PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. - Architect and engraver, b. at Mojano di Mestre on 4 Oct. 1720, d. at Rome on 9 Nov. 1778.
He initiated certain aspects of neoclassical taste in Rome, both as an architect and as a student of the decorative forms of Roman art, which later became the basis of the so-called Empire style; but through the fantastic luminism and picturesque colorism of his impassioned evocations of ancient, Renaissance and Baroque Rome, he holds the foremost place among the vedutisti of the 18th century and seems to anticipate the Romantic spirit. Trained in the Neo-Palladian milieu of Venice, he went to Rome in 1740 as a draughtsman for the Venetian embassy and began to devote himself to engraving; but his formation received its definitive seal in the study of the scenographic engravings of F. Gaspari and M. Ricci in Venice, in the vision of Tiepolo's Capricci and the etchings of Rembrandt and Castiglione, from which he drew that easy fluency of line that was lacking in his first published engravings: Prima parte di architetture e di prospettive (Rome 1743). Having returned to Rome, he immediately devoted himself to his most singular work, the Invenzioni capricciose di carceri (1745), in which the architect and the poet join hands in an extraordinary creation of constructive science and fantastic invention. Shortly thereafter he published the Antichità romane dei tempi della Repubblica e de' primi Imperatori (1748), which, alongside some engravings by others, contain, expressed in rapid etchings, his travel recollections. Meanwhile he was working on a monumental work, Le antichità romane (4 vols., 1756, with 216 plates), of which the Rovine del Castello dell'acqua Giulia (1771), the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, and the Descrizione e disegno dell'emissario del Lago Albano (1762) are but the continuation; and the Vedute di Roma, on which he worked from 1748 (2 vols., 1778), the completion. In these engravings there appears the Rome of his dream in the imposing ruins of the Roman era and in the monuments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, transfigured by his imagination into a moving evocation of grandeur, with gigantic wings in the foreground and vertiginous perspective vistas.
The work of P., historian and polemicist, is astonishing for the acuteness and modernity of its intuitions. In Della magnificenza ed antichità de' Romani (1761, with 49 plates) and in Osservazioni... sopra la lettera di M. Mariette (1764), he upholds the originality of Roman architecture as against Greek and seeks to define the distinctive characteristics of each. In his last years he made the decorative forms of Roman art a particular object of study: Diverse maniere d'adornare i camini (1769); Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, trofei, tripodi, lucerne ed antichi ornamenti (1778), which contributed to the formation of the taste for neoclassical decoration. Also worthy of note is the Raccolta di alcuni disegni del Barbieri da Cento detto il Guercino (1764).
P. completed only one work of architecture: the reorganization of S. Maria del Priorato of the Order of Malta on the Aventine, which was entrusted to him in 1765 by Cardinal Rezzonico. The moderate and harmonious proportions, the clear partitioning of spaces both outside and inside, rich in festoons and figured bas-reliefs, assert themselves with the first expressions of neoclassical taste in Rome, as do the piazza and the entrance of the Villa dei Cavalieri with its classical trophies, alternating with the smooth panels of the parapet. The publication of his collections was continued by his son FRANCESCO (b. at Rome in 1758 or 59, d. at Paris on 27 Jan. 1810), who also attended to the engraving of the unpublished drawings and, having moved to Paris at the end of the 1700s, established there the Chalcographie des P. frères, with a school of engraving and a factory of terracottas that had an intense and active life.
Bibliography16 works
Amalia Mezzetti