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• 1 2021-03-30T11:16:07-07:00 Frontispiece 11 EQVES.IO.BAPT.PIRANESIVS.VENETVS.ARCHITECTVS plain 2024-10-31T13:11:44-07:00 EQVES . IO . BAPT . PIRANESIVS / VENETVS . ARCHITECTVS / VIX(IT) . ANN(OS) . LIIX / OB(IIT) . V . ID(US) . NOVEMB(RIS) . CIƆIƆ CCLXXIIX; Franciscus Piranesius invenit et sculpsit 1779. Josephus Cades vultum delineavit. CAVALIER GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI / VENETIAN ARCHITECT / LIVED for 58 Years / DIED 9 November 1778; Drawn and engraved by Francesco Piranesi in 1779. Portrait drawn by Joseph Cades.

  The Didot edition of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane opens with an image in which the artist’s works are framed through assemblage and allusion. Original editions of the first of four volumes of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane, by contrast, open with the frontispiece that follows, whose own story of failed patronage is embossed in its publication history. Between 1756, when the work originally appeared, to 1835, when the first volumes of the Didot edition were printed in Paris, the significance of Piranesi’s works exceeded the financial spat that lay behind the publication of this volume. The wider audience for whom the work was intended (Wilton-Ely 1988, 48) should be seen as the context of this image, as opposed to the patronage controversy that features largely in critical discussions of the following frontispiece.  
  
  Piranesi himself said of Le Antichità Romane “Imperocchè dovete considerare, come ve ne prego, che questa Opera non è del genere di quelle, che si confondono nella folla de’ libri d’una Biblioteca, ma ch’è composta di quattro Volumi in foglio; che abbracia un nuova Sistema su i monumenti dell’antica Roma; che sarà depositata in molte Biblioteche pubbliche d’Europa” (Lettere di giustificazione 11-2; trans. Eitner 106). As the creators of this image—his son Francesco (1758-1810) and the sculptor, painter, and engraver Giuseppe (or Joseph) Cades (1750-1799)—here suggest, Piranesi’s works can, in the 1830s, be known and assessed through the fragments of the Marble Plan, Trophies of Augustus, column drums, and urn that litter the foreground.  
  
  This image thus invokes and introduces the stories of Piranesi’s reception history that can be seen in the printed details of this volume and the visual elements of this etching. Column fragments display holes in their center, exposing construction methods and material details that occupy much of Piranesi’s attention in this and other volumes of Le Antichità Romane. The map fragment is a nod to Giovanni’s simulation of the ancient map of Rome known as the Marble Plan in both the “Pianta di Roma” in this volume and the Campus Martius Ichnographia in that volume; it also serves as a gesture to the theme of cartography that pervades his works. For instance, the harness and shields that appear on the capital here suggest those included in the Tomb of Cecilia Metella in this image from the third volume of Le Antichità Romane or the trophies of Augustus that were the subject of another work. Vines decorate the right-hand side of the cracked stone block that is the focal point of the image, where a medallion of “Equesto Bapt. Piranesius / Venetus Architectus” makes him part of the ancient monuments he depicts. In a similar way, the portrait by Francesco Polanzani (1700-1771) shows him with a severed right arm, as if he were a damaged, but living, ancient statue. The printed details of this edition, though, place him squarely in the early nineteenth-century culture of antiquarianism. They also suggest that, in a different sense, Piranesi’s works have themselves become Classics, on par with the classical Western authors that Didot was most known for printing. 
   
  Differences between the Didot edition and the original 1765 edition are most pronounced in this volume because it contains extensive typeset text, as the side-by-side comparisons below demonstrate. The visual appearance of this volume’s text (below, L), and the publisher’s stamp on its title page (below, R), fundamentally alter the cultural framing of Piranesi’s works.  
  Additionally, the arrangement of the volume’s texts—in some cases, at far greater distances from the images they explain—begins the process of severing Piranesi’s words and images that Heather Hyde Minor has traced (2015). And, indeed, “Given the way that Piranesi’s sons had systematically destroyed his own conception of his works as books, it is ironic that their repackaging of his prints into a passive sequence of tomes helped fulfill his promise that his books would not remain buried in the crowded shelves of libraries” (Yerkes and Minor 2020, 200). Nevertheless, the longevity, status, and access that the Didot edition affords does continue to allow, if not to facilitate, the united and alternating experiences of word and image that Piranesi’s works originally encouraged. (JB) 
  
  To see this image in the first volume of Le Antichità Romane, volume 1 of Piranesi’s Opere, click here.