A simple comparison between the way in which, for instance, Piranesi visually stages the Pantheon and the manner preserved by more traditional vedutisti or architectural historians shows how much the importance of suggesting that the building is actually present for the beholder, with the spectator actually inside it, replaced the documentary tradition that started with the Speculum Magnificentiae Romae at the end of the sixteenth century. In such later monographic publications as the Rovine del Castello dell'Acqua Giulia (1761) and the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma (1762), culminating in the studies of the Villa Hadriana and Paestum, unfinished at the time of his death and published by his son Francesco, the form and content is always visual. The Magnificenze (1762) and Le Antichità Romane (1762) offer the most complete vision of the Roman and Etruscan origins of classical architecture. In his early works, the Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), or the Antichità Romane de'tempi della Repubblica e de'primi Imperatori (1748), he presents a combination of etchings showing the ruins at the moment he saw them, subject to the ravages of time, together with hybrid images that assemble an abrupt montage of their present state with elements that had disappeared by the eighteenth century, and additions imagined by the artist, as in the scenes from the Via Appia. If one leaves aside Piranesi's writings, often polemical, on the correct use of ornament or the origins of classical architecture, which form a minor part of his oeuvre, and whose authorship is still sometimes contested, the large majority of his output consists of a series of etchings showing the ruins of Rome and its environs, with some reconstructions, as, for instance, that of the Campus Martius. In this essay I want to consider more closely the nature of this visual history and its implications. They barely address the actual form of his publications on ancient Rome, in that his representations of Rome's past are not in the form of a continous narrative discourse, chronologically ordered, or even of a chronicle of facts, dates and material remains (of which Le Roy's chronological diagram of church ground plans is a rudimentary example), but a visual history. They concentrate on his position in the Graeco-Roman debate and in the controversies of the 1750s and 1760s between archaeologists, art historians and antiquarians on the origins of architecture, the nature and the legitimization of ornament. Yet common to all these new approaches, however valuable and innovative, is that they favor the content, the arguments, of Piranesi to the neglect of the actual visual form of his historical work. The Graeco-Roman debate on the origins of classical architecture between, on one hand, Julien-David Le Roy and, on the other, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Piranesi, has thus become the point of departure for recent studies of Piranesi's activities as an architectural historian. In the past decade Lola Kantor, Fabio Barry, Mario Bevilacqua and Francesco Nevola have situated his writings in the context of Venetian debate on the relationship between architectural forms and function, exchanges between representatives of the new disciplines of art history and archaeology and the humanist antiquarian study of Roman ruins. In his wake John Wilton-Ely and Manfredo Tafuri have developed a reading of his work as a precursor of modernism, favoring, like his fellow Venetian Lodoli, the simple expression of a building's function, and rejecting the traditional Vitruvian view of Greece as the cradle of classical architecture. Instead, in one of the first articles he wrote after his arrival at the Warburg Institute in London, he drew attention to Piranesi's importance as an architectural theorist and historian. Rudolf Wittkower was one of the first to break both with the tradition that considered Piranesi mainly as a vedutisto, a brilliant and highly original producer of evocative views of Rome, and with the Romantic tradition that saw him as the inventor of irrational space and of prophetic visions of the modern predicament. A Visual History of Architecture One of the major developments in recent Piranesi studies is to consider his work as an integral part of the aesthetic and historical debates sparked off after the 1750 rediscovery of Pompei, Herculaneum and Paestum, and the resulting publications by Winckelmann and Julien-David Le Roy.
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