Piranesi's "Parere su L'Architettura"

The engravings reproduced on plate 27 illustrate one of the most important turning-points in Piranesi's career. After 1761, when he was in his early forties, there appears to be a crisis in his development. Behind it lie issues of general interest, which make it worth while to review shortly the whole situation. In 1761 Piranesi published his Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de'Romani, a book with 200 pages of text and 38 plates. It contains his view on art in a polemical form directed against two works : an essay by an anonymous English writer published in 1755,1 and Les Ruines des plus beaux Monuments de la Grice published in 1758 by the Frenchman Le Roy. The latter was much the more important adversary, for he was the first to bring home to the West the Greek architecture of Athens, an event of far-reaching effect. In the text accompanying his engravings Le Roy explains that architecture is a Greek creation, from which all Roman buildings derive. As the Romans are only copyists, their architecture is decadent compared with that of the Greeks. These principles, similar to those formulated by the English writer,2 awakened Piranesi's opposition. Hitherto he had lived in a purely archaeological world, and had not attempted any speculative theorising or criticism. But now his answer burst forth with satirical violence. It consists of three different arguments. In the historical field he claims that the Etruscans are an older race than the Greeks, that they developed the arts to a high degree of perfection before the Greeks really began and that for a long period they were the sole masters of the Romans. His second point is concerned with the natural gifts of the Etruscans. He emphasises that they were much more talented than the Greeks. They invented and brought to perfection sculpture, painting, mathematics, and the technical arts. This is proved by their remarkable constructions, such as the water-works of the Lake of Albano, the Cloaca Maxima, aquaducts, circuses, road-building, etc. His last point stresses a still more extravagant aesthetic theory : the Etruscans did not adorn their buildings; their grand style in architecture is comparable to the Egyptian. The Greeks for their part adhered to a vain prettiness and not to a grand style; they thought mainly of the ornaments, of the treatment of details, but not of the architecture as a whole; they took almost all the liberties that they wanted.3 In the later Roman Empire, when reason was replaced by caprice, architects