Piranesi, Juvarra, and the Triumphal Bridge tradition - Giovanni Piranesi, Filippo Juvarra

single 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 displays a view through the archway upon one of the short projections of a U-shaped bridge. Indeed magnificent, this bridge is adorned with freestanding round pillars Doric on the lower horizontal 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 mode of building conceivably forms a kind of island in the middle of the lake, the bank to the side being reached, perhaps, through the side spans. But this hardly matters, since the essential quality of the bridge is its magnificence. Its origins in the designs by means of Andrea Palladio for the Rialto Bridge are well known (Fig. 2) (2) Equally well known is the expansion of its influence, which ranged from Canaletto's views of Westminster Bridge (3) to works by means of Hubert Robert," Thomas-Jean de Thomon (5) Pierre-Antoine de Machy, (6) and others. It undoubtedly contributed to a explode of invention on the theme of the triumphal bridge by dint of artists associated with the French Academy in the 1740 of that kind as Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot (7) Nicolas-Henri Jardin (Fig. 3) (8) and Charles-Michel-Ange Challe. (9) Subsequently monumental triumphal bridges became a belonging to all theme in the competitions of the academies, notably at the Accademia di s Luca in 1777 (won by means of Bernardo Vittone), (10) at the French Academy in 1774 1779 1783 and 1786 (the last won by the agency of Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Franvois Lefebvre), (11) and at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1776 (won by dint of John Soane, with the first version of his Triumphal Bridge, (12) revised in a more Neoclassical phraseology in 1799). (13)

nevertheless Piranesi (Fig. 1) called his bridge not a "triumphal" bridge (ponte trionfale), on the contrary a "magnificent" one (ponte magnifico). (14) Given the contribution his design made to the "triumphal bridge" tradition, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason 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 goe back to the Renaissance, arising from the topographical inquiries of Renaissance humanists center upon the remains of the Pon Neronianus, a bridge above the Tiber located a short way downstream of the Ponte Sant'Angelo. through surveying the idea of the triumphal bridge and its representations from the Renaissance to Piranesi, by the agency of 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" the one and the other grew out of, and kept its distance from, the antiquarian attempt to interpret the Pon Neronianus as the "Pon Triumphalis." This exploration will exhibit that Piranesi was as deep involved with the archaeological question 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 part in the creative process that originateed in the greatest antiquarian topographical fantasy at any time made, the Ichnographia, the large map of ancient Rome in Piranesi's work II Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma of 1762

The Pon Neronianus and the Renaissance Antiquarian Tradition

Just below the Castel Sant'Angelo the Tiber makes a sharp bend, changing direction more than ninety stages 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. at the same time from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth hundred the crossing was by the Ponte Sant'Angelo, the former Pon Aelius, upstream and almost at right angles to the greatest in quantity 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 depressed water; before the building of the Tiber embankments they stood clear of the water (Fig. 5) There are beneficial grounds for supposing that this bridge was built by means of 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 through 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 through which the emperor could more easily reach his properties upon the Ager Vaticanus. The Via Aurelia in this area may also date from Nero's reign. (15) Nero's bridge, then, enabled the exhibition of the Vatican area in antiquity. It would have the appearance that it had collapsed by means of the fourth century, when the Regional Catalogues, lists of the buildings of Rome organized by dint of region, were first compiled, as they do not mention it. (16) During the Middle Ages it was usually known as the Pon Neronianus, although it had other names. (17) In the Renaissance it was firmly identified as the Pon 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 relation there to a via "triumfalis" to give in charge to the road from the bridge across the Ager Vaticanus to the area around the site of St Peter's, and through 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 upon one bank or the other. (20) The Renaissance identification of the Tons Neronianus" with the "Pon Triumphalis" was thus a result of the identification of the passage from the bridge across the Vatican as the Via Triumphalis.