FROM ‘PORTICHO’ TO PROPYLAEUM

Francesco di Giorgio's drawing of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ likely was based on a sketch that was elaborated by the artist and his students in Siena in the 1490s.Footnote ¹ Some of these finished drawings were published in the Monumenti antichi, a collection of 30 folios of drawings of mostly ancient monuments in Rome and Tivoli. Francesco di Giorgio himself edited the Monumenti antichi and attached it to the end of a copy of his Trattato I (the first version of his text; Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Codex 148 Saluzzo, fols 71r–100v).Footnote ² In the Monumenti antichi, Francesco di Giorgio included two plans of buildings on the Capitoline Hill. One is a structure from the northwestern summit of the hill that he called ‘la sala del chonsilio di Cesari’ (fol. 88). The other is from the southwestern summit. Francesco di Giorgio called it the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ (fol. 82).Footnote ³ The latter (Fig. 1) depicts the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (labelled ‘Tenpio di Giove’) as a rotunda surrounded by a colonnade. Inside the rotunda is a statue (‘simulacro’). The temple itself is surrounded by courtyards (‘chortile’) and reception halls (‘sala’). A circuit of rooms and towers completes the structure. Francesco di Giorgio himself noted on the drawing that this plan was an imaginary reconstruction of a landscape full of ruins: ‘In maggior parte ito inmaginando che per le molte ruine pocho conprendar se ne po’.Footnote ⁴ Francesco di Giorgio's drawing of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ as an imaginary palace was evidently a planned feature of the Monumenti antichi. Indeed, in the preface to the Monumenti antichi, Francesco di Giorgio stated that he wanted to depict the ruined structures as they were originally constructed.Footnote ⁵ In other drawings, Francesco di Giorgio likewise noted that the buildings represented by his drawings were in ruins in his day, but the plans are nevertheless always complete — and almost completely imaginary.Footnote ⁶

Fig. 1. Turin, Codex 148 Saluzzo, Biblioteca Reale, fol. 82, 1480–1500. Francesco di Giorgio's drawing shows a fantasy of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’, at the centre of which is a rotunda called the ‘Tenpio di Giove’. Below this structure, and attached to it, is the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ that the artist claimed he saw. Source: Maltese and Maltese Degrassi (eds), Trattati (above, n. 2), I, 282, fig. 151. (Reproduced courtesy of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Biblioteca Reale — Torino.)

Though largely imaginary, Francesco di Giorgio's drawing of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ did attract the interest of two of the most important Italian archaeologists of late nineteenth-century Rome, Giovanni Battista de Rossi and Rodolfo Lanciani. De Rossi, according to Lanciani himself, pointed Lanciani to the drawing. In 1875, Lanciani published Francesco di Giorgio's drawing, and though he dismissed the rotunda and all the other structures as more or less a fantasy, Lanciani thought that Francesco di Giorgio had none the less stumbled on the dimensions of the temple's platform.Footnote ⁷ The dimensions of Francesco di Giorgio's ‘palazzo del Champitolio’, Lanciani pointed out, seem to preserve the dimensions of the platform of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, which had been revealed just partially, in 1865, through the archaeological investigations of the Germans and Italians, working largely independently of one another.Footnote ⁸ Lanciani's main point, in adducing Francesco di Giorgio's drawing as evidence, was to cement his identification of the Capitolium on the southwestern summit of the Capitoline Hill, not on the northwestern summit, or Arx, where the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli has stood in its present form since the fourteenth century.

Another feature of Francesco di Giorgio's drawing interested Lanciani. The drawing places, on the western side of his imaginary ‘palazzo del Champitolio’, what the artist called the ‘porticho del Champitolio’. Francesco di Giorgio even claimed, in the inscription that also dates the drawing, that he himself ‘observed the porticho del Champitolio from the Casa Savelli: the porta and portico had been ruined and spoliated in the time of (Pope) Paul (II)’ (‘Rincontra a cchasa Savelli che ar tenpo di Pavolo la porta e ‘l portico ruinato et dispogliato fu’).Footnote ⁹ In the pontificate of Paul II (1464–71), the Theatre of Marcellus was owned by the Savelli family, and so Francesco di Giorgio presumably had a suitable vantage-point from which to make his observations.Footnote ¹⁰ The ‘porticho del Champitolio’ consists of three intersecting circuits of columns, all of the columns linked by centre lines. The lines suggest that Francesco di Giorgio was recording, or imagining, an elaborate colonnade that framed one of the approaches to the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’. Lanciani took this information as evidence of an additional ancient structure that was attached to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in his words, ‘traces of a magnificent propylaeum’.Footnote ¹¹ Lanciani repeated this interpretation as fact in the first volume of his Storia degli scavi di Roma, published in 1902. Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’ was thereafter to be understood as a propylaeum: the plan ‘accenna alla esistenza di propilei nella fronte ovest della platea del tempio’.Footnote ¹²

