| Giovanni Battista Piranesi |
Article Index for Giovanni Battista |
Website Links For Giovanni Battista |
Information AboutGiovanni Battista Piranesi |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI | |
| 1720 births | |
| 1778 deaths | |
| people from the province of treviso | |
| ancient roman architecture | |
| italian etchers | |
| italian sculptors | |
| impossible objects | |
|
]] 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. as it appeared in the 18th century.]] 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:
The style of Piranesi was imitated by 20th-century forger Eric Hebborn . 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'', 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). REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|