Foundations of a modern discipline 27book of his Quattro libri (1570) documents those buildings
that remained largely intact, extrapolating what he could
deduce from the remaining fragments (sections of walls,
columns, etc.) and (book II) demonstrating with examples of
his own work those building types that had almost univer-
sally been lost to the past, such as residences and other
‘minor’ types.^24
Pirro came closest to treating Rome as a site of antiquity
in terms aligned with the approaches of early archaeologists.
He excavated at the Villa Adriano at Tivoli (from 1549) and
drew a map of ancient Rome, the Anteiquae Urbis Imago
(from 1561), to which the magisterial maps prepared over a
century later by Giambattista Nolli (Nuova pianta di Roma,
1748) and Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Campo Marzio
dell’Antica Roma, 1762) were clearly indebted.^25
The sixteenth-century studies of Serlio, Pirro, Palladio and
others maintained a strong sense of Rome’s enduring cultural
5 Pirro Ligorio, Anteiquae Urbis Imago, 1561, detail.