PIRANESI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. — Architect and engraver, b. at Mojano di Mestre on 4 October 1720, d. at Rome on 9 November 1778.
He anticipates 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 because of the fantastic luminism and picturesque colouring of his passionate evocations of ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque Rome, he occupies first place among the eighteenth-century view painters and seems to anticipate the Romantic spirit. Formed 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 training received its definitive stamp from the study of the scenographic engravings of F. Gaspari and M. Ricci in Venice; from his viewing of Tiepolo’s Capricci and the etchings of Rembrandt and Castiglione, from whom he acquired that effortless speed of line which was lacking in his first published engravings: Prima parte di architetture e di prospettive (Rome 1743). On returning 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, rendered in rapid etchings, his travel memories. 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 only continuations; while the Vedute di Roma, to which he devoted himself from 1748 (2 vols., 1778), completed II. These engravings present the Rome of his dream in the imposing ruins of the Roman period and in the monuments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, transfigured by his imagination into a moving evocation of greatness, with gigantic foreground wings and dizzying flights of perspective.
The work of P., historian and polemicist, is astonishing for the acuity and modernity of its insights. In Della magnificenza ed antichità de' Romani (1761, with 49 plates) and in Osservazioni... sopra la lettera di M. Mariette (1764), he maintains the originality of Roman architecture in relation to Greek architecture and seeks to define the distinctive characteristics of each. In his final years he devoted particular study to the decorative forms of Roman art: Diverse maniere d'adornare i camini (1769); Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, trofei, tripodi, lucerne ed antichi ornamenti (1778), which contributed to the formation of Neoclassical decorative taste. Also worthy of mention is the Raccolta di alcuni disegni del Barbieri da Cento detto il Guercino (1764).
P. completed only one architectural work: the reordering of S. Maria del Priorato of the Order of Malta on the Aventine, entrusted to him in 1765 by Cardinal Rezzonico. The moderate and harmonious proportions, the clear division of the spaces on the exterior and interior, rich in figured festoons and bas-reliefs, assert themselves as the first expressions of Neoclassical taste in Rome, as do the square and 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. in Rome in 1758 or 1759, d. in Paris on 27 January 1810), who also undertook 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 terracotta manufactory that enjoyed an intense and active existence.