Piranesi
NAME:
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Stimulated interest in antiquity with his drawings of classical ruins
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
Also known as Giambattista Piranesi
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
4 October 1720, Mogliano, near Mestre, Venice, Italy
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
9 November 1778, Rome, Italy. Aged 68
DISCIPLINE:
Draughtsman, printmaker, architect
FIELD:
Archeology, Neo-Classicism
LANGUAGE:
Italian
PARENTS:
Father:
Mother:
SIBLINGS:
SPOUSE:
CHILDREN:
EDUCATION:
MAJOR WORK: Vedute di Roma (1748-1778)
LIFE AND TIMES:
In 1740 Piranesi went to Rome as draughtsman in the retinue of the Venetian ambassador. In 1743 he published twelve etchings designed as a prospectus for his skills as an architect. Entitled “Prima parte di architecttura e prospettive”, the etchings were a dazzling display of perspective drawing and they also show how the majestic ruins and fragments of antiquity in Rome stimulated his imagination.
Piranesi returned to Venice in 1744. His surviving work from the next year include a design for a ceremonial gondola, exuberantly decorated with shells, sea foam and dolphins, and his “Grotteschi” drawings. The latter are fantastical works mixing scenes of festivity with crumbling antiques and bones.
In 1745 Piranesi returned to Rome. His father had stopped paying him an allowance and he took a job as agent for a Venetian print seller. The sale of prints to foreign tourists was a profitable business and Piranesi now began working as a topographical artist. He produced a series of almost fifty small etchings of famous Roman sights, both ancient and modern, which were bound into guide books, and by 1748 had begun his celebrated series, “Vedute di Roma” (“Views of Rome”).
They made Piranesi sought-after because they were more appealing, larger and more accurate representations of Roman buildings than other work on sale. Around this time he published the first edition of his ‘prison’ etchings, which are now among his best-known works. They depict nightmare scenes of places of incarceration, full of gruesome details such as decapitated heads, broken chains, cages, spikes, knotted ropes and instruments of torture.
During the 1750’s Piranesi became one of the most prominent archeologists and antiquarians in Rome and was regarded as something of a guru by foreign visitors. He was introduced by the French artist <a pal of> Clerisseau* to the English architect <taught> Adam* with whom he went on drawing expeditions to archeological excavation sites.
In 1756 Piranesi published the four volumes of drawings entitled “Antichita romane” (“Roman Antiquities”). These, together with the views of the Tivoli gardens in “Vedute di Roma”, are among his finest works and are one of the great artistic achievements of the eighteenth century. They were complex, atmospheric and informed. It was the prints rather than the explanatory texts for which Piranesi’s work was prized and he probably had help with the text from one of his scholarly friends such as the German antiquarian <a pal of> Winckelmann*.
In 1761 Piranesi published “Della magnificenza ed architettura de’Romani” in which he attacked the view that Greek architecture was the purest example of true classicism and that the Romans had debased classicism with too much ornamentation. Winckelmann was the arch proponent of this view, current among most scholars and widely held across Europe, particularly in France. Piranesi passionately defended Roman architecture, declared that the ancients themselves had departed from the rules.
In his rejection of a rigid concept of classicism that could deaden creativity, Piranesi acted as a liberator and a stimulant to the English architects Adam and <influenced> Dance*. In the 1760’s, he directed the rebuilding of Santa Maria del Priorato, the church of the Knights of Malta on the Aventine Hill, Rome. Its interior is full of drama and invention and the church has been described as being one of “last full-blooded baroque buildings of the eighteenth-century.”
Piranesi very rarely bothered to draw anything to do with the human figure, such as busts, statues and narrative freizes, and it has been noted that he must have been the only artist among the many who drew ancient ruins who did not add human figures resting in the shade of the ruins.
Many of his drawings reveal his background and early training in hydraulic engineering and stone masonry. He produced a study of Roman aqueducts and plumbing, and was fascinated by tunnels. The Romans had built a tunnel through a volcanic outcrop by Lake Albano to lower the lake’s level. Piranesi interrogated local peasants and bribed fishermen to go into the tunnel until he had enough knowledge to reconstruct the entire structure.
In his later years, Piranesi was marginally involved in the shadier side of antiquarian life. The interest in antiquities had been fostered the work of scholars and collectors such as <influenced> Caylus* and the English in particular were avid collectors. Piranesi was involved as a speculator in excavations, as a dealer, restorer, and - it has been suggested - probably as a forger. Piranesi’s last work was series of etchings of the ruins of the Greek Doric temples at Paestum.
ASSESSMENT: Piranesi was one of the foremost artist-engravers of the eighteenth century who played a large role in the Neo-Classical movement.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He met <met> William Chambers* in Rome
ONELINER: GB Piranesi, first etcher of Roman ruins
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Penny, Nicholas, Piranesi, Oresko Books Ltd., London, 1978
Wilton-Ely, John, Piranesi, as Architect and Designer, Yale University Press, London, 1993