From the NYR

 Beard-

By the middle of the first century BCE, the traditional Roman system of timekeeping, with its rough and ready method of keeping the calendar year in step with the solar year, was hopelessly disorganized. Despite the best efforts of those responsible, the official date was sometimes several months adrift from the natural cycle of the seasons: “April” might fall in the middle of winter, and the harvest festivals tied to particular dates must often have been celebrated before the crops were even ripe. Caesar solved all this, introducing a year of 365 days, with an additional day in each quadrennial “leap year,” not to mention—in due course—a month named after himself, “July.” Ancient writers had no doubt that the expertise behind this reform came from scientists based in the Greek city of Alexandria in Egypt, where Caesar had been besieged. But how, and where, did Caesar manage to find the time to master the intricacies of calendrical science? It was most likely, we were told (half-jokingly perhaps), on that cruise. However he spent his evenings with Cleopatra, by day he was swotting up on his astronomy and having lessons with the Alexandrian scientists.

On Piranesi-

The Vedute, which he began in the 1740s and added to throughout his life, cleave closer to reality, but here also he found room for play—stretching the scale, collapsing distances, and infusing everything with haphazard life. People clamber over broken walls, herd sheep, gesture at each other in Italian; women hang clothes on a laundry line tethered to the Temple of Cybele (now known as the Temple of Hercules Victor). These actors are too peculiar and specific to qualify as staffage (the arthistorical term for the generic persons dotted about painted landscapes), and sheets of figure studies at the Morgan show Piranesi clocking the attitudes of workers in his printshop and people on the street. 

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De Quincey’s account of “wheels, cables, catapults, &c., expressive of enormous power” wasn’t quite true, but it captured the mood and helped establish the images as metonyms for the irrational mind. Their special architectural-psychological trick was to appear simultaneously claustrophobic and infinite. More than a century after De Quincey, Aldous Huxley saw their “colossal pointlessness,” which “goes on indefinitely, and is co-extensive with the universe” as revealing the “subterranean workings of a tormented soul.” Later, nihilist aesthetes of my own generation meditated on posters of the Carcert through fugs of dorm-room pot smoke. Susanna Clarke’s recent novel of elliptical captivity and captivation is titled simply Piranesi.? “All considered,’ Tschudi writes in Piranesi and the Modern Age, “the mind itself as an infinitely extending entrapment is perhaps Piranesi’s most lasting legacy as an architect.” 

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The practice of framing works on paper under glass developed during Piranesi’s lifetime, and most of his plates were conceived on the older model of albums or portfolios with title pages, dedications, and texts. Those appendages could be lengthy: Divers Manners of Ornamenting Chimneys and All Other Parts of Houses (1769) came with a trilingual, thirty-five-page “Apologetical Essay in Defence of the Egyptian and Tuscan Architecture.”