Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (1720–1778)

PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1720–1778)

PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1720–1778), Venetian architect, engraver, and archaeologist. By means of over a thousand etched plates and his theoretical defense of creative fantasy, Piranesi revolutionized the European perception of Roman antiquity and exerted a major influence on many of the leading architects and designers of European neoclassicism. The son of a stonemason and master builder, he spent his first twenty years in Venice training in architecture and stage design, and was strongly influenced by the local tradition of topographical art represented by Canaletto and the etched fantasies of Marco Ricci (1676–1729) and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770).

Moving in 1740 to Rome, where he spent the larger part of his life, a lack of practical commissions led him to develop skills in etching souvenir views, or vedute, for the grand tour market. As a graphic artist of genius he was to transform the mundane topographical view into a highly sophisticated means of architectural communication—based on a strongly practical understanding of ancient technology—as well as a vehicle of powerful emotional expression. Around 1748 he began to issue his magisterial views of Rome, Vedute di Roma (135 plates), which he published individually, or in groups, throughout the rest of his career. These theatrical images were to generate a highly charged emotional perception of the Eternal City and its environs that has lasted to the present day.

Piranesi's main creative energies were concentrated on developing the architectural fantasy, or capriccio, as a device for formal experiment, creative release, and a stimulus for contemporary architects, whose designs he thought had failed to measure up to the ruined grandeur around them. Such was the intention behind his first publication, Prima parte di architetture e prospettive (1743; Part one of architecture and perspectives) as well as a group of arcane prison compositions, Carceri d'invenzione (c. 1745; Prisons of the imagination). By these means Piranesi was to exercise a seminal influence on visiting artists, architects, and patrons in Rome over the course of nearly four decades. His personal contact with visiting designers such as William Chambers, Robert Mylne, George Dance, John Soane, and, above all, Robert and James Adam, enabled him to exert a critical influence on the development of avant-garde British architecture.

During the 1750s archaeology became increasingly important to Piranesi. His four-volume treatise, Le antichità romane (1756; The antiquities of Rome), pioneered new archaeological methods and techniques of illustration, and its publication quickly won him international recognition; he became a leading protagonist for Rome in the furious controversy provoked by the excessive claims of Hellenic originality by promoters of the Greek revival. With the election of the Venetian Pope Clement XIII (reigned 1758–1769), the 1760s became a golden age of patronage for Piranesi, who won financial support for a series of impressive polemical folios: Della magnificenza ed architettura de' Romani (1761; Concerning the magnificence and architecture of the Romans); Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma ( 1762; The Campus Martius of ancient Rome), and others. In response to criticism by the French critic Pierre-Jean Mariette, in 1765 Piranesi issued the manifesto Parere su l'architettura (Opinions on architecture), which advocated a highly eclectic system of design inspired by ancient Rome in contrast to the radically astringent taste supported by Greek revivalists such as Marc-Antoine Laugier, Julien-David Le Roy, and Johann Winckelmann. Through the pope and members of the Rezzonico family Piranesi received commissions to carry out these ideas in reconstructing the Order of Malta's church in Rome, Santa Maria del Priorato (1764–1765), together with designs for an unexecuted tribune for S. Giovanni in Laterano. He also produced various furnished interiors from which only two tables survive (Minneapolis, Institute of Fine Arts; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), complex marble chimneypieces (such as the one at Burghley House, Lincolnshire), and a pioneering painted Egyptian interior for the English Coffee House in Rome (destroyed in the nineteenth century). Many of these works were to be illustrated in his internationally influential folio, Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini . . . (1769; Various ways of ornamenting chimneypieces . . . ), which illustrated a range of his own designs for interior fittings, furniture, and decorative objects.

His closing years were involved in producing a quantity of imaginatively restored antiquities from excavated fragments, notably represented by large vases and ornamental candelabra primarily for the British market. Ironically, Piranesi's final work, completed and published posthumously by his son Francesco, was a potent contribution to the Greek revival in the form of etchings of the Doric temples at Paestum, south of Naples (1778). Perhaps the ultimate legacy of Piranesi's unique vision of antiquity, however, is represented by the dramatically refashioned plates of the Carceri (2nd state, 1761)—a series of visual metaphors for the endless creative inspiration of the past, which had a profound impact on such leading figures of Romanticism as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Victor Hugo, and which continue to inspire writers and poets as much as artists, architects, and film directors.

See also Art: Art Theory, Criticism, and Historiography ; Rome, Architecture in ; Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette: With Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times. Introduction by John Wilton-Ely. Translated by Caroline Beamish and David Britt. Los Angeles, 2002.

Secondary Sources

Robison, Andrew. Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings. Chicago, 1986.

Wilton-Ely, John. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings. San Francisco, 1994.

——. The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. London and New York, 1978.

——. Piranesi as Architect and Designer. New Haven, 1993.

John Wilton-Ely