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#Piranesi rome etching series

His Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi (1778), includes illustrations of a number of antiquities that he and his son Francesco Piranesi (1758–1810) had restored and installed not only in his own “museo” and showrooms, but also in important Italian collections, and a number of fine British houses.

#Piranesi rome etching series

This series eclipsed earlier views of Roman landmarks by their dramatic presentation which combined imagined scenes with an in-depth understanding of ancient Roman technology. Probably best known for his Vedute di Roma, which Piranesi had begun by 1747, and continued to produce plates for until almost the day of his death in 1778. In 1740, he traveled to Rome where he studied set design with Domenico and Giuseppe Valeriani and engraving with Giuseppe Vasi. He later studied etching and perspective composition in the workshop of Carlo Zucchi. Pursuing an early ambition to become an architect, he was apprenticed to his uncle Matteo Lucchesi, a prominent architect and hydraulic engineer, and then to the Palladian architect Giovanni Scalfurotto. Piranesi, the son of a stonemason, was born in 1720 in the village of Mogliano, near Venice. Foreign and Italian patrons included Pope Clement XIII (1758–69), and he was internationally renowned for his etchings of the scenery and ruins of classical Rome.

John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 40.Venetian architect, draftsman, scholar, archaeologist, and designer, was tremendously influential in the development of neo-classicism.

John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 36.

Wendy Thompson, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2003).

John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 31.

For interior views, see Pietro Santi Bartoli’s etchings of the interior on another page.) (Piranesi’s etchings depict the exterior of the monument. The trees (almost entirely erased from the Antichita) are back with a vengeance, digging their gnarled roots into the ancient structures. The leftmost edge of the Pyramid forms a strong diagonal between the ruins and trees of the bottom right portion and the wide open sky of the top left. The vantage is from roughly the same height as the Antichita, rising from the very bottom to the very top of the plate. He returned to the Vedute sometime before 1760 and radically recut the plate of the Pyramid of Cestius. 5 The Pyramid, now viewed from a low vantage point, rises above the viewer almost dizzyingly, grazing the top of the plate. 4 He flexes his engineering training (which he received from his uncle, an engineer for the Venetian waterworks) to produce something more like an archaeological illustration, with a sharp focus and higher level of detail than the Vedute. Piranesi was seeing the Pyramid as both artist and archaeologist when he returned to it again in 1756 for the Antichita Romane portfolio.

Wilton-Ely calls this a "factual statement of exaggerated force." 3

The surface is cleared of vegetation in order for the edges and inscriptions to be more visible. 2 His depictions of light become more painterly and descriptive. 1 His Vedute di Roma (editions from 1751 until his death in 1778) plates were much larger than the Varie Vedute, allowing for greater detail and Piranesi's expression of the monumentality of Rome's public spaces. The top of the pyramid rises up and over the top edge of the plate in an illusionistic manner. In the 1745 portfolio Varie Vedute, Piranesi begins to depart from the more traditional style of his master of the previous five years, printmaker Giuseppe Vasi.