![]() The definitive twenty-one-volume roster of important print artists, Adam Bartsch’s Le Peintre-Graveur (1803–1821), ignored him. Preceding the dark vaults and pointless bridges of the Carceri were the first of the Vedute di Roma ( Views of Rome, 1745–1778) that were sold in volume to travelers on the Grand Tour and defined the popular image of Rome for generations: the theatrical slanting light, the grandiosity, the squalor.īut just as the architectural establishment, bewildered by Piranesi’s effervescent schemes, treated him as a crank (the architect Luigi Vanvitelli called him a “lunatic”), print connoisseurs, put off in part by his entrepreneurial success, dismissed him as a hack. His prints, in the meantime, made him famous. When he took up printmaking, it was to make ends meet, and his elaborate title pages announced the authorship of “Giambattista Piranesi, Venetian Architect,” but he died with just one significant architectural project to his name. ![]() The actual Piranesi was born in the Veneto in 1720 and went to Rome at the age of nineteen with the dream of becoming an architect. And throughout the two centuries that followed, Giovanni Battista Piranesi the person and Piranesi the tormented trope have shared space in the world like a badly executed hologram: never invisible, never quite clear. And so on, until the unfinished stairs and the hopeless Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.ĭe Quincey never claimed to have seen the etching in question-he was riffing on hearsay from Coleridge-so our compassion is being called into play for an imaginary figure in an imaginary prison in an imaginary etching. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived…. You perceived a staircase and upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself…. “Creeping along the sides of the walls,” De Quincey wrote, He wasn’t worried about the real Piranesi, long dead by then he was considering the plight of an etched figure he understood to be Piranesi in one of the artist’s Carceri d’invenzione ( Imaginary Prisons). 5.“Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi,” mused Thomas De Quincey in his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Jones, Fake? The Art of Deception (London 1990), p. Scott, "Some sculpture from Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli", in: Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria: gli antecedenti e il contesto (Rome 1983), 339-355. Oddy (ed.) The Art of the Conservator (London 1992), 122-136. Opper, "Glory of Rome restored", British Museum Magazine 51 (Spring 2005), 38-40.Į. The dionysiac theme of the vase was taken up elsewhere in the house, for example the dining room, with its wall paintings of Bacchus and his consorts. The diary of a Dutch tourist mentions it in the Piranesi workshop in that year.īoyd displayed the vase at his country seat Danson House (Bexley), a neo-palladian mansion surrounded by landscaped grounds. The vase was acquired by the wealthy West Indies proprietor and director of the East India Company, Sir John Boyd, on his Grand Tour of Italy in 1776. The configuration of the support of the vase is made up of a variety of unrelated ancient fragments supplemented by matching modern parts. The scene is fully preserved on a Roman Altar in Naples that in the 18th century was in the collection of the Prince of Francavilla and illustrated in Montfaucon's Recueil d'Antiquites of 1757. However, the frieze is in fact a most skillful and painstaikingly accurate restoration of numerous original fragments representing satyrs at vintage. In modern literature, the Piranesi Vase is mostly considered an elaborate pastiche. This is underlined by the fact that both vases were represented by three plates each in the 1778 compilation of Vasi, Candelabri e Cippi. Curator's comments Together with the so-called Warwick Vase, the Boyd or Piranesi Vase ranks among the most ambitious restoration projects of the Piranesi workshop.
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