long-established French Academy.

Piranesi proposed to dedicate to Lord Charle-

mont a folio volume to be called Ancient Sepulchral Monuments. But as Piranesi
worked on the project for five years, it grew into four folio volumes of over two
hundred plates. After exhausting the tombs he investigated the bridges, theatres,

aqueducts and other monuments of Rome. As he outgrew the first project he broad
ened the title to Roman Antiquities.
After two hundred years, the work still remains the vastest picture book of
buildings and antiquities in Rome. Almost half of the plates record things that have
since vanished or been further damaged. It is the first book that attempted to reas
semble objects that had been found together and then scattered. The big plate of
the Roman water system was the first painstaking reconstruction of far flung and

complicated ruins, and alone cost him six months of drawing, digging and measur
ing. This book also went farther than previous attempts to interpret ancient remains
in the light of ancient texts, and especially in the light of Vitruvius' description of
Roman engineering practice. Renaissance architects had looked at ancient ruins
with Vitruvius in hand in a way that Matteo Lucchesi must have taught Piranesi,
but they had not used Vitruvius so thoroughly or gone to him for help in guessing
at the foundations underground. Piranesi's method was right, even though he some
times pictured Roman foundations as though they had been built by the modern

engineering methods that he had learned in Venice.

Little as we know about Piranesi's teachers in art, we know less about his teachers
in archaeology. As a boy his brother, the monk, had started him on Latin, and his
uncle Matteo must have shown him all the main books on classical architecture. Dur
ing his busy years in Rome antiquarian priests must have helped him with their
classical learning, and are said to have written some of his prefaces for him. But his
originality as an archaeologist lay in inspecting the Roman ruins through the eyes
of his uncle the engineer. Discoveries are apt to occur when the training of one pro
fession is diverted onto another. The intellectual curiosities of Rome in the 1750's
and '6o's show in the fact that Piranesi was suggesting some of the fundamental
methods of modern archaeological excavation even while his adversary Winckel-
mann was inspiring classical archaeology with an emotional outlook.
The Roman Antiquities made a European sensation. France was already expecting
the book, thanks to Piranesi's close connection with his neighbors in the French
Academy and to the prospectus that his French publishers in Rome sent to impor
tant Parisians. Paris alone ordered two hundred copies, and Piranesi wrote a year
later that he had sold two thousand to Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Russia,
where they obtained a substantial patronage for him and his sons. Some nine months
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