His final great work, Diverse Maniere d’Adornare i Cammini (1769), is a catalog of fantastical fireplace designs. Here, Piranesi blends Egyptian hieroglyphs, Etruscan urns, Roman trophies, and rococo scrollwork into a dizzying proto-postmodern pastiche. The Mantelpiece with a Mummy shows a sarcophagus transformed into a chimney breast; Cammino Egizio (Egyptian Fireplace) surrounds a hearth with sphinxes and obelisks. Critics at the time called it barbaric. Today we see it as the birth of eclectic historicism in design. The complete etchings of Piranesi, as enumerated by modern catalogues raisonnés (principally Hind, Focillon, and Wilton-Ely), number approximately 1,048 individual plates. They can be grouped into the following major series:
Plate VII, The Drawbridge , shows a massive wooden bridge suspended over a void, chains hanging from unseen heights. Plate II, The Man on the Rack , places a tiny human figure on a wheeled scaffold inside a vaulted rotunda of cyclopean arches. The architecture is pure fantasy: staircases lead to nowhere; balconies intersect at impossible angles; machinery (wheels, pulleys, capstans) serves no discernible function. piranesi. the complete etchings
These prints are also archaeological documents. Piranesi insisted on measuring and drawing every surviving Roman monument. His Antichità Romane (1756) – a four-volume set of etchings – includes detailed cross-sections of the Tomb of Hadrian, the Aqua Claudia, and the Marble Plan of Rome. He corrected earlier Renaissance reconstructions by proving, for example, that the so-called “Temple of Minerva Medica” was actually a nymphaeum. In this, Piranesi was a pioneer of scientific archaeology, even as his imagination flew into fantasy. By the 1760s, Piranesi had become a controversial public intellectual. The “Greek vs. Roman” debate raged among antiquarians: were Greek or Roman architects superior? In his folio Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani (1761), Piranesi argued fiercely for Roman originality, claiming the Etruscans and Italic peoples had invented everything the Greeks later refined. He backed his text with 35 etchings of Roman construction techniques: opus reticulatum , concrete vaulting, brickwork. His final great work, Diverse Maniere d’Adornare i