WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

OF THE LETTER WRITERS, DIARISTS AND NOVELISTS OF

MOST
the past interest us for the way in which they represent the fashions and
forces of their age. The exceptional man of the past stands out because he differs
from his age by discovering something new in the world around him or in the
world within himself. He looks so intensely human that we hardly notice the by
gone fashions that he wears. Thus we think of minor Elizabethans, like Beaumont
and Fletcher, as dandies in trunk-hose and doublets, whereas Shakespeare is a
voice inside each one of us, speaking in words that fit our thought more aptly than
our own speech. One test for a man's genius might be his ability to present facets
enough for every man to find his own reflection somewhere. Piranesi was human
to the point of violence. He evoked reactions from many critics that do not add up
to a coherent picture of him, but do neatly characterize each critic.
It is odd that none of the tourists who visited Piranesi seems to have written
a description of him. A year after his death his elegant biographer Bianconi said:
"Piranesi was rather tall, dark skinned, with most lively eyes that never stayed
still. His expression was pleasant, though earnest and meditative. He spoke more
copiously than eloquently, struggling to be clear." He must have spoken with Vene
tian z's, for in the first state of the Prisons he spelled the French publisher Bouchard
asBuzard (fig. 9.) In Italy a dialect indicates a man's birthplace, not his social stand
ing, as it does in French or English.
The best portrait of Piranesi is Polanzani's etching (frontispiece) which shows
him at thirty as a deep-chested, muscular man with a look that is solitary and for
midable.
The earliest personal recollection of him may be in the introduction that Sir
William Chambers added to his Civil Architecture in 1791. Chambers had left Rome
when Piranesi, aged thirty-five, was living across the Corso from the French Acad
emy. Chambers later built a casino for Piranesi's enemy, Lord Charlemont, so that

he had a certain bias when he wrote: "A celebrated Italian Artist, whose taste and
luxuriance of fancy were unusually great, and the effect of whose compositions, on
paper, has seldom been equalled, knew little of construction or calculation, yet less
of the contrivance of habitable structures, or the modes of carrying real works into

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