
impeccable, from the thoroughgoing footnotes to the ‘bio-bibliography’
of the author. As engagingly written as it is illuminating, The Lost
Corso is — as Connors recounts in his preface — the product
of decades of meditations on Piranesi, much as Piranesi’s
Ichnographia resulted from a lifetime of ruminations on Rome
itself.