Piranesi records the discovery of a Roman catacomb in this print, preserving for his audience an important archaeological discovery that was, like many catacombs uncovered in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, destroyed not long after its discovery through modern activities. The purpose of this print, to record and preserve, are detected in the rather straightforward way Piranesi renders the configuration, major architectural details, and content of the burial vault. In recording these aspects, Piranesi leans on his training as an architect while avoiding the temptation to romanticize or dramatize the setting so often evident in other images of Roman ruins.  

The difference between this print and others by Piranesi is immediately visible in relation to another view of a tomb chamber from the same catacomb complex, produced by Piranesi for the subsequent volume of Le Antichità Romane, which includes modern architecture intruding on the ancient and dramatizes the moment of archaeological discovery. The staffage figures further amplify the distance between intentions; where Piranesi records in the other print a group of scholars and excavators in the dramatic act of discovery, here he includes what must be assumed to be groups of tourists and antiquarians cooly assessing the remains.   

This print is the only example in the volume to document a catacomb, an important source of information about ancient Rome since subterranean explorations of Antonio Bosio (c. 1575 or 1576-1629) in the sixteenth century, and one of the major foci of early modern Roman archaeology. In Piranesi’s day, discoveries of new catacombs through excavations under the aegis of the papal authorities were regularly published to great antiquarian acclaim, and the catacombs consequently became hotspots for grand tourists. Their popularity with such audiences is captured in the staffage figures that populate this scene, figures who embody just the sort of antiquarians and grand tourists who frequented the sites and consumed the discoveries, whether in print or material form. With its focus on preserving and recording in a straightforward manner, the print can be considered adjacent to this early tradition of catacomb scholarship. (Kantor-Kazovsky, 83ff.) 

The preference in this print for recording (or “riccordo”) and clarifying the catacomb architecture leads Piranesi to restrain his imagination more than usual. And yet, there are multiple smaller ways Piranesi distorts the reality of the Vigna Casali catacomb, while avoiding the more dramatic effects of perspective and chiaroscuro characteristic of his more romantic prints. Familiar to any Piranesi viewer, the artist operates at two scales. The staffage figures are small relative to the architecture, perhaps half the actual size. Following on this, the sarcophagi, which are most immediately associated with the size of the human body because they need to accommodate a prone corpse, are similarly undersized. By contrast, the urns which would have held cremated ashes are appropriate to the size of the architecture, though in shape they are unlike ancient Roman urns. Perhaps for simplicity and to focus on the architecture of the tomb chamber, Piranesi does not record the inscriptions accompanying the tombs or the frescoes that, as he notes in the key, covered the walls. Piranesi also sanitizes the conditions of the excavation, rendering the tomb as better preserved and more neatly arranged than it would have been in reality, undoubtedly restoring parts of the architecture with his burin. The ruins are here less romanticized, and nature intrudes less on the recently excavated chambers, than in other prints, including the other view of the Vigna Casali catacomb. (SB)