Piranesi antiques series#

The suite, which were purchased at auction in 1817, has never been seen outside of Soane’s museum in London until this exhibition, which will be making its sole stop on the West Coast at the Cantor. The drawings are in the collection of British Neoclassical architect and major Piranesi fan Sir John Soane, who acquired much of the Italian artist’s work during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The exhibition “Piranesi’s Paestum: Master Drawings Uncovered” is currently at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University (through January 4), showcasing a set of 15 drawings completed by Piranesi in 1777, the year before his death. Towards the end of his career, he turned his focus toward restoring antiquities. His designs for the latter, which are still viewable today, combined Roman and Etruscan influences, an example of Piranesi’s grab-bag style, which drew from the constructions of the ancient Romans, their Umbrian ancestors, the Greeks, and even the Egyptians. The 1760s saw folios commissioned by the Venetian pope, Clement XIII Rezzonico, as well the design for an unrealized tribune for San Giovanni in Laterano and the reconstruction of the Santa Maria del Priorato Church in Rome between 17. Piranesi’s treatise, a veritable Vitruvian-level architectural manual, helped shed light on the era of Greek Revival among architects and designers.

Piranesi antiques series#

Le Antichità Romane, a four-volume, 250-plate series produced in 1756 highlighted the decorative and technical elements of ancient Roman architecture. Vedute di Roma, a series of 135 plates depicting notable Roman architectural sites such as the Arch of Constantine, the Arch of Septimius Severus, and the Pantheon, was an ongoing project Piranesi began in 1748. Piranesi’s oeuvre also had a heavy dose of reality. De Quincey insists on the intensely personal nature of the plates, so much so that he writes, “Creeping along the side of the walls, you perceived a staircase and upon it, groping his way upwards was Piranesi himself.” In Thomas De Quincey’s 1820 autobiographical work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the writer, who certainly had consciousness-altering experiences on the brain, describes the works as a record of Piranesi’s visions while hallucinating during a fever. The labyrinthine settings, replete with winding stairways and cruel contraptions, were reprinted in 1761 and numbered I–XVI, with an addition of two more. Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione, or prison fantasies, were first published as a series of 14 etchings in 1750. The design proves to be both highly technical and fanciful at the same time.

The vantage point from which Piranesi renders the bridge is complicated, with the viewer forced to look through an anchoring arch on the side of the bridge in order to see the main path of the structure. Complete with loggias and arches, the Ponte Magnifico, a plate in the volume, held the story that it was erected by some imagined Roman emperor of unknown lineage, bearing his equestrian statue.

The plates of his first publication, Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettive, printed in 1743, were occupied with capricci, works of architectural fantasy and efforts to solve architectural problems. The creation of “unreal cities” moved him, and as he studied ancient structures, he drew buildings and architectural features purely out of his own mind. He would become an important figure to the Neoclassicists, known for his topographical engravings, of which he completed over 1,000 unique examples in his lifetime. After he moved to Rome in 1740, the dearth of practical architecture jobs led him to the tourism market, selling high-end souvenir etchings to the Grand Tour set. Born in 1720, the son of a stonemason and master builder, he spent 20 years training in architecture and stage design.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s imagination was captivated by fantastic spaces. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Paestum, Italy: Interior of the Basilica, from the West, 1777, pencil, brown and grey washes, pen and ink. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Paestum, Italy: Interior of the Temple of Neptune from the West, 1777, black chalk, pencil, brown and grey washes, pen and ink Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Temple of Neptune, View of the Interior from the West, 1777, black chalk, pencil, brown and grey washes, pen and ink.