Lanciani was, of course, correct in locating the Capitolium and the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the southwestern summit of the hill. But he was incorrect both in his understanding of what Francesco di Giorgio saw on the hill in the late fifteenth century and in what the architect attempted to represent in his drawing. First, let us start with Lanciani's suggestion that the structure that Francesco di Giorgio labelled the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ essentially maps onto the dimensions of the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In 1875, Lanciani thought that the temple platform was 58.6 m on each side — a square — and so was able to place the temple platform, as he understood it, nicely on top of the precinct surrounding Francesco di Giorgio's ‘Tenpio di Giove’.Footnote ¹³ Lanciani evidently thought that Francesco di Giorgio's plan of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’, which consists of a building essentially divided into three distinct zones, mirrored the triple cellae of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus — one each for Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, the northwest angle of Francesco di Giorgio's structure fitted perfectly into the ‘attuale topografia del luogo’. Figure 2 models what Lanciani likely had in mind by showing the platform layered on Francesco di Giorgio's drawing. It is also easy to see that Lanciani was correct that the northwest angle of Francesco di Giorgio's drawing does indeed match the site remarkably well.

Fig. 2. A model of Rodolfo Lanciani's 1875 assertion that a 58.6 × 58.6 m platform for the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus could be accurately overlaid on Francesco di Giorgio's ‘palazzo del Champitolio’.

There is little consensus, even now, on how large the platform was in antiquity. A few years later, in 1897, Lanciani realized that the platform was not 58.6 m on each side, and revised his figures accordingly. Now, in Lanciani's estimation, the temple platform was 57.17 × 61.52 m — a rectangle. Indeed, even though there is no agreement on the dimensions of the temple, all have agreed that the platform was rectangular.Footnote ¹⁵ Neither Lanciani, nor anyone else, returned to Francesco di Giorgio's drawing to revise Lanciani's assumptions in the light of new hypotheses on the shape and dimensions of the temple platform. If Lanciani had, it would have been clear that a rectangular platform would not have aligned so perfectly with Francesco di Giorgio's ‘palazzo del Champitolio’. Using Sommella's dimensions of a 54 × 74 m platform (52 × 62 m plus an additional 12 m of space behind the temple cellae), it is difficult to reconcile Francesco di Giorgio's ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ and the temple platform as it is currently understood (Fig. 3).Footnote ¹⁶ Clearly, Francesco di Giorgio neither had the dimensions of the platform in mind, nor did he draw his ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ accordingly.

Fig. 3. Demonstration of insufficient correspondence between the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ and a 54 × 74 m platform for the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. (A) Temple foundation as the perimeter defensive wall. (B) Temple foundation as the outer wall of the palazzo complex. (C) Temple foundation as the inner perimeter of the rooms labelled ‘sala’ and ‘cortile’. (D) Temple foundation as the perimeter of six of the nine central spaces of the complex.

We can also rule out Lanciani's interesting suggestion that Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’ was a propylaeum attached to the temple platform. The structure that Francesco di Giorgio drew — three intersecting circuits of columns, which would have been attached to the long side of an otherwise standard, if colossal, temple — has no analogue in Roman temple architecture. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the precinct surrounding the temple in antiquity, the Area Capitolina, was surrounded by a porticus in Capitolio and able to be closed off by at least one porta.Footnote ¹⁷ These structures were situated around the temple at a short distance from the temple platform, making the addition of a large propylaeum to the temple even less likely due to lack of space. However, if Lanciani was right that Francesco di Giorgio sketched a portico adjacent to the temple platform, it does remain at least remotely possible that Francesco di Giorgio saw the remains of a porticus or a porta leading to the Area Capitolina, or indeed the remains of one of the temples or other structures attested in the literary sources as standing in the Area Capitolina.Footnote ¹⁸ The remote possibility that Francesco di Giorgio had supplied a plan of now lost ancient structures on the Capitolium led Christian Hülsen to attribute a drawing of a ‘porticho’ by Giuliano di Sangallo as that seen by Francesco di Giorgio. This possibility also led Sommella to suggest that the columns indicated by Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’ were related to the arcades of a portico surrounding the Area Capitolina, and that these arcades, partly standing in fragmented ruins, were identified in the twelfth-century Mirabilia as the porticus Crinorum.Footnote ¹⁹

What is more likely than a record of an otherwise unattested propylaeum or a portico known in the Middle Ages or Renaissance is that Francesco di Giorgio saw something different when he was in Rome c. 1470. In what follows, we suggest that the spoliated ‘porticho del Champitolio’ that Francesco di Giorgio saw from the Theatre of Marcellus consisted of remnants of the temple platform itself — not the palace-fortress that Francesco di Giorgio himself admitted was a fantasy.

THE LAST COLUMNS OF THE TEMPLE OF JUPITER OPTIMUS MAXIMUS

In the eleventh century, if not before, the monumentality of the Capitol was focused away from the precinct of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Rather than on the Capitolium, the southwest summit of the hill, the Capitol was now situated to the northwest of the hill.Footnote ²⁰ Surrounding the Asylum (present Piazza del Campidoglio) were built the Palazzo Senatorio on the ‘Tabularium’ in the twelfth century and the Palazzo dei Conservatori in the fifteenth — the core of structures that made the Capitol the seat of the Roman commune. Beyond, in the direction of the Campus Martius, was the church of Santa Maria in Ara Caeli (today's Aracoeli), first identified as such in the twelfth-century Mirabilia Urbis Romae.Footnote ²¹ By the fifteenth century, the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill, the Capitolium, was largely an open space, but not an empty one.

A number of fifteenth-century sources describe and represent a similar structure as standing on the Capitol. In the decades before Francesco di Giorgio's visit to Rome, Poggio Bracciolini's De Varietate Fortunae, published in 1448, described this part of the Capitol as full of ‘broken columns lying about here and there’ (‘plurimasque passim confractas columnas’). Curiously, Poggio Bracciolini also noted a ‘huge marble lintel of a porta of a temple’ (‘ingens cuiusdam portae templi marmoreum limen’), in other words a structure possibly consisting of at least two posts spanned by a transverse beam.Footnote ²² Writing also in the middle of the fifteenth century, Flavio Biondo likewise noted a ‘porta Capitolii ingens’ at the termination of the Clivus Capitolinus, which was, in his time, buried half-way up in ruins (‘ruinis supra medietatem obruta’).Footnote ²³ Like Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo, Francesco di Giorgio saw a landscape of ruins on the southwestern summit of the Capitol dominated by a singular ruin, likely standing columns and a trabeated structure. It is possible, then, but by no means certain, that Francesco di Giorgio's report of a ruined ‘porticho del Champitolio’ from c. 1470, Poggio Bracciolini's ‘ingens limen’, and Flavio Biondo's ‘porta Capitolii ingens’ are the same.

This highly speculative coupling of literary reports and Francesco di Giorgio's drawing is supported by other evidence. Maps and sales contracts also attest visible standing columns in the area of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus from the fifteenth century until the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Drawn in 1469 and shortly thereafter, Pietro del Massaio's maps of Rome (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Lat. 4802, fol. 133r and Vat. Lat. 5699, fol. 127r) show a structure consisting of two vertical lines linked at the top (two columns carrying a trabeation?) in the area of the temple (Fig. 4).Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, this structure seems to have been noted in at least four other fifteenth-century representations of Rome (Figs 5–7). Whatever it was, this structure was a sight, like Santa Maria in Aracoeli and the Palazzo Senatorio, which was intimately associated with the Capitol.Footnote ²⁵ However, shortly after Francesco di Giorgio recorded having seen the ruins of a ‘porticho del Champitolio’ on the hill the structure rather quickly disappeared. A view of Rome from the Codex Escurialensis 28-II-12 (fol. 56v), dated to c. 1491, clearly depicts the southwestern summit of the Capitol as almost completely vacant.Footnote ²⁶ In the fifteenth century, just as the monumentality of the hill was sliding to the northwestern summit of the Capitol, the remnants left on the southwestern summit were cut up and carted off. This was a massive effort. Henri Jordan reported, in the nineteenth century, finding large deposits of ‘chips’ (‘Splitter’) of marble in the area of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the byproduct, he surmised, of cutting large slabs of marble into more manageable pieces.Footnote ²⁷

