Ruined map: metaphor and imaginative appeal

Abstract

This article presents a set of reflections directly or indirectly related to an image by Giovani Batista Piranesi: a set of marble fragments belonging to a map of Ancient Rome (Fig. 1). The ruin theme emerges in this precise and singular context. In the act of gathering the fragments of the map, in itself revealing an attention of a different order from the usual, it constitutes an appreciation of the ruin and its evocative and symbolic aptitude, but also of its appealing power of the imagination. The investigation of the conceptual background on which this image emerges - considering the protoscientific, aesthetic and artistic areas in which it was inscribed in the century. XVIII- it allows us to read it as a metaphor about the perception, representation and reinvention of ruins, in the urban context of the city of Rome, at that time. On the one hand, the aforementioned image reflects the perception of the city as a disfigured territory, on the other hand, the understanding of ruins as a secular value, configuring a structure of cultural and aesthetic identity. In addition, ruin appears in this article as an immeasurable repository of the imagination and as a catalyst for over-determined psychological movements. The imaginative conclusion, inherent to the processes of aesthetic contemplation of the ruins and, eventually, of the constructions, seems to be related to formal and visual characteristics of these types of theme, visually characterized by the incompleteness of the forms and by aspects of discontinuity and interruption.