Piranesi in Rome
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (4 October 1720 - 9 November 1778) was a Venetian, born in Mogliano Veneto, but it was in Rome that he claimed his place as the greatest printmaker of the eighteenth century. 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 vedutist Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782) in the art of etching and engraving. He nevertheless always considered himself an architect, and it was in the construction of Rome, present but especially past, that he found his greatest inspiration, as he later wrote:
When I saw in Rome how most of the remains of ancient buildings lay scattered through gardens and ploughed fields where they dwindled day by day, either weathering away, or being quarried into to steal fragments for new buildings, I resolved to preserve them by means of engravings. I have therefore drawn these ruins with all possible exquisiteness. (quoted in A. H. Mayor, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, New York 1952, p. 8)
Piranesi's first ever publication, Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, appeared in 1743 when he was just 23 years old. This fascinating work is a record of the young artist-architect’s first encounter with the antiquities of Rome and of his attempt to capture their immensity in visual form. The collection of plates of temples, palaces, ruins, and a prison are rendered with varied technique ranging from strict linearity to more flowing forms, but the detail is universally immaculate and signals the greatness to come.
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.
Read more about this copy here.
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 he 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.
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.
Read more about this copy here.
It was also not unusual for travellers on the Grand Tour to make up their own collections, and 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. 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). 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 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. 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.
In the meantime, he had begun working prodigiously on what would be his most famous series, Le Vedute di Roma, which he took up in 1747 and continued to create plates for until his death. City and landscape views known as vedute were especially popular in the eighteenth century as travellers on the Grand Tour sought to commemorate their travels and prove their prestige with representations of prominent cultural sites they had visited on their journey. Rome was among the most important stops on the Grand Tour, and many artists sought to provide its wealthy visitors with monumental souvenirs of its many cultural delights, though Piranesi’s views outranked them all.
These highly original, dynamic compositions often play with perspective and dramatic lighting contrasts to aggrandize the landmarks of contemporary and Ancient Rome. A fine example is his Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo. Here Piranesi presents the group of buildings responsible for housing different branches of the papal bureaucracy, explained in a key provided by the artist on either side of the title. A manipulation of two-point perspective allows the composition to highlight the concentration of papal power within the square, now known as the Piazza del Quirinale, but the focus above all is on the colossal sculptures in the centre, which provide the title for the etching as well as, at this point, that of the piazza. Piranesi informs the viewer that these two statues represent Alexander the Great taming his horse Bucephalus, and he attributes their creation to the famous ancient Greek artists Phidias, the main designer of the Parthenon. The veneration of ancient architecture is furthered with a host of ancient fragments in the foreground and fantastic rays of sunshine stretching into the sky in the background.
Piranesi. Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo (View of the Piazza del Quirinale with the Statues of Horse Tamers in side view), from Vedute di Roma.
Etching, ca. 1748–60, 395x545 mm. Third state (of six). Printed on thick Roman laid paper, untrimmed.
While modern architecture serves more of a backdrop for ancient sculpture in the Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo, in the second of two views of the Trevi Fountain it is the latter modern endeavour that takes centre stage. Here that most ambitious of the Baroque fountains of Rome, designed by Roman architect Nicola Salvi (1697-1751), Piranesi’s friend as well as a fellow member of the Accademia degli Arcadi is magnificently enlivened, bursting forth from the ancient grounds of the Eternal City. Shadows pervade over the figures in the foreground, keeping the light focused on the elaborate fountain and the masterful feat of hydraulics that allows it to channel water from the ancient Acqua Vergine aqueduct into the small square. Owing to the particularly cramped setting, Piranesi used an elevated perspective to present the structure, further aggrandizing it within its urban context.
Piranesi, Veduta in prospettiva della gran Fontana dell’Acqua Vergine detta di Trevi Architettura di Nicola Salvi (Perspective View of the Large Fountain of the Acqua Virgine, called the Trevi Fountain Architecture by Nicola Salvi), from Vedute di Roma.
Etching, ca. 1773, 475x705 mm. First state (of three).
Piranesi’s Vedute were an instant success and quickly established the artist’s reputation, while their dramatic renderings did much to shape cultural understanding of Rome and 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.
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 presents dramatic amalgamations of space with arches, vaults, and stairways that lead nowhere or everywhere through convolutions of perspective and warped scales, making for dark and mysteriously labyrinthine “places.”
Piranesi, The Arch with a Shell Ornament, from Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). Rome, [Bouchard], (c.1750).
Etching, ca. 1749-50. 405x545 mm. First state (of seven, per Robinson; of three, per Hind).
Like the Vedute, Piranesi continued working on the series. This first state of The Arch with a Shell Ornament presents a wonderfully “simplified” version of the famous plate, since the composition was later extensively altered. Here the relative simplicity of the composition underlines the daring originality of Piranesi’s vision, which from the start shows a great willingness to move beyond what might be expected.
Piranesi’s legacy is, however, hardly limited to the dark chambers of the Gothic novel, visions of Rome, or the antiquarian quest for knowledge and preservation. Among the many notable courses of influence one can trace from his prodigious oeuvre, the Romantic interest in ruins and the fragment, the “dream” worlds of the twentieth-century Surrealists, and the history and practice of archaeology and architecture more generally, all predominate. Such is the wide range of imagination and information both captured and evoked in Piranesi’s work.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article was published on 7 October 2020.
How to cite this information
Julia Stimac, “Piranesi in Rome,” PRPH Books, 11 May 2022, www.prphbooks.com/blog/piranesi-in-rome. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.