The present drawing and the following lots were most probably part of an album of which four other sheets are known: two with the Galerie Cailleux and two in a private collection. The repeated appearence of a Roman watermark and the identical chain lines in the paper support this assumption.
The range of subjects depicted is startling. The artist's imaginative use of antique motifs in the design of fountains is combined in some cases, with faithful depictions of archeological artifacts such as rythons and oenochoes. Yet most items drawn are purely from Robert's imagination. Vases with friezes of lions' heads and dedication plaques covered with hieroglyphics were fashionable at the time, and were often made up by antiquarians who did not hesitate to assemble them from various fragments. Piranesi was one of the most imaginative creators of 'Antique' vases, constructed from sculptural fragments.
The Egyptian motifs are, however, the most interesting aspect of the present drawings. Pope Urban XIV had assembled a large collection of Egyptian sculpture, which mostly came from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. This collection was the impetus for a renewal of interest in Egypt that was partly orchestrated by Piranesi. In the 1760s the Cafe degli Egiziani on the Piazza de Spagna was covered with Egyptian decorations. In one of the present sheets (lot 315) the cow Isis appears wrapped in a shroud supported by two children, a motif that seems to have been inspired by an authentic artifact probably found in the Isium of Rome, one of the sites where Isis was worshipped in Imperial Rome.
Similar sheets of studies of antique artefacts were drawn by other artists, such as those by Jean-Jacques Lequeu in the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, Paris, see Piranése et les Français 1740-1790, Rome, 1976, no. 114, illustrated