Piranesi's Altar to Apollo and the 18th-Century Business of Selling Ancient Rome

Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, has a late 18th-century watercolour of a Roman altar dedicated to Apollo. It’s carved all over with lion heads and lion feet, figures, fruit, ornament and, oddly, a crab. The caption says the altar came from the Villa di Cicerone, Cicero’s villa. The drawing is by an Italian draughtsman, Donato Vaselli, copying a print by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

So this is a copy of a print of an object whose history came from Piranesi’s own caption. That chain is how a lot of Europe learned what ancient Rome looked like.

Donato Vaselli after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Altar to Apollo from the Villa di Cicerone, late 18th century, pen and ink, brush and watercolour. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (CC0).

Piranesi made Rome bigger than life

Piranesi (1720–1778) was trained as an architect, but he made his name as a printmaker. His views of Rome’s ruins were huge, dramatic and full of tiny human figures that made the arches look even more colossal. Visitors on the Grand Tour bought them by the hundred and took them home to Britain, France and Germany. For many people who never saw Rome, Piranesi’s Rome was Rome.

He also sold antiquities. In the 1760s and 1770s excavators like the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton were pulling marble fragments out of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and other sites. Piranesi’s workshop bought fragments, rebuilt them into complete vases, candelabra and altars, and sold them to wealthy travellers.

Where the fragments stop and the workshop starts

Some of those restorations were careful and accurate. Others mixed unrelated ancient pieces with new carving to make something grander than anything that had come out of the ground. The famous Piranesi Vase in the British Museum is a good example. Its frieze combines genuine fragments, but its stem and supports are pieced together from unrelated ancient bits plus modern parts. It was sold to Sir John Boyd in 1776 as an ancient Roman object, and at the time nobody thought that was dishonest.

In 1778 Piranesi published many of these pieces in a set of etchings, Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi. The plates worked as a catalogue and an advertisement at once. A caption naming a famous site, Hadrian’s villa or Cicero’s, added prestige and value. How much of any given altar was Roman, and whether it really came from where the caption said, was a question buyers didn’t press too hard.

Why this copy matters

Vaselli’s watercolour shows the next step. Piranesi’s prints became models in their own right. Draughtsmen copied them, designers mined them for ornament, and the lion feet, garlands and animal heads turned up again on furniture, silver and interiors across Europe. Neoclassical design owes a real debt to objects that were part ancient, part 18th-century workshop.

Look at the drawing that way and it’s less a record of a Roman altar than a record of what Europeans wanted a Roman altar to be. Rich, ornate, and signed off with a famous name.