We interviewed a type specialist to confirm a hunch about the printed characters that appear on many of Piranesi’s sketches. Sophia Bevacqua-Collins, one of our research assistants, spelunked in the storerooms of the Vatican Museums to track down an ancient relief that inspired one of Piranesi’s drawings and an inscription. What we found there was often as interesting as what he drew on the front. One of our favorite topics became the parts of Piranesi’s drawings that usually don’t get published: the backs of the pieces of paper. These trips allowed us to make some wonderful discoveries. From a Manhattan kitchen to the drawings cabinet at the Louvre, we traveled as a team to visit public and private collections. Coming face-to-face with drawings and books was the next part of our research. But these were only the first steps of the hunt. Our searches for drawings and rare books had us trawling auction results, sleuthing through library catalogues, and chasing down footnotes in pursuit of primary sources that seemed promising. Princeton University Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections. Title page, Campus Martivs antiquae vrbis (Rome: Veneunt apud auctorem in aedibus Comitis Thomati, 1762). The material qualities of Piranesi’s books and drawings were fundamentally important to our research, and we spent a lot of time tracking down crucial objects. There are wonderful examples of destroyed copies, too-books that were cannibalized for their prints. Each copy of a Piranesi book is unique, and owners could customize their copies in all kinds of ways. Eighteenth-century book-making involved machines, but the results were still essentially hand-made objects. In our investigations, we relied on each other, and on specialists. While we did not hunch over printing tables and rub sticky varnish on copperplates, we did work in ways that were sometimes similar to Piranesi’s methods. Piranesi’s books were the results of a modern enterprise in which he tightly controlled the labor.
Bundled together, his stacks of printed texts and images were then marketed and sold from the Piranesi house-museum, as his residence and workshop was known. Scholars helped him compose texts, and other printers set his words in letterpress. After making drawings, he etched copperplates, handing them over to his assistants to run through his presses. He studied monuments and ruins with his artist friends, and later with his sons and apprentices. Piranesi’s chosen medium required complex work. The inscription to Claudius appears near the lower right corner of the central plate. “Scenographia Campi Martii,” Campus Martivs antiquae vrbis (Rome: Veneunt apud auctorem in aedibus Comitis Thomati, 1762).
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