cans, or Etruscans, and was then taken over and named by their Greek conquerors

the Dorians. The Italic origin of Greek art became the faith by which Piranesi was
to live and die.
Lucchesi also gave his nephew his veneration for architecture. "Architecture,"
he wrote, "which is now in deeper eclipse than any other art, directs works that

approach the idea of Creation." He constructed a bridge and a palace with a fine

stair on the mainland, but in the city of Venice itself his only architectural com
missions were to remodel a couple of old buildings. He rebuilt the Church of St.

John in Oil on the pattern of Palladio's beautiful church of the Redeemer. Palla-
dio's interior, always unfolding in a mystery of light and space, seems not to
have satisfied Lucchesi, for he called his "improved" imitation The Redeemer Re
deemed. Uncle and nephew are said to have quarrelled. They were so much alike
that they could not but fall out.
Piranesi's region produced almost all the great Italian architects since Michel
angelo. The long tradition of northern Italy strengthened his family background
and fixed his ambition to become an architect. Many years later, long after he must
have abandoned all hope of designing great buildings, he still persistently signed
himself ARCHITETTO VENEZIANO. He prepared himself for his career by
studying with various masters, but probably quarrelled with them as he had with
his uncle Matteo. It is final to quarrel with a teacher, for after you have slammed
the door it is hard to go back the next day, but it is less drastic to lose your temper
with a book, for it will stay in the corner where you threw it until you cool off and
resume your studies.
Piranesi is said to have taken lessons from Ferdinando Bibiena, then old and blind
in Bologna, but much more probably studied his handbook L' Architettura Civile,
first published in 1711. The number of inexpensive pocket editions show that this
manual became required reading for Italian architectural students. This it deserved
to do, for it summed up what an architect had to know about geometry and calcula
tion, building methods and materials, house planning, handy detail for doors and
windows, the five orders of columns and entablatures, perspective for renderings
and stage sets, and construction machinery. The chapters on perspective contained
some diagrams and pictures that started all stage decorators drawing buildings at
an angle, with walls fleeing away right and left into the distance. This diagonal
scheme reappears throughout Piranesi's work (fig. 6). Bibiena does not write much
about the perspective of circular buildings, which Piranesi often miscalculated.
The Morgan Library has two sheets of sketches that Mr. Willard C. Clifford has
identified as copies from Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer his