The elder Piranesi was of a quarrelsome disposition.  He wrangled with an English patron, Viscount Charlemont, and, like Beethoven, destroyed title-pages when he became displeased with the subject of his dedications.  He was decorated with the Order of Christ and was proud of his membership in the London Society of Antiquaries.  It is said that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict.  This probably accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely executed versions of his compositions.  His besetting fault was a tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition.  Fond of strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a sinner in the handling of his blacks.  An experimenter of audacity, Piranesi’s mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing atones for many defects.  The remarkable richness and depth of tone, brought about by continuous and innumerable bitings, and other secret processes known only to himself, make his plates warm and brilliant.  Nobility of form, grandeur of mass, a light and shade that is positively dramatic in its dispersion over wall and tower, are the characteristic marks of this unique etcher.  He could not resist the temptation of dotting with figures the huge spaces of his ruins.  They dance or recline or indulge in uncouth gestures.  His shadows are luminous—­you may gaze into them; his high lights caught on some projection or salient cornice or silvering the August porticoes of a vanished past, all these demonstrate his feeling for the dramatic.  And dramatic is the impression evoked as you study the majestic temples that were Paestum, the bare, ruined arches and pillars that were Rome.  It is Paestum that is the more vivid.  It tallies, too, with the Piranesi plates; while Rome has visibly changed since his day.  His original designs for chimneys, Diverse Maniere d’Adornare i Camini, are pronounced by several critics as “foolish and vulgar.”  He left nearly two thousand etchings, and died at Rome November 9, 1778.  His son erected a mediocre statue by Angolin for his tomb in Il Priorato.  A manuscript life of Piranesi, which was in London about 1830, is now lost.  Bryan’s dictionary gives a partial list of his works “as published both by himself in Rome and by his sons in Paris.  The plates passed from his sons first to Firmin-Didot, and ultimately into the hands of the Papal Government.”

De Quincey’s quotation of Wordsworth is apposite in describing Piranesi’s creations:  “Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars”; from sheer brutal masonry, gray, aged, and moss-encrusted, he invented a precise pattern and one both passionate and magical.

MERYON