Le Antichità Romane

by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

$195,000 · Offered by Sophia Rare Books

First edition

Rome: Stamperia di Angelo Rotili sold by Bouchard e Gravier , 1756. / First edition, a remarkably tall, large-paper copy of the foundational treatise on Roman engineering Dibner Heralds 169 , and the book that established archaeology as an empirical, measured, and visually documentary science. Across four folio volumes and more than two hundred copperplates, Piranesi reconstructed ancient Rome not as a picturesque ruin but as a functioning

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