Fig. 4. Pietro del Massaio's 1469 plan of Rome depicting a trabeated structure standing on the southwestern summit of the Capitol. Left: Paris, BN Lat. 4802, fol. 133r. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Right: Vatican City, Vat. Lat. 5699, fol. 127r. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.)

Fig. 5. Early fifteenth-century depiction of Rome showing a trabeated structure standing on the southwestern summit of the Capitol. Chantilly, Musée Condé MS 65, fol. 141v, 1411–16. (Source: HIP/Art Resource, NY.)

Fig. 6. Early fifteenth-century depiction of Rome showing a trabeated structure standing on the southwestern summit of the Capitol. Taddeo di Bartolo, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1414. (Source: Scala/Art Resource, NY.)

Fig. 7. Early fifteenth-century depiction of Rome showing a trabeated structure standing on the southwestern summit of the Capitol. Turin, Biblioteca Reale Ms. Varia 102, fol. 28r. (Source: Frutaz, Piante di Roma (above, n. 24), fig. 154.)

Documents of sale and contracts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries illustrate the intense interest in the Capitol as a source of valuable building materials, not only for use in the renovation of the Palazzo Senatorio, but also for the reconstruction of Saint Peter's. In the years before Francesco di Giorgio's visit to Rome the process was well under way. In October 1454, Jacopo da Varese was paid 32 ducats for the removal of stones from the site, perhaps for the renovation of the Palazzo Senatorio evident in other documents from the same time.Footnote ²⁸ In the second half of 1461, contracts reported a number of instances. In one, a certain Silvestro was named as using 36 ox-drawn ‘carts’ (‘carecte’) to remove stones from the hill.Footnote ²⁹ To understand these figures, it is useful to turn to the 1743 Castelli e ponti di Maestro Niccola Zabaglia. There, Niccola Zabaglia wrote that one cart-load (‘carrago/carrettata’) of volume is 30 ‘cubic palms of travertine or any other type of stone’ (‘palmi cubici/palmi cubi’). Using the ‘palmo cubo’ employed in the Papal States before 1870, a cart-load was one-third (0.33) of a modern cubic metre of stone. Thus, in 1461, Silvestro's 36 carts removed about 12 (11.88) cubic metres of materials. Zabaglia also noted that a cartload was 3,000 ‘libbre’. By analogy, again, with ‘libbra’ used before 1870, a cart could carry as much as 1,017 kg (0.339 kg per ‘libbra’). Silvestro's 36 carts could have carried away more than 36,000 kg of stone in the course of one job.Footnote ³⁰ With this level of excavation happening on the hill, it is easy to imagine that the remains of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus were more exposed than they had been for centuries, mixing still-standing structures like Poggio's ‘ingens limen’ and materials that had, until recently, been buried — the perfect set of circumstances, in other words, for Francesco di Giorgio to make his observations of the ruined ‘porticho del Champitolio’ (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Hypothetical view of what Francesco di Giorgio and other fifteenth-century artists saw of the remains of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus superimposed on today's Campidoglio. Note the sightline from the Casa Savelli (Theatre of Marcellus) to these hypothetical ruins. Francesco di Giorgio claimed that he saw them from this point of view.

