are never absent. He portrays ladders that scale bulky joists,
poles of incredible thickness, cyclopean block and tackling. They are
of wood, not metal nor marble, for the art of Piranesi is full of
discriminations. Finally, you weary. The eye gorged by all the mystic
engines, hieroglyphs of pain from some impossible inquisition--though
not once do we see a monkish figure--all these anonymous monkey men
scurrying on what errand Piranesi alone knows; these towering arches,
their foundations resting on the crest of hell (you feel the
tremendous impact of the architectural mass upon the earth--no mean
feat to represent or rather to evoke the sense of weight, of pressure
on a flat surface); the muffled atmosphere in these prisons from which
no living prisoner emerges; of them all you weary, for the normal
brain can only stand a certain dose of the delirious and the
melancholy. This aspect, then, of Piranesi's art, black magic in all
its potency, need no longer detain us. His Temples of Paestum sound a
less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them.

II

Giambattista Piranesi was born at Venice in 1720. Bryan says that
about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under
Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master,
Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned
that art. Ricci and Pannini were much in vogue, following the example
of Claude in his employment of ruins as a picturesque element in a
composition. But Piranesi excelled both Ricci and Pannini. He was an
architect, too, helping to restore churches, and this accounts for the
proud title, Architect of Venice, which may be seen on some of his
plates. He lived for a time in Venice, but Rome drew him to her with
an imperious call. And, notwithstanding the opposition of his father,
to Rome he went, and for forty years devoted himself to his master
passion, the pictorial record of the beloved city, the ancient
portions of which were fast vanishing owing to time and the greed of
their owners. This was Piranesi's self-imposed mission, begun as an
exalted youth, finished as an irritable old man. Among his
architectural restorations, made at the request of Clement XIII, were
the two churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Il Priorato. Lanciani
says that Il Priorato is "a mass of monstrosities inside and out." It
is his etching, not his labour as an architect, that will make
Piranesi immortal. H