Luigi Ficacci

Piranesi's work could be largely divided in to three catagories; views; imagined works; antiquarian records. For me, the imagined works were the most interesting and the works that are primarily about preserving a record of antiquities the least. Of course there is overlap. Title pages of various collections are imagined compositions, even if the contents are engravings of architectural diagrams. Views of ancient Roman remains act as antiquarian records even if the main objective was to sell souvenirs to rich Brits on the Grand Tour. But for me the pinacle is the Imagined Prisons that inspired the purchase of the book in the first place.

What gains here from completeness, one loses in scale. Most of the reproductions are two per not particularly large page, making appreciation of the wealth of fine detail difficult. Making the pages larger in area or number, however, would make for a very unwieldy book indeed, considering the already 800p scale of this edition. Hence I might look for books containing subsets of the whole but reproduced much larger.

Anyone interested in Roman architectural remains should probably give this volume a perusal.… (more)