University of Virginia Library

99. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista.

VARIE VEDUTE / DI ROMA / Antica e Moderna / Disegnate e
Intaglia / te da Celebri Autori / In ROMA 1748. / A spese di Fausto
Amidei Librario al'Corso

Small folio. Engraved title page (1 leaf); 83 engraved plates.

The engravers included in this volume are Paolo Anesi (ca.1700-after
1761), a landscape painter and an engraver of views and portraits who
worked in Rome; Jerome-Charles Bellicard (1726-86), a Parisian who
won the Prix de Rome, 1747, and became a professor at the Académie
in 1762, but who was ruined by gambling; F. Pierre Duflos (eighteenth
century), a painter and engraver who worked at Rome; Jean-Laurent Le
Geay, an architect, painter, and engraver who won the Prix de Rome,
1732, and worked in Germany after leaving Rome; and Piranesi.

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), though a Venetian who
trained with Lucchesi and Zucchi, worked primarily in Rome as both an
architect and an engraver, his engravings forming by far the greater
part of his life's work.

The present volume, which has recently come into the University's
collections, has a title more or less matching that given in Jefferson's
want list for the University, in the section on "Architecture." Although
the book includes some engravings by other hands, there are some
thirty-seven with an engraved "Piranesi F" signature and a good many
more with an inked imitation of that signature. Among these is that
for the temple of Fortuna Virilis, whose beautiful Ionic order was later
used at the University (see No. 92b). The title page is dated 1748,
but the seven plates by Bellicard are dated 1750, which might mean that
this volume was expanded by the inclusion of plates by others after the
1748 date.

The title of this book matches that given by Sowerby. It is something
of a composite, which will surprise no one familiar with the bibliography
of Piranesi. The restrikes from the Piranesi plates have been
so numerous and so unsystematized that it is difficult to determine either
what Jefferson was ordering for the University or what he himself
bought for his private library. He recommended that the University get
a single-folio volume which he called "Vedute di Roma antica et
moderna del Piranesi." The volume in his own library, which, according
to Kimball (p. 98), entered it in 1805 and was later sold to Congress,
was described in 1840 as a Rome, 1748, quarto edition with the binder's
title Varie Vedute di Roma antica e Moderna, but the volume is not now
known to be in existence and thus escapes further analysis.

It seems clear enough that Jefferson did not own the two-volume
folio edition of the 1760s issued by Piranesi, the 127 plates of which
were to make up Vols. XVI and XVII of the 1800 collected restrike.

The copy now on the library's shelves is the gift of the Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

U. Va.

*NA1120.P78.1748

M

Sowerby 4197