He Egyptian ornament with startling brutality in the mantelpieces

developed
in his chimney book. The style lay dormant until Napoleon's Egyptian campaign
of 1799 suddenly sprinkled continental Europe with hieroglyphs and sphinxes, just
as the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922 put patchwork Egyptian figures
on handbags and cocktail napkins. In America the contemporaries of Edgar Allen
Poe adapted Egyptian pylons for hopeless doorways into prisons and cemeteries.
The New York Tombs Prison got its name from the Egyptian façades designed
in 1834.
Piranesi's imperial Roman style was made to order for Napoleon to glorify his
Mediterranean conquests and to remind the world that former self-made emperors
had become respectable with time. A world in the turmoil of provisional govern
ments wanted to recall the stability of the Imperium Romanum, and a generation
scattered by wars longed for the security of the Pax Romana. It is no wonder that

people helped themselves to Piranesi's fasces and eagles to such an extent that some
scholars would like to rename the Empire style the Piranesi style. Twenty years
after his death his sons obeyed the pull of the times by taking all his copperplates to
Paris, where they were printed perhaps even more than in Rome.
Piranesi's ideas reappear in Thomas Hope's Household Furniture and Interior
Decoration of 1807, and Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de Décorations Intérieures of
1812, which named the interior decorator, created his profession and established his
chilly good taste. The new rich of these shaken years were not so sure of their taste
as the old nobility had been and so relied more on professional decorators. The Pi
ranesi style held on until the 1 840's when too much security turned people to bor
rowing trouble from the pageantry of an imaginary Middle Ages and other old un
happy far-off things.
The year before he published the chimney book, Piranesi started to etch over
a hundred plates of Vases, Candelabra, Urns, Sarcophagi, Lamps and Other Antique
Ornaments, which he worked on during his last ten years. He had become a dealer in
Roman antiques which he bought or dug up at Hadrian's Villa and elsewhere, then
repaired and sold. Cardinal Rezzonico bought some, but most of his customers were
rich English travellers who passed through Rome with letters from Robert Adam
and other English friends. When he got a good marble he advertised it in a smash

ing great etching dedicated to some likely purchaser (figs. 116-119). Reading the
names on the dedications is like picking over the calling cards that probably littered
a bowl in Piranesi's front hall. To some fifty odd Englishmen there are barely half a
dozen from other nations, and only about three Italians. Fifteen years later the fam
ily's acquaintance had changed when Piranesi's son Francesco dedicated a series of

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