Giovanni Battista Piranesi
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Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista) Piranesi (4 October 1720 - 9 November 1778) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" (Carceri d'Invenzione).
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[edit] Biography
Piranesi was born in in Mogliano Veneto, near Treviso, then part of the Republic of Venice. His brother Andrea introduced him to Latin and the ancient civilisation, and later he studied as architect under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, who was Magistrato delle Acque, a Venetian engineer specialized with excavations
From 1740 he was in Rome with Marco Foscarini, the Venetian envoy to the Vatican. He resided in the Palazzo Venezia and studied with Giuseppe Vasi, who introduced him to the art of etching and engraving. After his breakout from Vasi, he collaborated with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to a series of vedute of the city; his first work was Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), followed in 1745 by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna.
From 1743 to 1747 he sojourned mainly in Venice were, according to some sources, he frequented Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Then he returned to Rome, where he opened a workshop in Via del Corso. In 1748-1774 he created a long series of vedute of the city which established his fame. In the meantime Piranesi devoted himself to the measurement of much of the ancient edifices: this led to the publication of Antichità Romane de' tempo della prima Repubblica e dei primi imperatori ("Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic and the First Emperors". In 1761 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing facility of his own. In 1762 the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma collection of engravings was printed.
The following year he was commissioned by Pope Clement XIII to restore the choir of San Giovanni in Laterano, but it did not materialize. In 1764 Piranesi started his sole architectural works of importance, the restoration of the church of Santa Maria del Priorato in the Villa of the Knights of Malta in Rome, where he was buried after his death.
In 1767 he was created knight of the Papal States. In 1777-78 Piranesi published Different vues de Pesto, a collection of vedute of Paestum.
He died in Rome in 1778 after a long illness.
[edit] The Vedute
The remains of Rome kindled Piranesi's enthusiasm. 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.
[edit] 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 and Belloto, 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”. For the second publishing in 1761, all the etchings were reworked and numbered I - XVI (1-16). Numbers II and V were novel etchings to the series. 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 Rack
- 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. ..."
An in-depth analysis of Piranesi's "Carceri" was written by Marguerite Yourcenar in her Dark Brain of Piranesi (1979). Further discussion of Piranesi and the "Carceri" can be found in The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi by John Wilton-Ely (1978). The style of Piranesi was imitated by 20th-century forger Eric Hebborn.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Ficacci, L. (2000). Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings.
- Focillon, Henri (1918). Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Essai de catalogue raisonné de son oeuvre.
- Hofer, P., 1973. The Prisons (Le Carceri) - The complete first and second states.
- Miller, N. (1978). Archäologie des Traums. Versuch über Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
- Tafuri, Manfredo (1986). La sfera e il labirinto : Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70. Turin: Giulio Einaudi.
- Wilton-Ely, J. (1978). The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. London: Thames & Hudson.
- Wilton-Ely, J. (1994). Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings - an Illustrated Catalogue. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts publications.
[edit] External links
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