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Piranesi, Juvarra, and the Triumphal Bridge tradition

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2003 by David R. Marshall

One of the most influential images in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Prima pane di architetture, e prospettive, a collection of engravings published in 1743, was the Ponte magnifico (Fig. 1). It shows a view through the archway on one of the short projections of a U-shaped bridge. Indeed magnificent, this bridge is adorned with freestanding columns, Doric on the lower level and Ionic on the upper, a colonnade, and a central feature that takes the form of a triumphal arch. (1) Its functionality is uncertain: the main structure conceivably forms a kind of island in the middle of the lake, the bank to the side being reached, perhaps, by the side spans. But this hardly matters, since the essential quality of the bridge is its magnificence. Its origins in the designs by Andrea Palladio for the Rialto Bridge are well known (Fig. 2). (2) Equally well known is the extent of its influence, which ranged from Canaletto's views of Westminster Bridge (3) to works by Hubert Robert," Thomas-Jean de Thomon, (5) Pierre-Antoine de Machy, (6) and others. It undoubtedly contributed to a burst of invention on the theme of the triumphal bridge by artists associated with the French Academy in the 1740s, such as Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot (7) Nicolas-Henri Jardin (Fig. 3) (8) and Charles-Michel-Ange Challe. (9) Subsequently, monumental triumphal bridges became a common theme in the competitions of the academies, notably at the Accademia di S. Luca in 1777 (won by Bernardo Vittone), (10) at the French Academy in 1774, 1779, 1783, and 1786 (the last won by Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Franvois Lefebvre), (11) and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1776 (won by John Soane, with the first version of his Triumphal Bridge, (12) revised in a more Neoclassical style in 1799). (13)

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Yet Piranesi (Fig. 1) called his bridge not a "triumphal" bridge (ponte trionfale), but a "magnificent" one (ponte magnifico). (14) Given the contribution his design made to the "triumphal bridge" tradition, why did not Piranesi himself embrace the idea of a ponte trionfale? In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to establish what made a bridge "triumphal." The idea of a "triumphal" bridge goes back to the Renaissance, arising from the topographical inquiries of Renaissance humanists centered on the remains of the Pons Neronianus, a bridge over the Tiber located a short way downstream of the Ponte Sant'Angelo. By surveying the idea of the triumphal bridge and its representations from the Renaissance to Piranesi, by way of Flavio Biondo, Onofrio Panvinio, Pirro Ligorio, Nicolas Poussin, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and Filippo Juvarra, this article will explore the ways in which the subgenre of the architectural fantasy that may best be described as the "magnificent (triumphal) bridge" both grew out of, and kept its distance from, the antiquarian attempt to interpret the Pons Neronianus as the "Pons Triumphalis." This exploration will show that Piranesi was as deeply involved with the archaeological problem of the triumphal bridge as he was with the fantasy genre of the magnificent bridge, and will reveal that Piranesi's archaeological investigation of the triumphal bridge played an important role in the creative process that resulted in the greatest antiquarian topographical fantasy ever made, the Ichnographia, the large map of ancient Rome in Piranesi's book II Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma of 1762.

The Pons Neronianus and the Renaissance Antiquarian Tradition

Just below the Castel Sant'Angelo the Tiber makes a sharp bend, changing direction more than ninety degrees, enclosing the area of the city to the northwest of the Oratory of the Filippini (Figs. 4, 6). This is the natural site for a bridge connecting the Campo Marzio to the Vatican, as the nineteenth-century engineers who built the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II recognized. Yet from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century the crossing was by the Ponte Sant'Angelo, the former Pons Aelius, upstream and almost at right angles to the most direct crossing. In antiquity, however, there had been a bridge at the Tiber bend. A little upstream of the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II, toward the Ponte Sant'Angelo, the remains of an ancient bridge are still visible at low water; before the building of the Tiber embankments they stood clear of the water (Fig. 5). There are good grounds for supposing that this bridge was built by Nero. At that time, the Vatican side of the river, the Ager Vatica nus, contained estates belonging to members of the imperial family, including Nero. Caligula had built there the circus known as the Circus Gaii et Neronis, used by Nero as a private racecourse, while Nero built a naumachia, a stadium for sea battles. Initially Nero's bridge would have been essentially private, the means by which the emperor could more easily reach his properties on the Ager Vaticanus. The Via Aurelia in this area may also date from Nero's reign. (15) Nero's bridge, then, enabled the development of the Vatican area in antiquity. It would seem that it had collapsed by the fourth century, when the Regional Catalogues, lists of the buildings of Rome organized by region, were first compiled, as they do not mention it. (16) During the Middle Ages it was usually known as the Pons Neronianus, although it had other names. (17) In the Renaissance it was firmly identified as the Pons Triumphalis, following Flavio Biondo's Roma instaurata, written in 1444-46 (first printed edition 1471). (18) Biondo, wh o was well acquainted with the Regional Catalogues, may have taken the reference there to a via "triumfalis" to refer to the road from the bridge across the Ager Vaticanus to the area around the site of St. Peter's, and by extension applied it to the bridge. (19) Biondo also states that certain ruins were part of a gateway to the bridge, thus initiating a tradition maintaining that there was an arch on one bank or the other. (20) The Renaissance identification of the Tons Neronianus" with the "Pons Triumphalis" was thus a consequence of the identification of the route from the bridge across the Vatican as the Via Triumphalis.

Piranesi, Juvarra, and the Triumphal Bridge tradition

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2003 by David R. Marshall

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