torischen Architectur, first printed in Vienna one year after Piranesi was born.

This
Project for a History of Architecture was the first— and for many years the only-
comprehensive picture book of famous ancient and oriental buildings. The illus
trations range as far afield as Siam, China, Spalato, Palmyra and Stonehenge. Where
Fischer could get accurate pictures he made the buildings recognizable. Egypt and
Greece were still so untravelled that Fischer's fanciful pictures of Pyramids or his

meagre diagram that misrepresents the Parthenon are more fantastic than his com

paratively truthful engraving of the remote Persian cliff carvings. Piranesi must
have heard of many of these faraway wonders from the sailor friends of his mater
nal grandfather, who was a sea captain. Fischer's strange book would have meant
more to a Venetian, at the crossroads of the world, than to an inland Roman or
Florentine. Piranesi must have admired the book for a number of reasons— for
its glimpses of the exotic, for the encyclopaedic sweep of its erudition, and for the
grandeur of its imaginary reconstruction of halls tower high and walls to the
horizon.
Piranesi, like all his Italian contemporaries, formed his taste on Palladio's Archi-
tettura, which had less influence when it was first published in 1570, than in the
eighteenth century when it came to dominate Italian, English and American prac
tice. Palladio's illustrations familiarized Piranesi with Roman buildings long be
fore he went to Rome. His human harmony, and some of his actual architectural
schemes appear in Piranesi's first designs. After years in Rome Palladio's clarity and

elegance gave way to Piranesi's own baroque sombreness and conflict.

Although the Venice in which Piranesi grew up had no room or cash for new
buildings in brick and stone, it did give scope for the tinsel perspectives of the stage.

The many opera houses in that pleasure resort did not attract their international
audiences by well-written plays, but by the ingenious contrivance of their scenery.
The floors of their stages sloped up to backdrops painted with endless flights of
balustraded stairs and domes beyond domes. Since the glimmering of the candles
killed most color and revealed only lines and masses, the illusion of immensity de

pended on the adroit rendering of light and shade and a mastery of the mathemat
ics of perspective. All Italian stage designers once possessed a synthesis of skills that
would be hard to equal in a scenery studio today. By going to school at this exact
ing craft, Piranesi learned to focus light and shade with dramatic effect, to draw
buildings from the most imposing angle, to sketch with accurate boldness, and to
dare any stunt in perspective.
But when the masquerade of eighteenth-century Venice jarred on his longings
for grandeur, he fled to an elder brother, a monk, who read to him from ancient his