88 What is Architectural History?
lished from 1748), and when and how did he revise them
over time? In her contribution to The Serpent and the Stylus,
Roberta Battaglia demonstrates that these questions demand
of historians that they understand Piranesi’s procedure and
its material traces in the copperplates on which he worked
and in the prints made from these plates.^7 Her example is
typical of the common problem of chronology posed by dis-
covery of a new exemplar of a series, which must be dated
and reconciled with the existing sequence of engravings on
the basis of a specialist knowledge of the architect’s works
and design method.
Piranesi almost never dated his Vedute. He reworked the
copperplates of this and other series, leaving scholars to
determine the original sequence of the initial etchings and the
order in which details were added, enhanced and lost through
a series of revisions to the plate. Study of this problem pro-
ceeds by a comparative study of the various states of the
etchings, through analysis of the deterioration and obfusca-
tion of details on the extant copperplates, by observing the
relative density of the ink on the page in any given example,
along with the clarity of the print’s lines, and by accounting
for known patterns of sale and dispersal and the collection
history of known early examples. In her essay Battaglia
describes a hitherto unknown collection of the Vedute found
in a volume of miscellaneous prints housed at the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana in Rome. She records in detail the four-
teen Vedute found in this volume, comparing the examples
to hand with existing known and dated collections: ‘The
Vatican series is of extreme interest because it contains – for
some of the views – a fi rst state not hitherto recorded in
specialist studies. It also enables us to witness closely Pira-
nesi’s creative process, fi xing a precise moment of that con-
tinuous and almost exasperated experimentation that the
artist applied in his every working process.’^8 The evidence
sheds light on a narrow problem of chronology, while opening
its procedural implications to the larger question of how
Piranesi designed, and thus of how he saw the world and the
possibilities open to him as an architect – a question as per-
tinent to the Vedute as to his other series and to his vast work
of preparing, publishing, reproducing and distributing his
prints, of which thousands of examples exist worldwide.