time had come when a man of genius could hope to make an independent living.

Once intellectuals began to dispense with the protection of the nobility, the French
Revolution could not be far off.
Piranesi's thirties were his years of truculence. As soon as he had
published the
Roman Antiquities, and even while he was rebuking Lord Charlemont, he started a

gigantic polemical work called The Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans. He
was angered by two attacks on ancient Rome from London and Paris. In 1755 a silly

anonymous article in a London newspaper called the Romans "a gang of mere

plunderers sprung from them who had been, but a little while before their con
quest of Greece, naked thieves and runaway slaves." Then in 1758, after Piranesi
had prepared to answer this article, the real threat came from another quarter
when David Leroy published the first book ever devoted to Greek architecture,
Les Ruines des plus beaux Monuments de la Grèce. Leroy claimed that the Greeks had in
vented an architecture which the Romans had then adapted. It astonishes us today
to find that such an opinion ever caused astonishment. Europe knew Roman archi
tecture well, but had no idea of the Greek, for few cultivated Europeans had pene
trated the iron curtain of brigands and suspicious Turkish officials who made a
visit to Greek ruins next to impossible.
On the other hand, Rome had dominated the West for over two thousand years
until Romans, and indeed all Italians, had come to feel that nothing could have
originated anywhere else. Not only Piranesi's uncle Matteo, but all his Italian con
temporaries believed that the Etruscans, an older and more intelligent race than
the Greeks, had handed on their inventions to the Romans. After the Romans con

quered Greece, the Greeks had picked up a whimsical facility from the pioneer la
bors of ancient Italy. When Piranesi was a boy certain Frenchmen and Englishmen

began to suspect that the Greeks had invented more art than the Italians allowed.
The French and English attacks that roused Piranesi were just the beginning of one
of the great revaluations of modern time. This revaluation struck with force in
1764 when Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art announced the vision (later a
dogma) of the Greeks as Arcadians dwelling in ideal beauty and noble calm. Winck-
elmann allowed merit to Piranesi's etchings but naturally spurned his theories. In
the narrow intellectual circles of the eighteenth-century Rome the two men, who
were almost of the same age, avoided each other for thirteen years like wrestlers too
wary to grapple— one the lofty rhapsodist of Greece, the other the heavyweight
champion of Rome. Today both theorists seem equally arbitrary.
When Piranesi saw the threat to his faith he threw everything into the defense.
After five years of work he had etched only thirty-eight plates of great Roman build

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