When Gibbon was in Rome as a young man in 1764–1765, he may have visited a shop which was noted in the address book of many of his well-to-do countrymen. It was that of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the Palazzo Tomati, where antique sculptures (expertly restored) were to be bought, and an excellent series of prints of the Roman landmarks could be purchased for so little as two and a half paoli apiece—about half a crown—say, a dollar today. Gibbon may not have laid out any money on these impressive etchings, inexpensive as they were, for he was doing the grand tour economically, on an allowance of £100 a year, which had to cover his own expenses and those of his tutor–traveling companion. But he must have lingered wishfully over the portfolios.
There is no record that he acquired any of these Roman views in later years when he was more affluent. He was not the sort to dress up his house for show or to stock his library with ornamental accessories. His snug workroom in Bentinck Street, London, eschewing the usual mahogany, had shelves painted blue and white, which probably took most of the wall space. He could not have framed and hung a series of Piranesi views, as Sir Walter Scott was presently to do in his dining room at Abbotsford. Nor was Gibbon’s next library, in his house “La Grotte” at Lausanne, adapted for prints on the wall. In commenting on this room, or series of rooms, when he was making an addition to it, he wrote, “not forgetting the water closet, few authors of six Volumes in quarto will be more agreeably lodged than myself.” He was apparently content without the mementos and pictures which seem appropriate for the professional writer’s study, for his bookcases lined the walls, having solid wooden doors so that they could be locked like boxes. The southern windows overlooking Lake Geneva were the only pictures necessary.
(We know about “La Grotte” because it was still intact in the 1880’s. The Geneva post office now occupies its site, and there is a balcony toward the lake over approximately the spot where Gibbon put the final touch to the Decline and Fall in his summerhouse one evening as the moon was rising. William Beckford, author of Vathek and caliph of Fonthill, to whom Piranesi dedicated a plate of an antique vase, had purchased the place, thousands of books and all, after Gibbon’s death, “to have something to read,” he remarked, “when I passed through Lausanne.”)
A record exists of about four-fifths of the books that Gibbon possessed. He himself kept catalogues of them; that of the library at “La Grotte” is a card index, written on the backs of playing cards. Among these there were no bound volumes of Piranesi such as an English gentleman might have cherished as a souvenir of Rome. Gibbon was no sentimental collector. He bought only what he could use; once he had decided upon the subject that was to occupy most of his writing life, it was reference material. He had seen Rome. Why, therefore, squander money on views of it?
He had, in fact, seen more of the antique Rome than exists today. While there have been new excavations and clearances of Renaissance structures from old remains since his time, many ruins have also dwindled and vanished. Piranesi too saw Rome as it stood in the eighteenth century, columns deep in the rubbish of centuries, greenery sprouting from the architraves, and goats grazing where senators had paced. This Rome in its twilight, with the barefoot friars of St. 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. Every shrub in his forum may not be placed just where it grew, but the buildings are in their proper relationship and pretty much in their proper proportion. If they look gargantuan, it is because he shrank the human figures he placed in such thespian postures about them—an old trick still favoured by factory owners who show their plant on a letterhead. Piranesi did not hesitate to apply imagination when a decorative detail in the original had disappeared. But he was so conversant with ancient Rome that his friezes and rosettes were almost as good as the originals. In his shop he restored actual stonework. His customers preferred things whole.
Whether or not they met or knew each other’s work, Gibbon and Piranesi are kindred artists, each giving pulsing life to his record. From a fragment of a palace or an anecdote of an emperor we are permitted to see the past in the bright definition of morning light. Both the historian and the etcher have the same knack of shifting time backwards and forwards, so that morning fades to sunset, sharp images waver and go out of focus, and one sees in successive moments, as in a dissolving view on a screen, Rome in pristine splendor and decrepit age. There is a note of doom in this magic lantern show. One sees the universality of decline and fall. But this is not mere brooding over death; the hope of rebirth is implicit.
Curiously enough, Piranesi was a romantic and Gibbon was a realist; of the two, Gibbon belonged more to the eighteenth century; Piranesi anticipated dream worlds which were alien to the Age of Reason. Yet both reshaped their material as they felt it ought to look; for a realist can skirt reality as gingerly as a romantic. However they modeled their forms, they arrived at the same heroic end. Curiously, again, they have had to wait a century and a half to share the same volumes.
Analysis of Piranesi’s work has attracted several scholars. As authority for the present note, Arthur M. Hind’s Critical Study of Piranesi is cited. Therein the Roman views are numbered and described, and his productions are considered in detail.
Research has found that the eighteenth century misidentified some of the Roman remains. Piranesi naturally titled his subjects according to the knowledge of his day; Gibbon knew the monuments by the same misnomers. The Temple of Vespasian was thought to be that of Jupiter Tonans; the Basilica of Constantine, the Temple of Peace; the Baths of Trajan, the Baths of Titus; and so on. For the plates of this edition the correct names are given, sometimes in juxtaposition with Piranesi’s variants.
The greatest problem of translation lay in the names of monuments on the map of the Fora. While Piranesi showed with reasonable accuracy the buildings still existing in his day, he indulged in broad flights of fancy when he plotted the sites of those which were buried or gone. He made wonderfully-patterned plans, but they are only that. His numbers have been assigned to sites as we know them; and of course correct names are substituted for incorrect. This chore was undertaken by Francis W. Robinson, Curator of European Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, long a resident in Rome and student of its antiquities. He has also helped with translating Piranesi’s titles and captions.
Many of the monuments depicted by Piranesi may be located on this map. Some of them fall outside the region of the Fora, and some are of course outside Rome. If one were to take a tourist’s walk he might begin with the Roman Forum, as we do in the order of pictures in this first volume, and proceed from the Capitol to the Coliseum. Then he would visit the adjoining imperial Fora, the Cattle Market, the Palatine Hill, and finally get out to the gates of the ancient city, with the aqueducts, roads, and tombs beyond. If he had a chariot he might drive on to see the bridges, Tivoli with its falls, the Villa of Maecenas and the Villa of Hadrian, and finally, with changes of horses, Cori and Beneventum.
PAUL MCPHARLIN
