Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78)
'A View of the Remains of the Second Storey of the Baths of Titus'
1776
Etching (Piranesi List 109; Focillon 838; Hind 127, State I)
From Vedute di Roma, 1748-1778, Vol. II
Museum no. CAI 940
Bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides

Piranesi, more than any other artist, created a romanticised image in the European mind of the ruins of ancient Rome as the remains of grandeur on a heroic scale. Archaeologists have subsequently identified this structure as being a part not of Titus's baths, but rather of those erected by the Emperor Trajan.