Celebrating Piranesi
“I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), engraved self-portrait, second half of the 18th century.
This week we celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (4 October 1720 - 9 November 1778), the formidable Italian artist, architect, designer, and archaeologist, famous above all for his sublime images of Rome. Fascinated with Roman antiquity and the legacy it left to the modern city, his often fantastical etchings offer rich visual imagery and a dramatic meditation on time that has significantly shaped the cultural perception of Rome.
Among his most famous works are a series of views of Rome, Le Vedute di Roma. The city and landscape views known as vedute had become especially popular in the 18th century as travellers on the Grand Tour sought to commemorate their travels and prove their prestige with representations of prominent cultural sites they’d visited. Piranesi’s Vedute, which monumentalized the ruins to a previously unfathomable degree, came to rival the ruins themselves in terms of cultural understanding or Roman antiquity. As Richard Wendor puts it, “Piranesi's views of Rome had such a profound influence on the cultural imagination of the late eighteenth century, in fact, that the images themselves became yet another superimposition with which the modern eye would have to contend.” (R. Wendor, “Piranesi's Double Ruin,” p. 162). Indeed, in his Italian Journey: 1786-1788, Goethe remarked that the city’s monuments had failed to live up to the image of Rome Piranesi had supplied to him via his etchings.
Piranesi, Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo, 1750, from Vedute di Roma.
Piranesi, Veduta in prospettiva della gran Fontana dell'Acqua Vergine detta di Trevi Architettura di Nicola Salvi , 1773, from Vedute di Roma.
Horace Walpole encouraged his readers to “study the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour ... Savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michael Angelo, and exuberant as Rubens, he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realize. He piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales heaven with mountains of edifices. Yet what taste in his boldness! What grandeur in his wildness! what labour and thought both in his rashness and details!”
While he notes the various urban elements Piranesi so influentially depicted in the Vedute, Walpole – who is credited with writing the first Gothic novel (Castle of Otranto, published in 1764) – was probably also motivated by Piranesi’s Le Carceri d’Invenzione, an impressively imaginative series of etchings with which the artist’s name is also irrevocably associated. Translating from Italian to “prisons of the imagination” or “imaginary prisons,” this series presented dramatic amalgamations of space with arches, vaults, and stairways that lead nowhere, convolutions of perspective and warped scales, making for dark, nefarious labyrinthine “places.”
Piranesi’s legacy is, however, hardly limited to the dark chambers of the Gothic novel. Among the many notable courses of influence one can trace from his prodigious oeuvre, the Romantic interest in ruins and the fragment and the “dream” worlds of the 20th-century Surrealists, as well as the history and practice of archaeology and architecture more generally also predominate. Such is the wide range of imagination and information both captured and evoked in Piranesi’s work.
Born in Mogliano Veneto, Piranesi was Venetian, but his career unfolded almost entirely in Rome. His father was a stonemason and master builder and his mother was the eldest sister of Matteo Lucchesi, a prominent architect and engineer with aristocratic connections. Piranesi was likewise destined to become an architect and apprenticed with his uncle in Venice. There he also learned the craft of stage design, becoming familiar with principles of lighting and how to create dramatic effects through perspective that would come to have such great impact in his work.
Struggling to find work in Venice, Piranesi moved to Rome in the 1740s, where he worked as a draughtsman for Marco Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador of Pope Benedict XIV. He also spent a brief period in the studio of master painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), and trained with Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782) in the art of etching and engraving. Vasi, who specialized in vedute, is said to have told Piranesi, “you are too much of a painter, my friend, to be an engraver,” yet it was precisely this willingness to bend boundaries that would allow Piranesi to become so influential.
Piranesi's first ever publication, Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, appeared in 1743 when the artist-architect was just 23 years old. This fascinating work is a record of the young Piranesi’s first encounter with the antiquities of Rome and of his attempt to capture their immensity in visual form. The collection of plates represent temples, palaces, ruins, and a prison with varied technique ranging from strict linearity to more flowing forms, but the detail is universally immaculate and signals the greatness to come.
“Piranesi's first published work. As such, it is a remarkable production. Granted that some of its thirteen plates are little more than pleasant exercises in a set tradition, others are strikingly inventive, extraordinarily successful in their complex compositions, and remarkably sophisticated in their harmonious technique. Clearly, Piranesi learned and developed further, but the level of the first publication at age twenty-three shows he already had the talent of a genius” (Robinson, p. 12).
Piranesi, Carcere oscura con Antenna pel suplizio dè malfatori... (Dark prison with a courtyard for the punishment of criminals...), from Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive.
See more details about this copy here.
“... a truly extraordinary collection of prints, a publication that demonstrates how quickly and deeply the young artist had absorbed, and in many ways transcended, the graphic and architectural models available to him during the early 1740s.”
