Back to Blog
Hotel piranesi in rome5/21/2023 It is the work of Giovanni Paolo Panini, the influential professor of perspective at the French Academy, teacher of Robert and until Piranesi's arrival, the leading producer of vedute. The intricacies of this ''network'' are indicated by a large architectural drawing, and its label, just inside the exhibition's entrance. Nonetheless, it outlines the versatility of his talent and the breadth of his interests, placing them against an almost unbelievably rich backdrop that includes works by such Roman visitors as Jean Honore Fragonard, Hubert Robert and Robert Adam, as well as references to both a bustling French Academy and a booming art market wherein the purchase of newly excavated antiquities went hand in hand with the patronage of living vedutiste. In fact, it barely scratches the surface of Piranesi's oeuvre. ![]() Containing only about 100 drawings, prints, illustrated books and some artist's sketchbooks drawn largely from the Morgan's own collection, this exhibition is not comprehensive. ''Exploring Rome: Piranesi and His Contemporaries,'' a new exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, pays modest tribute to this dialogue and to a graphical genius who flourished in the gap between fact and fiction, past and present and the launching pads of both Romanticism and Neo-Classicism. Arriving in Rome in 1740, the 20-year-old Piranesi immediately undertook a thorough exploration of the city's architectural riches and its ''speaking ruins,'' as he called them, establishing a dialogue that would become the basis of his life's work. The stars of the contemporary Venetian firmament included Tiepolo, Canaletto and Ferdinando Bibiena, the theatrical designer who invented multiple-point perspective, which Piranesi would later put to famous use. He was instilled with an admiration for the architecture of Andrea Palladio, as well as the waterworks of Classical Rome. The son of a Venetian stonemason, and trained in both architecture and set design during Venice's second golden age, Piranesi was well prepared for this achievement. His magnificent etchings, published in illustrated books, broadcast the glories of Rome, both as they were and as they might have been, throughout Europe. In an often-quoted passage from his 1765 ''Anecdotes of Painting in England,'' Horace Walpole advises artists to ''study the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendor.''īy that time, Piranesi had elevated the medium of the veduta, or topographical rendering, and its imaginary counterparts, the veduta ideate and the even more fanciful capriccio, to the level of high art. ![]() No one understood the spell of Rome as profoundly as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, nor recast that spell so imaginatively. The air was hot with debates about the relative superiority of Rome or Greece, and new discoveries, like those at Pompeii, Paestum and Herculaneum, gripped educated imaginations everywhere. After nearly a three-century lull, the excavation of the ancient city had resumed in earnest, and the sense of its rich and anarchic mix of architectural time and space -Classical, Renaissance and Baroque - was beginning to cast its deepest spell.Īrcheology, not yet a clear-cut discipline, was a site of creativity and controversy occupied by scholars, artists, architects and ardent collectors alike. The glory that was ancient Rome was the rage of Europe in the 18th century.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |