Naughty Boy, Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings

 “Naughty Boy, Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings”

Arthur M. Sackler Collection

Avery Architectural Library

Columbia University in the City of New York


“The Colosseum” by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1757. Photograph by R.S. Johnson Fine Art.  


        Naughty boy Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the 18th century Venetian architect and Rake-about-Rome, confined most of his architectural escapades to copper plates rather than to completed works of architecture.  His prints of fantastical Roman architecture, as seen in this current exhibit at the Palace Theatre Art Gallery of important Piranesi drawings and etchings from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection at the Avery Architectural Library of Columbia University, visually introduced innumerable generations of artists and architects to the majesty of antiquity.

 

Excavations in 1738 of the ruins at Herculaneum, and later in 1748 of the ruins at Pompeii, sparked the revived interest in classic art and architecture.  These archaeological discoveries - combined with the popularity of Piranesi's mass-produced  prints - resulted in the Neoclassical movement on the European Continent.  Neoclassicism, in turn, was first chronicled in the scholarly writings of German art and architecture historian Johann Winkelmann.


Visually describing these excavated temples and palaces in his own etchings, Piranesi savagely manipulated the complex interdependencies between light and shade.  His Carceri d'Invenzione, or Prison series begun circa 1745 and reworked in 1761, still capture the imagination of modern man by their uncanny, if not intellectually perverse, relevancies to today's spiritual and sociological imprisonments some might experience within an urban architecture of concrete, steel, and glass or conversely, even the spatial imprisonment of the relentless void of agricultural landscapes.

 

Piranesi's Vedute di Roma, or Views of Rome series, published from 1945 onward, in comparison, aggressively courted an underlying romance and poetry inherent in the surface ruins of classic architecture.  The Castel S. Angelo, first printed in the early 1760s, was one of the 135 etchings of ancient and - at the time, please remember - "modern" Rome.  This visionary rotunda, seemingly, recalls a similar monumental geometry found in the puristic architectural renditions by French Neoclassical architects Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux.  When it gets down to exaggerating the grandeur of classic and baroque Roman architecture, nobody "doux" it better than Piranesi.



Titian Butash

Greenwich, Connecticut


* * *



First published in Greenwich Time, Architecture, June 1985.

Modified November 6, 2024.

© Titian Butash All rights reserved



References

Butash, Titian.  “Roman Fantasies. Naughty Boy, Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings," Architecture, Greenwich Time, May 1985. Edited March 23, 2024.

Greenwich Library, Greenwich Library Archives. Connecticut: Greenwich, 2024.

"Jewels in Her Crown: Treasures of Columbia University Libraries Special Collections." Columbia University Libraries, Butler Library. New York: New York. https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/jewels/about. Accessed October 31, 2024.


Raynor, Vivien. "Art: Piranesi Prints in Stamford and a History of Photos in Norfolk," New York Times, June 23, 1985, Section CN, 11. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/23/nyregion/art-piranesi-prints-in-stamford-and-a-history-of-photos-in-norfolk.html. Accessed November 6, 2024.




Image


Fig. 1  R.S. Johnson Fine Art.  “The Colosseum” by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Vedute di Roma Series, 1757).  N.d., Photographer R.S. Johnson Fine Art.  Public Domain.  Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi,_The_Colosseum.png#file.  

Accessed March 23, 2024.  



Location: Greenwich, CT, USA

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