9/10/2023 0 Comments Piranesi drawings analyzedThis enormous appreciation had its epicentre in Rome where the local art marked, influenced by the collecting interests associated with the Grand Tour, polarized its activity on the rediscovery of the Eternal City’s old ruins which were not seen any more as ordinary/quaint elements of the landscape but instead as specific and autonomous entities characterized by a powerful, evocative potential. Therefore, restoring Piranesi, his arguments, executed works and drawings to architectural history appear as a necessity.ĭuring the seventeenth century the fascination of ruins had an irresistible impact throughout Europe thanks to the Grand Tour, the new archaeological discoveries and the tireless work of painters and engravers who, with their art, reproduced the beauty of the ancient world. However, most of these evaluations lack a stable historical base. Piranesi’s perception caused him to be described as madman or idiosyncratic. Thus Piranesi placed Romans in another aesthetical category which the eighteenth century called ‘the sublime’. Secondly, he distinguished Roman from Grecian architecture identified with ‘ingenious beauty’. Concerning origins, he developed a history of architecture not based on the East/West division, and supported this by the argument that Roman architecture depended on Etruscans which was rooted in Egypt. Piranesi, however, conceived of these two debates as one interrelated topic. He has thus been excluded from the ‘story’ of the progress of western architectural history. Both of these served the identification of Piranesi as ‘unclassifiable’. The former interpretation derived from Piranesi’s position on aesthetics, the latter from his argument concerning origins. The second is the mode of codification of architectural history. The vectors of approach yielding misinterpretation of Piranesi derived from two phenomena: one is the early nineteenth-century Romanticist reception of Piranesi’s character and work. But Piranesi was misinterpreted both in his day and posthumously. He is numbered foremost among the founders of modern archaeology. He posited crucial theses in the debates on the ‘origins of architecture’ and ‘aesthetics’. "Invenzioni capric di carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)," Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 153.ġ7Marchesano, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” 151.In the architectural, historical, and archaeological context of the eighteenth century, Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) played an important role. 17ġ4Lucchi, Lowe, Pavanello, The arts of Piranesi, 125.ġ5Marchesano, Louis. The prisons of I Carceri stand out as one of his major achievements. For example, in Italy, a popular representation of the sublime involved depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting, a terrific and devastating event. The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice.
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