Forma Urbis Romae
The Forma Urbis Romae (FUR), also Forma Urbis marmorea or Forma Urbis for short , was a monumental plan of the city of Rome , which was created under the emperor Septimius Severus between 203 and 211 AD and today an important testimony to the topography of the ancient Rome is. There is no reference to the plan in the ancient text sources. This means that dating must be done solely from the plan itself.
The plan was approx. 18 m wide and 13 m high and attached to 150 marble slabs on an inner wall of the Templum Pacis . On a scale of about 1: 240, he showed the floor plans of all public and private buildings in the city. Public buildings such as temples and thermal baths were also given their official names. Cassius Dio (72,24,1–2) reports of a fire in the Templum Pacis. There is much evidence that the building was renovated under Septimius Severus (193–211 AD). L. Cozza has shown that large parts of the inner wall to which the plan was attached are Severan . There are no post-Severan buildings on the surviving fragments of the plan. Two parts of the plan point to the date of origin: First, the Septizodium , which can be seen on the fragments 8a and 8bde defines the terminus post quem (the date by which the plan must be created). The septizodium was built by Septimius Severus in AD 203 (CIL VI, 1032). Second, on fragment 5abcd, one sees an inscription designating Septimius Severus and his son Aurelius Antoninus ( Caracalla ) as common rulers. That was between AD 198, when Caracalla was made Augustus, and AD February 4, 211, when Septimius Severus died. This is the terminus ante quem (time before the plan was made).
After the destruction of the Forma Urbis in the Middle Ages , fragments appeared again and again since the Renaissance that were already published back then. Karl III gave a first collection . , King of Spain and King of the Two Sicilies , in 1741 to the Pope, who had them installed in the great staircase of the Capitoline Museum . In 1756 Giovanni Battista Piranesi dedicated four sheets of the first volume of his engraving Le Antichità Romane to the fragments of the Forma Urbis. A first edition of the material was presented between 1893 and 1901, followed by a complete revision in 1960 with the additions and corrections that had been necessary up until then.
At present, 1,186 fragments are known in the original, plus a further 87, which have only survived in old drawings and engravings. They only make up about 10 to 15% of the ancient population. A project at Stanford University is digitizing the fragments and trying to assign them to their original location. In 2014, during construction work in the Palazzo Maffei Marescotti, further fragments were found that are not yet included in these figures.
Meaning of the card
There are no written contemporary reports on the function of the map. It is believed that the hall of the Temple of Peace with the map housed the office of the city prefect, who was responsible for the cadastral system, in the time of Septimius Severus. The map could have served as a site plan or land register. This assumption is based on the fact that the map is shown in great detail, which must have been based on actual surveying work. Also, the 1: 240 scale used is the same as that commonly used by Roman cartographers.
Plausible objections are raised against this, however. The map was too big for a map. The topmost map areas were at a height of 13 m. You could hardly make out them from the ground. Also, only a small part of the details was labeled. In addition, there were no measurements that would otherwise be used in maps. The fact that the walls are only represented by one line and not, as is otherwise usual in Roman land registers, with two lines to indicate the boundaries speaks against its use as a land register. Owner information is also missing. Despite the astonishing wealth of detail, there are sometimes considerable errors in the most famous public buildings.
The map seems to have been primarily a representative representation that should impress the viewer. The temple of peace as the land registry is said to have contained maps drawn on papyrus, which were then scratched on the marble slabs on the same scale. Accordingly, there were two editions of the Forma Urbis Romae in the Temple of Peace, one on papyrus and one on marble.
literature
- Rodolfo Lanciani , Luigi Salomone, Ulrico Hoepli : Forma Urbis Romae . 8 volumes. Ulricum Hoepli, Milan 1893–1901.
- Gianfilippo Carettoni, Antonio M. Colini , Lucos Cozza, Guglielmo Gatti (eds.): La pianta marmorea di Roma antica. Forma urbis Romae . Rome 1960
- David West Reynolds: Forma Urbis Romae: The Severan Marble Plan and the Urban Form of Ancient Rome . PhD Diss. University of Michigan, 1996
- Emilio Rodríguez Almeida: Forma Urbis Marmorea. Aggiornamento Generale 1980. Rome 1981.
- Emilio Rodríguez-Almeida: Formae Urbis Antiquae: the mappe marmoree di Roma tra la Repubblica e Settimio Severo . Rome 2002
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ Jason Urbanus: Piecing Together a Plan of Ancient Rome. In: http://www.archaeology.org . August 15, 2016, accessed October 10, 2016 .
- ↑ Stacey Liberatore: Ancient Roman puzzle gets a new piece. In: http://www.dailymail.co.uk . March 8, 2016, accessed October 10, 2016 .