At one point, Jacques-Louis David, then composing his "Oath of the Horatii" (1784) at Rome, wished to take him to Paris. But Dies had reasons for not accepting the offer. He was courting a young Roman whom he subsequently married. Meanwhile, he had made the acquaintance of the engraver Giovanni Volpato, for whom he executed numerous drawings, and this no doubt suggested the plan, which he afterwards carried out, of publishing, in partnership with Jacob Wilhelm Mechau, Johann Christian Reinhart and Johann Friedrich Frauenholz, the series of plates known as the "Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie", published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg in 1799.