None of the above-mentioned reports specify the removal of columns. That some columns were still available, if not visible, is indisputable. In the 1540s, Pirro Ligorio mentioned having seen colossal columns of Pentelic marble on the Capitol, some of which were ‘carried off for the work of the most holy temple of San Pietro’.Footnote ³¹ Two contracts confirm specifically that columns from the Capitol were transported to Saint Peter's. One, dated to 1544–6, states that a column of marble was taken from the Campidoglio; the other, dated to 1548, records that a column was raised on the hill and designated to be made into a statue of the pope.Footnote ³² It seems by the last half of the sixteenth century that any remaining vestiges of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus could be found only by digging. Flaminio Vacca's 1594 Memorie di varie antichità trovate in diverse luoghi della città di Roma contains the notice that ‘many columns of marmo statuale’ were excavated from the area ‘behind the Palazzo de’ Conservatori’, some of which had enormous capitals — one Flaminio Vacca used to sculpt a lion for the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Villa Medici (the lion now adorns the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence), and others were used by Flaminio Vacca's teacher Vincenzo de Rossi for the Cappella di Cesi in Rome's Santa Maria della Pace.Footnote ³³ The removal of stone from the temple was so complete that only a handful of shattered fragments of marble were recovered from the site in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ³⁴

A NEW INTERPRETATION OF FRANCESCO DI GIORGIO'S ‘PORTICHO DEL CHAMPITOLIO’

The ruined ‘porticho del Champitolio’ that Francesco di Giorgio projected in his drawing of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ and that Lanciani imagined was a propylaeum has a peculiar specificity — three intersecting circuits of columns joined by centre lines, with stepped projections on the north and south sides that narrow from eight columns in width down to four columns at either end. This design is not attested in Roman architecture, and yet the artist claimed that he saw elements of the structure. So how did he come up with it? Reconstructing Francesco di Giorgio's method of drawing his ‘porticho del Champitolio’ will possibly explain the peculiarities of his plan and reveal both what he did and did not see.

Let us take Francesco di Giorgio at his word: he made his observations of the Capitol from the Casa Savelli (Theatre of Marcellus). From this vantage-point, Francesco di Giorgio would have been able only to see what Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo apparently described, and what maps and other images also apparently depict: at least one trabeated structure situated on the southwestern summit of the hill. From this group of remnant columns, Francesco di Giorgio projected a matrix of columns at regularly-spaced intervals. Figure 9 demonstrates that this field of columns quite closely maps onto the hexastyle portico, with 9 m intercolumniations, of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.Footnote ³⁵

Fig. 9. A 54 × 74 m platform for the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus with 9 m lateral intercolumniations overlaid on Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’.

As columns were spaced virtually always at regularly repeating intervals, Francesco di Giorgio's column matrix admittedly would map onto the portico of most prostyle temples.Footnote ³⁶ All that he needed to see was the trabeated structure and perhaps a few other column remnants. From a handful of columns, he could have projected a colonnaded structure. But this observation, that two or more columns could produce a matrix, does not explain why Francesco di Giorgio thought that he was drawing a ‘porta and portico’. Nor does it account for the peculiar design of the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ as having stepped projections on its north and south sides. To understand how Francesco di Giorgio imagined this structure, it is important to know which of the columns he used as the basis of his reconstruction and where his ‘porticho del Champitolio’ was situated on the Capitoline Hill.

There are two reasons for associating the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ with remains from the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. First, Francesco di Giorgio was precise in orienting the structures he imagined. He labelled each side of the imaginary ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ with inscriptions indicating the orientation of the structure. The left side is labelled ‘diverso chasa de’ Conservadori’ (‘in the direction of the Palazzo de’ Conservatori’), thus orienting this side of the structure as facing north.Footnote ³⁷ Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’, as viewed from the Casa Savelli, is behind the Palazzo dei Conservatori and oriented from north to south. This suggests that the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ was in the area of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The second reason has to do with the design itself of the ‘porticho del Champitolio’. Like the temple platform, Francesco di Giorgio's structure is essentially a rectangle with steps cut from the corners. One of the possible ways of accounting for its stepped projections on the north and south sides is to place the structure on the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and to imagine the materials and processes by which Francesco di Giorgio came up with his reconstruction.

