Later in Le Antichità Romane and other publications, Piranesi would inscribe his reconstructed plans on slabs of fragmented marble, often illusionistically held to the surface with metal clamps. Here, Piranesi’s Rome emerges from the old fragments. The small numbers that label these sites link the reader to entries on subsequent pages. The map of Rome in the center of the print represents ancient monuments as they appeared in Piranesi’s day. Although he consistently signed his work ‘architetto,’ he is famous for his engravings of the monuments of ancient Rome, and in fact constructed only one building in his entire career. The numbers that appear alongside the marble fragments correspond to entries in the detailed index that follows, in which Piranesi lists each surviving fragment and posits its identity and location in the city. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was the greatest printmaker of the 18th century. In this image, Piranesi scatters pieces of the marble plan around a map of the walled city. Amongst the many treasures of this collection are a number of volumes of engravings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), one of the greatest engravers of the eighteenth century, and today, 4 October 2020, is the 300th anniversary of his birth in Venice. Piranesi was well acquainted with the Severan fragments, and frequently drew inspiration from them for his own plans and images of antiquity. This fragmentary evidence of ancient Rome’s urban layout influenced early modern cartographers and antiquarians, who attempted to reconstruct Roman topography from extant ruins and writings from antiquity. Fragments of the Severan Plan were discovered in 1562 but had recently been put on public display at the Capitoline Museums. The etched plates and printed text that follow work together to index the surviving ruins of ancient Roman monuments known in the eighteenth century and the fragments of an ancient marble plan of Rome known as the Severan Marble Plan, or the Forma urbis romae. This plan of Rome begins a lengthy section on two specific types of ancient Roman fragments. This print appears early in the first volume of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane, following the dedicatory frontispiece and the standard preface and imprimatur, which provided proof that the papacy had granted proper permission for the publication.
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