dered among the grass; cypress and sycamore shaded damp mounds of ruin; shrubs

rooted in the cracks of every old cornice and architrave, shimmering in the breeze
and distilling their pungency in the sun. The Colosseum alone grew plants enough
to catalogue in a special little botany book. What a jumble it was of old and new, of

permanence and change, of palaces and shacks, of cesspools and cypress groves. No
wonder that the city struck the Venetian's imagination and gave him something
new to explore and draw every day for thirty-five years! Every chance to dig and

probe and discover thrilled him like the eager labors of a lover.

The Views of Rome reveal his life progress as an artist. Though he dated only
one of them— the Cascade of Tivoli of 1766 (fig. 103)— his sons' sale catalogue of

1792 dates all of them with some accuracy. He etched them from his first establish
ment in Rome until his death almost thirty-five years later, so that the series records

the maturing of his hand and eye. In the early views a mild even light fuses build
ings into a city landscape (figs. 25-28). Every window, every beggar and tree keeps
its place in a harmony as tranquil and distinguished as Canaletto's. He etches the

copper to a more or less even depth all over. Later he focuses on single buildings
that loom up dark against the sky (figs. 44, 45). He makes some lines much broader
and blacker than the rest by scratching them with a wide point and by returning
them again and again to the acid, while protecting the lighter parts with coats of
varnish. The final Views are often birds-eye panoramas that he had to construct
from notes made on the ground or by clambering on walls. The ruins lie as black
as though the Goths had burned them the night before. Hardly a living thing ven
tures onto the surrounding hillocks of cinders that lose themselves in volcanic
gloom (fig. 127). Then the very last etchings of all recapture the wide unity of the
first ones by dappling light and shade from cloudlets that fill the sky and by thick
ening the air between column and column (figs. 134-135).
Until Piranesi's time most professional viewmakers drew buildings in a simple,
square-on delineation, like most portrait heads. They sometimes suggested depth
by flanking the foreground with something dark on each side. Piranesi applied
Ferdinando Bibiena's diagonal stage perspective to views of actual buildings (figs.

29, 30) and then proceeded to invent more different patterns for his compositions,
more unexpected angles of sight than any other etcher before or since. Through
out his life he never stopped discovering fresh geometrical layouts, sometimes by
sketching in mid-air from a rope sling.
Since Piranesi made his Views of Rome for a tourist public, he had to enliven
them with figures. As time went on he became so interested in figures that he also
put them in his publications for the learned world. He does not seem to have been

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