Vaso Antico di Marmo

Piranesi’s interest in Roman antiquity, though concentrated on its architecture, also included domestic and ornamental objects. Late in his career, and with the help of sculptors and engravers, he freely “restored” recently discovered antiquities and then produced over 100 etchings indicating their provenance and acquisition. This etching’s central subject is an urn, as the caption notes, in Holland House in England. 

The etching displays three decorative ancient urns against a blank background, each with a small caption. Below them is a dedication that reads “A Sua Eccellenza Miledi Maria Fox” [To Her Excellency Milady Maria Fox]. The surface of the large urn in the center depicts men, women, a young child, a bull, and a pig. A priest with a beard and cowl stands beside an altar while a younger man to his left holds a wind instrument. To his left, a bare-chested man holds an ax above his head, as if ready to strike one of the animals near him. Above this scene, which the caption identifies as a “Sagrifizio di Suovetaurilii,” two bucrania, joined by foliage and framed by other ornaments, peer from a decorative panel. The urn depicts an animal sacrifice, the suovetaurilia or suovitaurilia, which is one of the most sacred and traditional rites of Roman religion: the sacrifice of a pig, a sheep and a bull to the deity Mars to bless and purify land. The handles on the left and right of the urn are capped by rams’ heads. It stands atop an inscribed pedestal which bears botanical and animal decorative motifs. To the left is a smaller lidded urn that is decorated with birds and foliage; it is, according to the caption, an antique marble vase that stands in the home of one Mr. Hugh Dean in England. The vase to the right is another ancient marble vase that can be seen “presso l’autore,” or at the author’s home studio.

The stories of Piranesi’s social, professional, and commercial ties outside of Italy are told in the dedications of his volumes and the annotations and captions of certain images. In the plates that came to be assembled in the two-volume Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi, Tripodi, Lucerne ed Ornamenti Antichi [Vases, Candelabra, Gravestones, Sarcophagi, Tripods, Lanterns, and Ornamental Antiquities], captions offer primary evidence in the history of the antiquities market and the development of the museum. They trace the discoveries and new resting places of plundered antiquities, often with commentary about their new owners’ “buon gusto” [good taste]. Also included in this volume is the Warwick vase, a creative pastiche of fragments that Piranesi restored and combined with the assistance of the sculptor Guillaume-Antoine Grandjacquet.

Late in his career, and after the support of Pope Clement XIII, a fellow Venetian, ended with his death in 1769, Piranesi turned his attention to the lucrative trade in excavating, restoring, and selling antiquities. Etchings such as this were explicit about their status as advertisements, with many indicating that the object itself can be seen “presso l’autore,” as in this etching, or “nel Museo dell’Autore”  [at the author’s home, or in the Author’s Museum]. He also notes that the urn is currently in the home of “Mylord Holland,” Holland House, and dedicates the plate to Mary Fox, the wife of Stephen Fox, who in 1774 became the second Baron Holland. These details help date the image to between 1767, when Stephen and Mary Fox were in Rome, and 1774, the year that Stephen Fox was named second Baron after the death of his father Henry. 

This image is of potential interest to Romanticists for its association, however conjectural and outmoded, with the inspiration of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Along with many other ancient urns, including the Sosibios Vase (which Keats sketched) and the Borghese Vase, Piranesi’s illustration of this vase was suggested as a source for the ode. In his 1884 edition of Keats’s poetical works, William Thomas Arnold cites the British Museum’s A. S. Murray, who declares in a letter of 12 August 1880 to Arnold that Keats  “got his knowledge from Piranesi’s work,” specifically from the engraving of “a large marble urn, then belonging to Lord Holland” whose location in the unnumbered volume of plates he cannot specify (Arnold xxiii). This association was widespread and longstanding enough for Oscar Wilde to ask, in his Intentions (1891), “who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?” (419). 

Piranesi’s rendition of the animal sacrifice and decorative motifs on this urn may have inspired Keats to turn to another image, of another urn, and thus to begin the poem’s encircling and conjuring of its invented subject. This etching most certainly speaks to the culture of mediated antiquity that Piranesi helped to further and that Keats sought, impossibly, to transcend. The material history that the image’s captions trace and the conjectural literary history that its limitations inspire are, though, both parts of its continued significance.