Frontespizio delle Diverse Maniere d’adornare i Cammini

Etching and engraving, signed at lower right. A very fine impression on contemporary laid paper, with “double circle and fleur-de-lis with letters CB" (Robinson 37), with margins, generally in very good conditions. Diverse Maniere d’adornare i Cammini ed ogni altra parte degli edifizi.. This volume was published in 1769, although a number of letters suggest that work on it had begun a few years before and that, probably, a large number of plates were ready by 1767. From a stylistic point of view, it can undoubtedly be considered as the zenith of Piranesi's inspiration. However, it defies classification; neither baroque nor neo-classical or mannerist, it is, as Focillon simply put it "in Piranesi's style". The novelty embodied in the sixty plates which make up the volume, apart from the intrinsic beauty of the engravings, consists in their spell-binding imagination, their straightforwardness and in an intertwining of classical yearnings and baroque remembrances, being nearly conscious of setting foot into the entranced dreams of an archaeologist. When depicting fireplaces, pieces of furniture, clocks or any other object, Piranesi utilised different decorative themes, which can be broadly divided into two groups. The first one consisted of motifs derived from classical antiquity, especially from Ancient Egypt, while the second theme was inspired by nature, with particular emphasis on elements of the fauna. Piranesi's ideas appear to be disquieting, ambiguous and contradictory, possibly leading toward Romanticism, thus confirming the theory held by a number of scholars who consider him a forerunner of the literary style of the Empire rather than as the foremost exponent of neo-classicism.