P iranesi's Double Ruin

Abstract

Perhaps it is in the very nature of Rome to be read as a palimpsest, as the site of perpetual double-exposure. 1 Throughout the centuries, the modern eye finds its vision of the eternal city constantly undermined by--and therefore superimposed upon--visual reminders of a monumental past, a past so present that contemporary sensibility must accommodate rather than attempt to obliterate it. In November 1786, during his very first days in Rome, Goethe noted that "I find it a difficult and melancholy business, I must confess, separating the old Rome from the new." 2 In the stillness of an autumnal evening two decades earlier, the historian Edward Gibbon found in the juxtaposition of the old and the new not only the inspiration for, but also the central thesis of what would become his magnum opus. Here is how he recalled that moment years later in one of the six versions of his memoirs: "In my Journal the place and moment of conception are recorded; the fifteenth of October 1764, in the close of evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan fryars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol." 3 Gibbons's great historical project was originally "circumscribed to the decay of the City," he notes, but it soon extended to the Empire itself.

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