Figure 10 imagines that Francesco di Giorgio saw five or six columns (or column remnants) from the porch at the southwestern corner of the temple. The three southernmost columns at the corner were likely absent: they were most vulnerable to spoliation and least stable structurally. His first inference would have been to mirror his physical evidence along lateral line A–A (Fig. 11), thus providing requisite symmetry to his ‘porta and portico’. Mirroring the remnant column group in the southwestern corner of the temple platform on the northwestern side placed three columns on the northwestern termination of the temple platform and three columns beyond. Even if no such columns ever stood on the northwest side of the temple, three of the five columns that Francesco di Giorgio imagined as once standing in this section of the platform do indeed mark the termination of the temple platform. In addition, the space beyond the north side of the temple, delimited in antiquity as it is now by a retaining wall, likely confirmed Francesco di Giorgio's striking reconstruction of a stepped ‘porticho del Champitolio’. If Francesco di Giorgio had seen all the columns in the southwestern corner and attempted to mirror them on the northwestern side, three of the columns would not have fitted into the topography of the site. Thus it seems that Francesco di Giorgio's observation of a handful of columns, when mirrored, fitted the limitations of space on the north side. Both elements — the particularities of the space to the north and the column remains to the south — mutually reinforced one another, resulting in the stepped design of the ‘porta and portico’.

Fig. 10. A possible explanation of how Francesco di Giorgio saw a group of five or six column remnants emerging from the grade of the soil at the southwestern corner of the temple platform.

Fig. 11. A model for how Francesco di Giorgio projected his ‘porticho del Champitolio’ from a column group at the southwestern corner of the temple platform. Francesco di Giorgio perhaps mirrored this column group along line A–A for requisite symmetry. The constraints of topography at the northwestern corner rationalized the unusual portico plan.

Francesco di Giorgio's next inference would have been to provide symmetry in the other direction, along longitudinal line B–B (Fig. 12). If so, the eighth and last row of columns in his projected reconstruction would have been the pilasters embedded into the wall of his palazzo complex. Francesco di Giorgio's portico plan thus can be construed as a rationalization of what might have remained of the original temple through bilateral symmetry. Figure 9 shows how Francesco di Giorgio's projected ‘porticho del Champitolio’ merges symmetrically with his imaginative reconstruction of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’. Everything beyond this row of pilasters is where the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ becomes pure fantasy.

Fig. 12. Mirroring the south and west column groups along line B–B for bilateral symmetry of the portico completed the stepped re-entrant corners of Francesco di Giorgio's portico plan.

If Francesco di Giorgio's drawing suggests that he did see a few column remnants, it also reveals what he did not see. In his reconstruction, Francesco di Giorgio did not see the 12 m intercolumniations of the centre bay of the temple. His columns were drawn as repeating at regular intervals. These regularly repeating intervals, in turn, suggest that any information about the columns on either side of the centre bay of the temple would have been obscured, while perhaps some column remnants on the northeastern side of the platform confirmed the extent of the portico. Instead, Francesco di Giorgio imagined that two more closely spaced columns completed the portico.

This last point, namely that Francesco di Giorgio did not see evidence of the centre bay of the temple, helps us understand the peculiar configuration of the plan. Our speculative reconstruction of what Francesco di Giorgio did and did not see provides the strongest correspondence between the specificity of what he drew — the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ consisting of three circuits of intersecting columns — and the physical evidence of the temple foundation and surrounding site as we now know it. He likely saw five or six columns (or column remnants) from the southwestern corner of the temple portico. From these, using a series of predictable design and site inferences, he was able to draw his ‘porticho del Champitolio’, which, though a fantasy, nevertheless fairly accurately mapped the dimensions of the temple platform. But he did not see, or failed to measure accurately, all the columns that originally stood across the southern face of the portico, thus further suggesting that only a handful of columns from one corner of the temple was visible in the latter half of the fifteenth century.

