Le Antichità Romane.
Rome: Stamperia di Angelo Rotili [sold by Bouchard e Gravier], 1756. First edition, a remarkably tall, large-paper copy, of the foundational treatise on Roman engineering — Dibner's Heralds of Science 169 — and the book that established archaeology as an empirical, measured, and visually documentary science. Across four folio volumes and more than two hundred copperplates, Piranesi set out to reconstruct ancient Rome not as a picturesque ruin but as a functioning technological system: its aqueducts, its concrete, its vaulting, its drainage, its tomb-construction, its lifting machinery, and the structural logic that had allowed its buildings to outlast fifteen centuries. Eight years of measurement, excavation, and drafting lie behind the plates; Piranesi's own preface insists on “esattissime ed instancabili osservazioni, scavazioni, e ricerche” — the most exact and tireless observations, excavations, and researches. No previous treatment of antiquity had been grounded in this kind of empirical programme, and none had generated a graphic apparatus adequate to convey it. The present copy is a remarkable survival. It preserves the rare imprimatur leaf †2 (dated 25 Gennaro 1756, with the earliest Bouchard list of Piranesi's publications on the verso), both of the celebrated Charlemont letters (the Avviso al Pubblico of 25 August 1756 and the Milord letter of February 1757), the original Polanzani portrait of 1750, the dedication plate in its 1757 “Utilitati Publicae” third state, and an exceptionally tall text block on thick Italian laid paper that carries throughout all four volumes a single consistent watermark — a script B cipher within a double-oval cartouche, corresponding to one of the Roman papermarks catalogued in Wilton-Ely's appendix and datable to the 1750s–1770s. The impressions are early, rich, and black; the contrast between burr and blank paper has not been softened by later re-inking or re-biting of the plates. What has survived, in other words, is a genuine mid-eighteenth-century Roman printing, on the stock that Piranesi himself chose. Bern Dibner placed the Antichità Romane in the Technology section of Heralds of Science as entry 169, “Roman Engineering,” and his one-paragraph annotation identifies precisely the reason: “the architectural and engineering marvels of the ancient Romans.” Dibner's list — 200 epochal books in science and technology, compiled in 1955 from the Burndy Library — placed Piranesi in the company of Vitruvius, Frontinus, Agricola, Ramelli, and Belidor. The grouping is not decorative. What Piranesi did for Roman antiquity was structurally analogous to what Agricola did for mining and Ramelli for machines: he converted a body of physical evidence into a systematic, illustrated, measurable, comparative record. The four volumes move from the urban infrastructure of the city (Volume I: walls, aqueducts, the Forum, the Campidoglio) to the sepulchral monuments of Rome and the Roman Campagna (Volumes II and III) to the heroic engineering of bridges and monumental structures (Volume IV: the Ponte Sant'Angelo, the Ponte Fabrizio, the Mausoleum of Hadrian, the Theatre of Marcellus, the substructure of the Temple of Claudius). The logic of the arrangement is infrastructural — water, burial, circulation — rather than aesthetic. Volume I contains what A. Hyatt Mayor called “the first painstaking reconstruction of far flung and complicated ruins” of Rome's water system. Piranesi's large plate of the aqueducts — which, by his own account, “cost him six months of drawing, digging and measuring” — synthesises archaeological survey with the ancient textual record, particularly Frontinus's De aquaeductu of c. 97 AD. This was not an antiquarian exercise but a reconstruction of a working system: sources, gradients, arcades, castella, distribution. Piranesi's training for this task was direct. As a young man in Venice he had been apprenticed to his uncle Matteo Lucchesi, a leading architect in the Magistrato alle Acque, the state organisation responsible for hydraulic engineering in the Venetian Republic. He understood water systems as an engineer before he approached Rome as an antiquarian, and the Cloaca Maxima and the imperial aqueducts are represented in the Antichità with the operational intelligence that this training provided. What most decisively differentiated Piranesi's method from all earlier Roman-antiquities books — from Desgodetz, from Rossi, from Bartoli — was his insistence on opening the buildings up. He did not merely show façades; he showed sections. He did not merely show sections; he showed how the sections were built. The cutaway plates of the great tombs — of Caecilia Metella, of the Scipios, of the Via Appia sepulchres — reveal the opus caementicium core within the brick and stone facing, the opus reticulatum patterning of the wall surfaces, the relieving arches within the mass, the concrete vault springing from its centering. This was the first systematic published account of Roman concrete as a construction technology. The importance of that fact is easy to underestimate now that Roman concrete is a standard subject in histories of building; in 1756 it was not. Piranesi made it visible. Plate LIII of Volume III — the great Dimostrazione in grande di alcune macchine adoperate dagli Antichi Romani nella costruzione del gran Sepolcro di Cecilia Metella — shows the ancient lifting apparatus by which travertine and marble blocks were raised to the upper courses of the tomb. Cranes, pulleys, capstans, scaffolding, and tackle are reconstructed step by step, with indexed letters keyed to an explanatory caption. Piranesi records the moment of breakthrough: the great travertines, he writes, suddenly stood before his eyes and he understood what until then had eluded him. The plate is, in effect, a reconstruction of an ancient construction site. It belongs to the same genre as the machine plates in Besson, Ramelli, Zonca, and Böckler — and, ultimately, as the illustrated trades of Diderot's Encyclopédie. But it is the first such reconstruction applied to the engineering of antiquity, and it crystallises Piranesi's larger thesis: that Roman building was not the spontaneous flowering of a national genius but a deliberate technological achievement, repeatable in principle by any culture that could organise the labour, the materials, and the geometry. In plates II–V of Volume I, Piranesi reconstructs on paper the Forma Urbis Romae — the great marble street plan of Rome engraved on a wall of the Templum Pacis under Septimius Severus (c. 203–211 AD) and surviving only in shattered fragments. He had worked directly on the reassembly of these fragments in 1741–42 at the Capitoline Museum under the curator Pietro Forrier, alongside G.B. Nolli. Plate II presents one hundred and eighty-two of the surviving fragments rendered as three-dimensional marble blocks, each numbered and keyed to a critical index; plates III–V arrange the fragments in what look like wooden study trays. This is archaeological cartography as a source-critical operation: the evidence is displayed, not merely deployed. No prior treatment of the Forma Urbis had shown the fragments this way. The method would recur in Piranesi's 1762 Campo Marzio, where the reconstructed city plan and its fragmentary documentary base are explicitly interleaved. The methodological innovation of the Antichità Romane is not any single plate but the combinatorial system that runs through all four volumes. Piranesi routinely integrates, within a single sheet or across a paired opening, ichnography (ground plan), orthography (elevation), scenography (perspective view), section, material detail, and a critical index keying all of these to each other and to a verbal caption. Susan M. Dixon has argued that this method — what she terms the multi-informational image, an engraved illustration that combines various drawings on various surfaces using various modes of representation, scale, and detail — was the most consequential thing Piranesi contributed to the history of illustration. It is the graphic ancestor of nineteenth-century engineering drawing and of the apparatus plates of the great industrial encyclopaedias. Modern writers, following a Project MUSE study by Heather Hyde Minor and Carolyn Yerkes, have described the indexed references within Piranesi's plates as proto-hyperlinks, and the layered, folded, curling paper surfaces within his compositions as proto-tabs and proto-windows. The anachronism is forgivable, because what Piranesi was inventing was a way of managing structured information on a two-dimensional page — a problem shared with Diderot and d'Alembert, whose Encyclopédie was appearing in Paris during precisely the years Piranesi was etching the Antichità. The Antichità Romane reached London in 1756–57. In April 1757 the Society of Antiquaries of London elected Piranesi an Honorary Fellow — one of the earliest formal recognitions by a learned society of archaeology as a discipline distinct from antiquarian collecting. Piranesi's reply of 3 September 1757 (SAL Correspondence & Papers no. 220, transcribed by Silvia Gavuzzo-Stewart and Alexander Stewart) thanks the Society for the high honour of placement among its honorary fellows of the celebrated Academy of Antiquaries. From the title-page of Della Magnificenza (1761) onward, Piranesi identified himself as Socio della Reale Accademia degli Antiquari di Londra — a fellowship earned, in substance, by