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 ofĪncient Rome), and others. His four-volume treatise, Le antichit à 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. 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.ĭuring the 1750s archaeology became increasingly important to Piranesi. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. In our time, he has had a direct influence on writers such as Borges and Kafka and on filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway.PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1720 –1778), Venetian architect, engraver, and archaeologist. Indeed, Piranesi could be said to have shaped a whole strain of contemporary architecture, as well as the wider visualization of antiquity itself. In his own day, he was most celebrated for his Vedute, 137 etchings of ancient and modern Rome so renowned were these startling and dramatic chiaroscuro images, imbued with Piranesi's romantic feeling for archaeological ruins, that they formed the mental picture of Rome for generations after. One the greatest architectural artists of all time, and certainly the most famous copper engraver of the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is most known for his terrifyingly original series of etchings of labyrinthine and megalomaniac prisons, Carceri d'Invenzione. The great 18th century architectural artist and master engraver "Piranesi was as savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michelangelo, and exuberant as Rubens he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry and exhaust the Indies to realize." -Horace Walpole
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