The Tomb of Porsenna. Textual and graphical translations of Pliny's Labyrinthus Italicus

Around 505 BC, king of Etruria and Clusium Lucumone Lars Porsena conquered Rome with a Confederate army of the Etruscan peoples. Upon his death a magnificent funerary monument might be erected sub Clusium: it consisted of a series of overlapping pyramids on a mazy basement protecting his body and a great treasure. Pliny placed the monument among the Four Great Labyrinths of Antiquity, but the description he provided, obtained from a Varro’s previous one, contains more than one inconsistency, which, ironically, are the essential ingredient of its future critical fame. The myth of its existence emerged in the fifteenth century but Pliny’s text translations performed by Leon Battista Alberti and Filarete contain more than a misunderstanding. Sir Christopher Wren interested in the legendary Etruscan tomb during the preparation of his Tracts. Wren’s quest for “authentic” architecture focused on time when the world began to take interest in geometry and arithmetic. The correct translation of Pliny’s words looked as the opportunity to identify an exemplary and pure model of Pythagoras age Italic burial. He involved its full circle in a passionate debate about the role of arithmetical proportions, the correct meaning of the Latin words and the enigmatic building form, in which the translation inextricably interwoven text and image. His "rational Porsena", finally fixed by Robert Hooke's memories and sketches and by Nicholas Hawksmoor’s lost 28 large drawings, is a fantastic and eclectic monument, in which philological curiosity and anxiety for modern application of its timeless pyramidal shapes converge.