this book. No first-edition Piranesi is complete without the apparatus of the patronage dispute that erupted during its publication, and the present copy preserves that apparatus in full. In 1754 Piranesi had understood the Irish peer James Caulfeild, Viscount Charlemont (later 1st Earl), to have promised patronage in exchange for engraved dedications across the four dedication plates of the Antichità. When the book appeared in May 1756, Charlemont — who had left Rome two years earlier — had paid nothing substantial, and his Roman agents John Parker, Edward Murphy, and the Abbé Peter Grant offered only 50 zecchini, which Piranesi understood as an insult. On 25 August 1756 Piranesi published the Avviso al Pubblico, a four-page letterpress tract bound into Volume I, announcing his suppression of the dedication. In January 1757 he took a chisel to the copper and physically erased Charlemont's name and coat of arms — invoking, explicitly, the Roman punitive practice of damnatio memoriae. The Avviso is joined, in a February 1757 letterpress supplement (also present here), by the A Milord letter, which reproduces in movable type the very text that Piranesi had gouged from the copper — so that the reader holds in one hand the erased inscription and in the other its textual ghost. In October 1757 the chiselled plate was re-engraved with a new, general dedication, reading in transcription: VRBIS AETERNAE VESTIGIA / E RVDERIBVS / TEMPORVMQVE INIVRIIS / VINDICATA / AENEIS TABVLIS INCISA / I. B. PIRANESIVS VENET. / ROMAE DEGENS / AEVO SVO / POSTERIS / ET VTILITATI PVBLICAE. That third state — the state of the present copy — was Piranesi's own resolution of the episode, and it remained in use until Francesco Piranesi altered the same copperplate in 1784 to accommodate a dedication to Gustav III of Sweden. A more complete set of the Charlemont apparatus was eventually gathered into the three Lettere di Giustificazione of 1757–58, which are separate from the Antichità proper and only occasionally bound in. The present copy's preservation of the Avviso and the Milord within the printed volume is the principal in-book evidence of the controversy — and a striking reminder that a rare-book collector's copy can, at its best, preserve not only the published text but the conditions of its publication. The Antichità Romane was published in a climate increasingly hostile to Roman priority. Julien-David Le Roy's Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce would appear in 1758; Winckelmann's Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke had appeared in 1755 and the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums would follow in 1764. In this context Piranesi's emphasis on Roman engineering — and in particular the heroic tone of Volume IV, with its scale and technological focus — is polemical as well as documentary. John Wilton-Ely has read the exaggerated scale and the technological emphasis of the late plates as the first signs of Piranesi's effort to counteract the rising Greek-priority claims of Winckelmann and Laugier. The explicit reply would come with Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de' Romani (1761), in which Piranesi argued that Roman architectural achievement descended not from Greece but from the Etruscans and, behind them, the Egyptians. The Antichità Romane is the evidence base for that argument: it is not that Piranesi contested Greek beauty but that he insisted, on measured-survey grounds, on Roman technological primacy. The debate — frivolous on its surface — was foundational for the emergence of comparative art history and archaeology. The reception of the Antichità Romane by the next generation of architects and engineers was as decisive as its archaeological reception. Robert Adam, who had reached Rome in 1755 and worked alongside Piranesi during precisely the years the book was being etched, would carry the cutaway-section method into his own British neoclassical practice and acknowledge Piranesi's instruction explicitly in Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro (1764). Sir John Soane absorbed the four volumes into his Lincoln's Inn Fields library and built around them a teaching collection of casts, models, and drawings whose curatorial logic descends directly from the indexed plate. Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Berlin in the 1820s and Leo von Klenze in Munich treated the Antichità as a working sourcebook for the heroic polychrome neoclassicism of the period. By the second half of the nineteenth century the book had become essential furniture of the European architectural library, in successive Roman, Parisian, and London printings — the Firmin Didot Paris reprint of 1835–39 introducing it to a new francophone public, and the early-nineteenth-century Roman re-strikes from Francesco Piranesi's surviving plates carrying the imagery into the railway age. The Antichità Romane occupies the rare position of belonging securely to two separate canons. It is Dibner's Heralds of Science 169, in the Technology section, on the engineering grounds sketched above. It is also Millard (Italian) 88, in the architectural canon, alongside Vitruvius, Palladio, Serlio, and Vignola. Focillon (1918) numbers the plates 144–395. Hind (1922) gives the fullest early English-language bibliographic treatment at pp. 83–84, including the indispensable note that Piranesi received 1,200 scudi from the Pope toward publication and less than 200 from Charlemont. Wilton-Ely's definitive catalogue raisonné (1994) treats the plates at I.279–528. The original copper plates themselves survive — all of them — at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, where the dedication plate (M-1400) can still be physically examined. Piranesi, almost uniquely among Old Master printmakers, is preserved in his entire technical base: the coppers, the papers, the letterpress, the states. One detail of this copy warrants explicit comment for the scholarly collector. The dedication plate is present in its third state — the “Utilitati Publicae” re-engraving of October 1757 — and the plate was subsequently modified once more, in 1784, to produce the fourth and final state dedicated to Gustav III. The Polanzani portrait of 1750, still present here, was replaced in 1784 by a new portrait by Francesco Piranesi after Giuseppe Cades, dated 1779. The combination of Polanzani portrait, third-state dedication, both Charlemont letters, and imprimatur leaf is fully internally coherent and is the signature of a first-edition copy issued between October 1757 and some point before 1784. No element in the copy points to a post-1784 reissue. References: Dibner, Heralds of Science 169 — Millard, Italian and Spanish Books (NGA, 2000), no. 88 — Focillon 144–395 — Hind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: A Critical Study (1922), pp. 83–84 — Wilton-Ely, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (1994), I.279–528 — Brunet IV, col. 680 — Robison, Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies (1986) — Ficacci, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (Taschen, 2000) — RIBA, Early Printed Books, vol. 3, no. 2550 — A. Hyatt Mayor, Piranesi (1952) — Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1978) — Heather Hyde Minor, The Serpent and the Stylus (2006) — Susan M. Dixon, Sources and Fortunes of Piranesi’s Archaeological Illustrations, Art History 25 (2002) — Silvia Gavuzzo-Stewart, translations of the Lettere di Giustificazione, Italogramma 7 (2014), 9 (2015), 10 (2016), 18 (2020) — Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Piranesi on Paper (online, 2022; watermark catalogue). Four volumes, folio (617 × 370 mm), thick Italian laid paper carrying a script B cipher within a double-oval cartouche consistent throughout all four volumes (a mid-eighteenth-century Roman papermark catalogued in Wilton-Ely's appendix). Engraved allegorical portrait of Piranesi by Francesco Polanzani (dated 1750), engraved title for Volume I dated MDCCLVI (Rotili imprint, sold by Bouchard e Gravier), typeset preface Agli Studiosi delle Antichità Romane with historiated headpiece and ornamental initial, the rare imprimatur leaf †2 dated 25 Gennaro 1756 with the earliest Bouchard list of Piranesi's publications on the verso (citing the Vedute di Roma at 39 plates, a diagnostic early-state figure), the two Charlemont letters bound in as integral (the Avviso al Pubblico of 25 August 1756 and the A Milord letter of February 1757, the latter reproducing in type the suppressed engraved dedication); the general dedication plate in its third state of October 1757, lettered VTILITATI PVBLICAE on the chiselled tablet; engraved frontispieces to Volumes II, III, and IV; and more than two hundred further numbered plates, many double-page or folding, with deep early impressions of strong contrast. Bound c. 1810–1830 in uniform red morocco, handsomely gilt, spines in compartments richly tooled with floral rosettes between raised bands, twin spine labels of dark olive and red morocco lettered OPERE DI PIRANESI and TOM. I–IV, gilt double-fillet and floral roll borders on the boards, gilt cornerpieces, gilt turn-in dentelles, Spanish-wave marbled endpapers in rose, blue, green, and cream, flyleaves on Italian paper of the 1810s–1820s with a standalone fleur-de-lys and Roman numeral VII countermark confirming the binding date. Unrestored. A tall, clean, and exceptionally fresh copy.
Item #6663
Price: $195,000.00