We can conclude that Lanciani's assertion that Francesco di Giorgio's drawing attests an ancient propylaeum associated with the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus is not tenable. Instead, Francesco di Giorgio's ‘porticho del Champitolio’ possibly could be another attestation of a structure on the Capitol noted by Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo respectively as an ‘ingens cuiusdam portae templi limen’ and ‘ingens porta’. This structure was likely the one depicted in early fifteenth-century maps and drawings: two columns supporting a transverse beam. When Francesco di Giorgio visited the city c. 1470, this ‘porta’ was therefore a noteworthy site. In his drawing, he restored the ruined structure as an elaborate ‘porticho’ attached to a wholly imaginary ‘palazzo del Champitolio’, in the centre of which stood a round ‘Tenpio di Giove’. The peculiar design of this portico makes most sense if the structure that Francesco di Giorgio saw and documented was located on the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The stepped projections on the north and south sides of the portico emerged from the artist's imagination based on his observation of a few columns or column remnants in the southwest corner of the temple's portico. The mirroring of these columns on the northwest side nestled the whole structure into the topography of the site (Fig. 13). Francesco di Giorgio and his fifteenth-century contemporaries therefore unwittingly recorded the last remains of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus before these remains virtually disappeared through the planned excavation and sale of salvaged marble and travertine from the site in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By looking again at Francesco di Giorgio's drawing of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’ and his plan of the ‘porticho del Champitolio’, it is possible to reconstruct not only what Francesco di Giorgio saw on the Monte Tarpeo, but also what Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo, Pietro del Massaio and others saw there. It was apparently a notable site, an evocative ruin worthy of commentary, artistic representation and imaginative reconstruction. Whatever temple remains continued to be visible, however, these were insufficient to suggest that they were originally part of the ‘Tenpio di Giove’ to viewers like Francesco di Giorgio.

Fig. 13. Francesco di Giorgio's projected ‘porticho del Champitolio’ merging symmetrically with his imaginative reconstruction of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio’.

The fact that Francesco di Giorgio imagined that the ‘Tenpio di Giove’ stood at the heart of a massive structure, a ‘palazzo’, likely is rooted in legends originating in the Early Middle Ages that imagine the Capitolium as an immense manmade structure that contained within it unbelievable power (Fig. 14). In lists of the ‘Seven Manmade Wonders of the World’ that circulated in the eighth century, the Capitolium is described as ‘bigger than a city’ (‘major quam civitas’) and a ‘huge building’ (‘ktisma mega’).Footnote ³⁸ By the twelfth century, this structure, like the monumentality of the hill itself, shifted to the northwestern summit of the hill. In the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, the Arx held a ‘palace’ (‘palatium’), which was decorated with amazing works of art and ornamented with gold, silver, bronze and precious stones. The Mirabilia relates that it was at ‘the summit of the Arx’ (‘in summitate arcis’) that the ‘Temple of Juno and Moneta’ stood.Footnote ³⁹ Using the Mirabilia and other sources, the thirteenth-century Graphia Aureae Urbis adds that ‘a gold statue of Jupiter sitting on a gold throne’ (‘aurea statua Iovis sedens in aureo trono’) was inside the ‘Temple of Juno and Moneta’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Both of these texts, the Mirabilia and the Graphia, as well as others related to them, were known in Francesco di Giorgio's day.Footnote ⁴¹ This is not to assert that Francesco di Giorgio drew upon them for inspiration; but the artist was drawing on a way of knowing and seeing the Capitol that had crystallized already in the Middle Ages and continued to be articulated thereafter.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, Jessica Maier has shown that in the decades after Francesco di Giorgio visited Rome cartographers like Leonardo Bufalini tended toward ‘imaginative exuberance’ when faced with fragments of Roman monuments.Footnote ⁴³ In collective memory, the Temple of Jupiter could be nothing less than an almost unimaginable structure. In reality, the structure and its platform were smaller than the Basilica Nova (100 × 65 m) at the other end of the Forum Romanum, a building that Francesco di Giorgio and his contemporaries understood as the ‘Tenplum Pacis’ and whose plan he included in the Monumenti antichi.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps that is why Francesco di Giorgio's observation of ruins on the Capitol and his reconstruction of the plan of the ‘porticho del Champitolio’ failed to suggest to him the necessary, but imaginary, immensity of Rome's most celebrated temple. It was simply not big enough and it was not situated on the northwestern summit of the hill. Thus, by the end of the fifteenth century, the Roman Imperial Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus had been lost, almost imaginarily detached from its physical location and disassociated from its valuable marble remains.

Fig. 14. Francesco di Giorgio's projected ‘porticho del Champitolio' and the impossibly immense scale of the ‘palazzo del Champitolio' overlaid on Giovanni Ioppolo's plan of the Capitoline Hill. Plan adapted from W. von Sydow, ‘Archäologische Funde und Forschungen im Bereich der Soprintendenz Rom, 1957–1973', Archäologischer Anzeiger (1973), 521–647, fig. 34.