Plautii Tomb, Tivoli

View of the Remains of the Tomb of the Plautii on the Via Tiburtina Near the Ponte Lugano Two Miles from Tivoli (Veduta degl’avanzi del sepolcro della famiglia Plauzia sulla via Tiburtina vicino al ponte Lugano due miglia lontano da Tivoli), “Views of Rome,” c. 1767-1769, Etching on wove paper, Sheet/Page 51.91 H x 74.77 W cm (20 7/16 H x 29 7/16 W in), Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Bequest of Frank B. Bristow), GW Collection (CGA.68.26.833)

By Evan Hampson

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s View of the Remains of the Tomb of the Plautii on the Via Tiburtina depicts the crumbling remains of a colossal ancient tomb belonging to the gens Plautia. The Plautii were a plebeian family that flourished during the Julio-Claudian dynasty of the first centuries BCE and CE. Several members, including Marcus Plautius Silvanus, held consulships during the Roman Republic and the Empire. Silvanus constructed this mausoleum for his family on the Via Tiburtina, the road from Rome to Tibur (modern Tivoli). He served as consul in 2 BCE and was a general who fought alongside the future emperor Tiberius during the Great Illyrian Revolt. The gens Plautia was intimately tied to the gens Claudia, as Silvanus' daughter Plautia Urgulanilla became the emperor Claudius' first wife, and Silvanus’ nephew Aulus Plautius led Claudius' invasion of Great Britain. The Ponte Lucano, the bridge that Piranesi mentions in his inscription, was named for Marcus Plautius Lucanus, another member of the family who built it in the first century BCE.

In this etching, the remains of a massive Roman tower looms over a road, dwarfing several passersby. On the right side of the composition, a rocky outcrop – or perhaps a fragment of another ruin – sprouting some vegetation casts a shadow across the road. The shadow falls on a man adjusting one of the bags on his donkey and a mother with her son, who clutches her dress as he looks off to the right. The shade extends up the weathered base of the ruin onto part of a large Latin funerary inscription that boasts of Silvanus’ consulship and his triumphal honors for his role in the Illyrian Revolt, as Cassius Dio records. The shadow also covers a smaller, yet much longer, funerary inscription to the right of the larger one, dedicated to Silvanus’ grandson Tiberius Plautius Silvanus Aelianus. The gargantuan tower and inscription dominate the entire left half of the print, with the top of the tower continuing out of view. In the middle of the etching, close to the bottom, a hunchbacked man sits in the street with his hands outstretched in a begging posture. Further up the road, a man holds what appears to be a flag, which could be the object of the young boy’s gaze. The melancholia of the scene is evident in that the heads of all the adult characters look toward the ground. Piranesi’s ability to capture such emotion in his prints earned him the nickname “The Rembrandt of Ruins.” The ancient, well-trodden road passes a lone tree and continues into the background, where two distant houses stand. Behind them rise three mountains, barely discernible against the cloudy sky. At the bottom of the print is an Italian inscription by Piranesi that identifies the crumbling structure as the Plautii’s mausoleum, which still stands today just outside Tivoli.

Hence, this piece illustrates Piranesi’s mastery of printmaking and is typical of his vedutas of Roman ruins outside the Eternal City. Here, he shows off his skill with line variation, using thicker lines in the shadowed places of the composition and thinner lines for gentle shading in the highlighted areas, especially the parallel horizontal lines in the sky. In addition, Piranesi uses thin lines for details such as the inscription of Aelianus and the houses in the background. Two figures are standing in front of one of the houses, as can be seen under a magnifying glass. Piranesi also plays with the scale of the ruin, as he does in other vedutas, with the figures in the foreground only as tall as about one and a half of the stone blocks making up the base of the inscription. He signs the work in the bottom left as Cavalier Piranesi, dating it after 1767, when Pope Clement XIII made him a Knight of the Golden Spur.

The scale of the monuments in Piranesi’s vedutas and the characters depicted within the art pieces reflect the attitude towards Rome in his time. The exaggerated immensity of the mausoleum of the Plautii evokes a feeling of awe and wonder towards Roman civilization. In displaying the Plautii tomb as larger than life, Piranesi may have wanted to draw a connection to larger mausoleums like those of Augustus and Hadrian – whose tomb he also etched (see View of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian (Now called Castel S. Angelo) (Figure #). The presence of the beggar figure at the bottom references a common metaphor from the time of Piranesi; the ruins of Rome are symbolic of the moral decay of society. This trope is also seen in Piranesi’s The Tombs Attributed to Piso Licinianus and the Cornelii on the Appian Way, which is populated with similarly unsavory characters (Figure #). Just as sections of these tombs’ marble veneers have crumbled to reveal the rough bricks underneath, the social virtues celebrated in antiquity have degraded and transformed once-grand monuments into the dens of drunks and beggars. 

Inscription in Latin 

M. Plautius M. F. A. N. / Silvanus / cos. VII vir epulon., / huic senatus. triumphalia / ornamenta decrevit / ob res in Ilyrico / bene gestas. / Lartia Cn. f. uxor. / A. Plautius M. F. / Urgulanius / vix. ann. IX."

English Translation by John Fine:

Marcus Plautius Silvanus, consul, septemvir of the Epulones, honored by the Senate with the triumphal ornaments for having conducted well the affairs of Illyricum, his wife Lartia and his son Aulus were buried in the mausoleum.

Photos courtesy of Dr. Pollack.

Dio Cassius. Roman History, Volume VII: Books 56-60. Translated by Earnest Cary, Herbert B. Foster. Loeb Classical Library 175. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924.

Lowe, Adam. “Messing About with Masterpieces: New Work by Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778).” Art in Print 1, no. 1 (2011): 14–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43045172.

Taylor, Lily Ross. “Trebula Suffenas and the Plautii Silvani.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 24 (1956): 7–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/4238637.

Zarucchi, Jeanne Morgan. “The Literary Tradition of Ruins of Rome and a New Consideration of Piranesi’s Staffage Figures.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (January 17, 2012): 359–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00459.x.