Giovanni Battista Piranesi
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Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista) Piranesi (4th October 1720 in Mogliano Veneto (near Treviso) - 9th November 1778 in Rome) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" {Carceri d'Invenzione).
Piranesi studied his art in Rome, where the remains of that city kindled his enthusiasm and demanded portrayal. His hand faithfully imitated the actual remains of a fabric; his invention, catching the design of the original architect, supplied the missing parts; his masterful skill at engraving introduced groups of vases, altars, tombs; and his broad and scientific distribution of light and shade completed the picture, and threw a striking effect over the whole. Some of his later work was completed by his children and several pupils.
Piranesi's son and coadjutor, Francesco, collected and preserved his plates, in which the freer lines of the etching-needle largely supplemented the severity of burin work. Twenty nine folio volumes containing about 2000 prints appeared in Paris (1835 - 1837). The late Baroque works of Claude Lorrain, Salvatore Rosa, and others had featured romantic and fantastic depictions of ruins; in part as a memento mori or as a reminiscence of a golden age of construction. His reproductions of real and recreated Roman ruins were a strong influence on Neoclassicism.
The prisons (Carceri)
The "prisons" (Carceri d'invenzione), or known as the single Italian word for prisons - carceri, are a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states, which show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines. These in turn influenced Romanticism and Surrealism. While vedutista such as Canaletto, Belloto, and others reveled in the beauty of place, in Piranesi, this vision takes a Kafkaesque, Escher-like distortion, seemingly erecting marvelous and gargantuan structures, epic in volume, but empty of purpose.
The first state was published in 1745 and consisted of 14 etchings. The original prints were 16” x 21”. In the second publishing in 1761, all of the etchings were reworked and numbered in roman numerals from I - XVI (1-16). Numbers II and V were new ones which were introduced in the second edition. Numbers I through IX were all done as portraits (taller than they are wide), while X to XVI were landscapes (wider than they are high). The works are:
- I - title plate
- II - The Man on the Rock
- III - The Round Tower
- IV - The Grand Piazza
- V - The Lion Bas-Reliefs
- VI - The Smoking Fire
- VII - The Drawbridge
- VIII - The Staircase with Trophies
- IX - The Giant Wheel
- X - Prisoners on a Projecting Platform
- XI - The Arch with a shell ornament
- XII - The sawhorse
- XIII - The well
- XIV - The Gothic Arch
- XV - The Pier with a lamp
- XVI - The Pier with Chains
Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1820) wrote the following:
- Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. ... But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. ...
References
- Hofer, P. 1973. 'The Prisons (Le Carceri) The complete first and second states', Dover publications inc, New York.
- Wilton-Ely, J. 1978. 'The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi', Thames & Hudson, London.
- Wilton-Ely, J. 1994. 'Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings - an Illustrated Catalogue, Vols. 1 & 2' Alan Wofsy Fine Arts publications, San Francisco.
External links
- [Etchings of Piranesi]
- [Prisons of the Imagination – images from the exhibition]
- [Antichita Romanae (1748)]
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