etchings of statues mostly to Swedes, but also to Russians, Germans and a few Eng

lishmen. He had sold his father's antique marbles to the king of Sweden, and the
French Revolution had made it hard for Englishmen to leave England.
In the spring of his last year Piranesi returned to his beginnings by going with a

party of helpers to measure and draw the great Doric temples at Paestum. In early
Christian times the silting up of the river had isolated that plain in such a malarial
loneliness that the discovery of the temples, only fif ty-odd miles south of Naples, in
about 1750, surprised Europe as much as the excavations then beginning at Pom

peii. Piranesi spent part of the summer of 1776 at Paestum, which he already knew
from former trips. He seems to have made a habit of sketching and measuring out
doors during the summers and then etching at home during the winters, just as
Italian painters used to spend summers drawing from the nude and winters paint
ing from their drawings. On the spot, Piranesi sketched so hastily that his notations
surprised Hubert Robert by their meagreness. Piranesi defended himself by saying:
"The sketch is not on my paper, but in my head. It will show in my etching." (figs.
78, 79) Being away from the scene for his final etching left Piranesi free to forget
unessentials, to design from remembered hints, to command shadows, and to create
what Bianconi called "a beautiful infidelity." The same routine of work enabled
the old Italian figure painters to simplify figures through reflection and under

standing.
At Paestum Piranesi measured the temples for plans and elevations that were
never etched and are now lost. He also made drawings for twenty large views and
etched seventeen of them. In these last etchings he attained the art that hides art,
for he managed to dramatize the row of temples standing elephant-legged on the
barren flats without resorting to schemes of stage design, and he somehow filled
these pictures with his deepest fluidity of air (figs. 134, 135). The big country boys
plodding after their cows were drawn by Piranesi's son Francesco, for Piranesi had
not finished etching this last set of plates when he died on November 9, 1778,

about five weeks after his fifty-eighth birthday. He met death with tools in his
hands, too busy to see doctors, and working with his pencil and etching needle
right into his last hours. After time of burial in the church of the painters' guild,
a

he lies today in Sta. Maria Aventina, surrounded by his only surviving architecture.
He spanned two worlds, like any really inventive man. While defending an
outworn historical theory he helped to establish modern standards for archaeology.
His original designs close the great Roman baroque tradition and start the first style
of the next century. By looking back at antiquity he imposed on posterity the hallu
cination of a Rome that probably never was. This spectacular tragedian of decay

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