Tavola Topografica di Roma in cui si dimostrano gli andamenti degli Antichi Acquedotti…

A topographical map of Rome depicting the paths of ancient aqueducts. The inscription "Dichiarazione delle note della Tavola", explains the contents that include named walls of Rome and subterranean aqueducts as well as identifying footprints of ancient remains.

"Dichiarazione delle note della Tavola: A. Mura odierne di Roma B. Mura di Roma anteriori all'Imperatore Aureliano Aquedotto arcuato della Marcia, Tepula, e Giulia Aquedotto arcuato della Claudia e Anione Nuovo Archi Neroniani Archi Antoniniani Aquedotto sostruito Aquedotto sotterraneo Rivo sotterraneo, porzionario delle acque Circonferenza delle Regioni antiche di Roma Nota delle Vie antiche Le rimanenti note son dichiarate o nella Tavola, o nella Spiegazione consecutiva della medesima Piedi Antichi Romani ".

Inset are technical drawings of aqueduct mechanisms. This is the plate XXXVIII of tome I of Antichità Romane, first edition by the French publisher Bouchard and Gravier in 1756. A great impression, printed with brown ink on contemporary laid, strong, paper with “double encircled fleur-de-lys with letter CB” watermark (Robison 33), with margins, perfect conditions.

The large plate of aqueducts as a whole is the outcome of the joining of two prints derived from two separate large-format plates, one relating to the upper half, the other to the lower half of the table. The author's resolution to include in the first book of this second topography of Rome must have been in response to the proposition of a twofold objective. The first instance was to give considerable prominence to the excellence of Roman hydraulic engineering, to which we owe the colossal public work of the aqueducts. With extraordinary technical expertise, derived in part from the knowledge he had acquired in his youth at the Magistrato delle acque in Venice, he reconstructed the water network of the eleven main aqueducts raised by the Romans to serve the city, of which scattered ruins remained in view, restored by emperors and pontiffs over the centuries. On the study of the subject Piranesi was to publish numerous plates in other works a few years later, such as Della Magnificenza ed architettura de' Romani (1761), with an illustration of the ancient Acqua Marcia aqueduct and a detail of the outlet of the Cloaca Massima into the Tiber, Rovine del Castello dell'Acqua Giulia (1761), and Descrizione e Disegno dell'Emissario del Lago di Albano (1762).

But the same topographical plate was also to serve as a graphic support for the demonstration of his hypothesis about the northern limits of the extent of the Campus Martius (see Osservazioni sulla determinazione de' limiti del Campo Marzio,, typographical text following the Spiegazione della Tavola degli Acquedotti nel primo tomo delle Antichità), with which he inserted himself into the merits of a debate at the time open by arguing, on the interpretation of Strabo's fifth book, that the said limit was to be extended as far as the Ponte Milvio, contrary to the assertions of the “modern Writers of Antiquity” who set the Mausoleum of Augustus as the northern extreme. The critical position would be taken up more extensively by the author in Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, a work on which he was working at the same time as the Antichità Romane, until the great Pianta di Roma e del Campo Marzio dedicated to Clement XIV, engraved at the end of his career (c. 1774). Piranesi would report in his Lettere di Giustificazione addressed to Milord Charlemont that the completion of the work for the table of aqueducts cost him - that alone - more than six months of work, spent both on topographical surveys and on revising the texts of the antiquarian Raffaele Fabretti (1680) and the mathematician Giovanni Poleni (1722) on the same subject (letter of August 25, 1756, p. VII). The statement is confirmed on the matrices, particularly on the matrix relating to the lower half of the table, where several copper abrasions are evident, whose topographical coordinates partly coincide with those reported in the Pianta di Roma.

Bibliografia

Petrucci, 1953, tav. 38, figg. 39 e 40, p. 243 ; Focillon, 1967, n. 217, p. 303; Wilton-Ely, 1994, n. 352, p. 402; Ficacci, 2000, n. 208, p. 208.