Piranesi's "Views of Rome"
Piranesi's "Views of Rome"
In his Views of Rome (Vedute di Roma), a series of copperplate
engravings, the artist, architect, author, and antiquarian Giovanni
Battista Piranesi (1720 – 1778) portrayed the monuments of the Eternal
City and its environs not just with precision and splendor, but as part
of a living landscape. In Piranesi’s prints, aristocrats saunter, women
hang laundry, and peasants water their livestock among the city’s
ancient ruins and Baroque buildings. The quotidian life of
eighteenth-century Rome is vividly portrayed against a backdrop of
atmospheric, often-decaying grandeur. The Views also preserve
for posterity a Rome now lost, for many of the monuments Piranesi
portrayed have since vanished. A savvy entrepreneur, the artist sold
prints of his Views individually and published them in multiple
editions; immensely popular in his lifetime, they have continued to win
admirers since.
Drawing on a gift made by Carl R. Ganter, Class of 1899, to fund new
library acquisitions, Kenyon College purchased from the London
bookseller Bernard Quaritch in August, 1945 for $208.00 a massive (55 x
81 cm) two-volume edition of Views of Rome published in Paris
between 1800 and 1807, after the artist’s death, by his sons Francesco
and Pietro (Hind 33). This was the first edition to appear after the
dramatic recovery of Piranesi’s original copperplates, which together
with other valuable objects had been looted from the family’s palazzo in
Rome by soldiers from the Kingdom of Naples in 1799 and recovered by a
British warship that had intercepted a Neapolitan vessel ferrying the
booty (Minor 193). Kenyon’s copy of the Paris edition, like many later
editions of the Views, is bound with an enormous fold-out map of
Rome and the Campus Martius (Pianta di Roma e del Campo Marzio)
originally published in 1788 or 1789 (Hind 87).
Browse Piranese by volume:
No comments:
Post a Comment