The third dimension of Pliny the Younger’s villa at Laurentum in S. K. Potocki’s vision

Abstract

The Villa Laurentina project seeks to present Count S. K. Potocki’s brilliant vision of the legendary villa of Pliny the Younger at Laurentum near Rome, first rendered in the 1770s in over thirty colour drawings. This unique work, amazing in its formal and stylistic homogeneity, was produced in Rome, in collaboration with two Italian artists – Giuseppe Manocchi and Vincenzo Brenna – and probably Franciszek Smuglewicz, a Polish painter active in Rome. All the architectural plans, sections of façades and walls of the rooms are provided with scale bars in palmi romani and braccia polacche. The first stage of the project was to transfer the eighteenth-century drawings on to programs used in architectural planning studios. For this purpose, scans of the plates were transferred to a CAD programme, which enabled the plan traces, sections and renditions of the walls to be made. Historical systems of measurement were calculated according to the metric system.