Francis in the Temple of Jupiter, had wrought a strong spell on young Gibbon. “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life.”

At the period of Gibbon’s grand tour Piranesi had reached the peak of his career. He had been elected a fellow of the British Society of Antiquarians in 1757. He was a good friend of the British architect Robert Adam, who caused nymphs of Herculaneum to appear on the mantlepieces of far-away Bath, and even those of Boston and Salem in New England. He dedicated many of his plates to the Englishmen and Scotchmen who found their way to his shop. He was shortly to be knighted by the pope, who had subsidized the series of Roman views and made gifts of it to visiting dignitaries. He was a scholarly artist, but he had a lively imagination, bringing the dry ruins that he loved to dramatic animation in his etchings.

Born in Venice 4 October 1720, the son of a stone-mason, he was educated as an architect, but found his medium of expression in images on paper, unhampered by the restrictions of actual building. Under Giuseppe Vasi, who had engraved a colossal view of Rome, he studied etching. He is supposed to have worked in the shop of the theatrical scene-painter Ferdinando Bibiena, whose palaces transcended stone. He may have been for a while in the studio of Tiepolo. All these influences he fused in his characteristic work.

Among his earliest etchings is a set of imaginary prisons, vast operatic backdrops of dungeons with heavy arches, endless flights of steps, ponderous chains, and murky instruments of torture. Coleridge and De Quincey were haunted with their opium-dream quality. Pure architectural inventions, they disclosed Piranesi’s forte. He could imbue a stone structure with drama, to play upon the emotions. These fabulous edifices have not lost their power to this day; one finds echoes of them in a T. M. Cleland automobile advertisement, a Chirico painting, a Moscow subway station.

In 1748 Piranesi published a series of small prints, Antichità Romane de’ Tempi della Repubblica e de’ primi Imperatori, which included views of the forum, triumphal arches, the Coliseum, and temples. These were followed shortly by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna, a series of larger size to which additions were made until it included 137 subjects. Some of these plates are over 18 by 28 inches, and their monumental scale of drawing makes the most of it. It is from among these two series that most of the illustrations in this edition of Gibbon have been selected. Additions have been made from other series, such as that of antique vases and candelabri, of fragments discovered in excavations, and from the maps which articulate the whole Roman scene as Piranesi knew it. He was vastly prolific of etchings, making about a thousand.

The views of Rome proved to be the most popular things that he ever did. Every tourist wanted a selection of them. Impression after impression was pulled from the etched plates. After Piranesi’s death in 1778, two years after the publication of the first volume of the Decline and Fall, the plates, beginning to show signs of wear, were somewhat reworked with the graver and again bitten with acid to strengthen their lines; this was done by his sons Francesco and Pietro and his daughter Laura, who had helped in his shop, and who took the plates to Paris, transferring the family business there about 1800.

The prints here reproduced are from a fine set, bound up in calf gilt, with the label of Tessier, Rue de la Harpe, “Relieur et Doreur de la Trésorerie nationale, du Bureau de la Guerre, et de la Calcographie Piranesi à Paris.” This would date them between 1800 and 1807. While they are not the very first impressions, they still have the lucidity that Piranesi would have wanted. There are impressions from plates so worn and so often re-etched as to be ruins themselves, so recent as Italy’s entrance into the recent war. The plates are again in Rome, deposited in the Regia Calcografia. Modern impressions are mere ghosts, murky and sad.

When Piranesi drew a building he presented it as he felt it ought to look. He was not untruthful; like a portrait painter, he altered details in the interest of artistry while preserving the likeness.