draughtsman cast down has paper and crayon, and then and there among the

trees and cattle, after the fashion of the golden age, settled on this singular mar
riage."
The story appears in a truer context in the anonymous English paraphrase of
the sons' life printed in The Library of the Fine Arts, 1831. This story is worth quot
ing at length, even though it comes to us at third hand, for it is the only personal
anecdote that retains some of the suddenness and singularity that Piranesi must
have put into his lost autobiography.

"He happened one Sunday to see the daughter of the gardener to the Prince Corsini,
whose features, and especially her black eyes, perfectly convinced him that she was

possessed of genuine descent from the ancient Romans; nor was her dowry of a
hundred and fifty piastres (about $175) of small consideration in the scale, though
the jealous watchfulness he maintained, was not entered into with merely merce

nary motives. To his friends however he mentioned his intentions of marrying, be

cause it would enable him to procure the means of beginning his work on Roman

Antiquities;and the whole history of his courtship, as it appears to have been

given in an account by himself, must be considered equally characteristic and
amusing.
At the very first interview he asked her hand in marriage;and though his ardour
frightened her at first, he contrived to obtain the consent of all parties to the cele
bration of their nuptials within five days afterwards. After the ceremony, he placed
beside her dowry his finished plates and his unfinished designs, observing that their
whole fortune was before her, but that in three years her portion should be doubled.
He continued his labours and kept his word. They went to reside in the house now
occupied by the celebrated Thorwaldsen, and seem to have lived on the whole hap
pily, though his notions of the rights of a husband and father, founded on those of
the pater-familias of the Romans, were no doubt carried to the extreme. In his ar
dent attention to his studies, his son complains that he would frequently forget his
meals, in which case his young children, who did not dare to interrupt him, were
often deprived of that nourishment which their tender age demanded."

Piranesi at once went full blast at a project that he had already started, and that
became his biggest single undertaking. He first secured all available aid for the long
pull The Pope allowed him to import two hundred bales of paper without
ahead.
paying customs duty. He obtained a promise of patronage from Lord Charlemont, a
young Irishman who had set forth when he was eighteen to travel in Egypt and the
Levant, and then in Rome was planning to set up a school for British artists like the