Already he was testing the very possibility of accurately rendering his encounters. In the dedicatory pages, Piranesi explained, "These speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying, though I always kept them before my eyes. Therefore having the idea of presenting to the world some of these images, but not hoping for an architect of these times who could effectively execute some of them… there seems to be no recourse than for me or some other modern architect to explain his ideas through his drawings.” At the same time criticizing the lack of achievement and potential for contemporary architecture, the statement speaks to the grandeur of Rome in “the meridian of its splendour” as well as the difficulty faced in translating the sublime ruins for the modern viewer.
The first edition of the Prima Parte was printed in 1743 and comprised thirteen plates in addition to a letter-press dedication. Piranesi did not publish a second part, but in the following years he etched other plates similar to the original ones and revised the entire work. Between 1743 and 1749 six different issues of the first edition appeared on the market. During the 1750s and 1760s Piranesi made a few changes to the plates and, by 1761, when he finally moved to a large house in Strada San Felice, from which he published and sold his prints for the rest of his life, the second edition of the Prima Parte was ready. He then continued to work on the series until his death in 1778, producing eight issues of this second edition. All subsequent editions of the work are posthumous.
We are pleased to be offering a beautiful copy Piranesi’s Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, presented in the second of six editions and the fifth of eight issues, according to Robison. As often happens with copies of the second edition, in the present volume the seventeen plates of the series are followed by other prints taken from different series: four are taken from the Trofei of 1753 (Facciata d'un Gocciolatojo in piano; Parte di una cornice di marmo; Capitello di marmo, il quale co' l'altro; Capitello di marmo nel Palazzo Mattei), and ten from the Opere varie (after 1761): Appartenenze d'antiche terme; Veduta d'uno de' circhi antichi (reduced version of the large frontispiece to vol. III of the Antichità Romane); Ponte trionfale (reduced version of the large frontispiece to vol. I of the Antichità Romane); Braccio di città pensile (reduced version of the large frontispiece to vol. IV of the Antichità Romane); Idea delle antiche vie Appia e Ardeatina (a reduced version of the large frontispiece to vol. II of the Antichità Romane); Ingresso d'un antico ginnasio; Scuola antica architettata alla Egiziana e Greca; Portici tirati d'intorno ad un foro; Rovine d'antichità Egiziana e Greca (upright), and Idea d'un atrio reale (upright).
Piranesi, Idea delle antiche vie Appia e Ardeatina, an imaginative reconstruction of two streets on the outskirts of Ancient Rome. This is a reduced version of the large frontispiece to vol. II of the Antichità Romane, bound here with Piranesi’s Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive.
See more details about this copy here.
It was also not unusual for travellers on the Grand Tour to make up their own collections. In the volume offered here, the Prima Parte is bound with another signal work by Piranesi: a first edition of the complete series of his precious manifesto of historical study of Roman antiquities, Antichità Romane de’ tempi della Repubblica, presented in the first state, in a later issue probably printed in the late 1760s and early 1770s.
The extensive and ambitious Antichità Romane is a testament to Piranesi’s artistic sensibility as well as his deep topographical knowledge of Rome gained through intense, first-hand study over the years. The first volume, presented here as bound with the Prima Parte, is divided in two parts, each opening with its own title page: the first shows Roman antiquities in Rome; the second Roman antiquities outside Rome. In total the series includes thirty etched plates (two titles, a dedication to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari dated 20 July 1748, two plates of inscriptions and index, and twenty-five views); this copy also includes nine etchings taken from other Piranesi works: four from the 1753 edition of the Trofei and ten etchings, printed on five leaves, from a 1760s edition of the Opere varie.
With great skill and finesse, Piranesi balances intricate compositions with a wealth of detail. “From the purely artistic side there is scarcely anything more attractive in Piranesi's work than this early series” (Hind). As with his Vedute, the picturesque is given priority over exactitude. Showing an impressively broad spectrum of buildings, he takes especial liberties with the settings of his structures as well as their size, and he also includes figures to emphasize their grandeur. The images are coupled with detailed explanatory texts in which the artist-archeologist situates the ruins within the broader contemporary context. The series was reprinted around 1765, with the addition of two plates, under the title Alcune vedute di archi trionfali et altri monumenti.
Piranesi, Tempio di Giano (Temple of Janus), from Antichità Romane.
The Antichità Romane represents a cornerstone in the history of classical archaeology, a field that gained popularity following the recent discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It was intended to illustrate Roman construction and ornamental techniques for contemporary designers and their patrons and was published in four volumes comprising over 250 images in total. Originally appearing in 1756, it helped establish Piranesi’s international fame, especially as an antiquarian. The year after its publication, he was elected to the Honorary Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Part of the project was also to establish the uniqueness of Roman architecture and emphasize its Etruscan origins instead of the influence of Greek models. The superiority of Roman versus Grecian archeological heritage was an important issue for Piranesi and one he would return to in his Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani of 1761.
Bound together, the Prima Parte and the Antichità Romane offer a brilliant testament to the growth and importance of Piranesi’s career, highlighting many of the major themes that helped establish the artist-architect’s rightful place in the cultural imagination.
Pietro Labruzzi, Portrait of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1779.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac, “Celebrating Piranesi,” PRPH Books, 7 October 2020, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/piranesi. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.