Tourist Work

Self -portrait as Monument

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is mostly remembered today for large engravings of sinister-looking fantasy-architecture, but in his own day was better known for producing the largest and finest available souvenir-prints of Roman tourist sights, such as his three splendid views of the Pantheon below. In the first of these, two heavy square bell towers are partially visible behind the pediment. These towers had been imposed on the structure about a century earlier by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Their ghastliness was ultimately recognized and they were demolished and removed not long after these pictures were made in the 1750s.  

Pantheon

Pantheon Interior

Pantheon Porch

Piazza Navona (with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers)

Sarcophagi

Temple of Concord

In the middle eighteenth century, despite Rome's well-established fame as a tourist destination, most surviving Roman monuments remained half-obscured by layer upon layer of subsequent habitation. Some of these ancient structures survive today in an excavated and restored state, but many others disappeared.

Arch of Septimus Severus

Temple of Jupiter

Tomb of Augustus

Cutaway diagram of Aquaduct 

Blank Ex-Libris with Artist's Implements