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, …