10/29/2022 0 Comments Piranesi prison![]() ![]() ![]() Piranesi’s are pictures of the ways those ruined places feel. 1), if ruins’ realities are less dramatic than this artist has them appear, there is, in his views, an unerring emotional accuracy. ![]() Why are Piranesi’s etchings so powerful? If the ruins are not quite so immense as he portrays them, nor the people quite so tiny, poignantly approaching insignificance (fig. When we think of 18 th century Italian architectural graphic art, we think of the surpassing images of ruined Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 – 1778). The lives of many 18 th century Italian architectural artists on paper – those working often in black and white – are, if anything, more colorful (though darker-hued) than their painterly cousins. Other vedutistas were well, even royally born, enjoyed the company and patronage of kings, Popes, and assorted aristocrats, while plying a profession they conceived as gentlemanly. Fellow Naples resident Gennaro Greco, whose disfiguring burns brought him the none-too-gentle nickname Il Mascacotta – he of the cooked face – enjoyed three beautiful wives, (simultaneously!) before falling to his death from a high scaffold while, naturalmante, painting. Leonardo Coccorante, painter of moonlit, ruined, sinister scenes populated by bandits and their prey, learned his shadowy art from a condemned Sicilian burglar, while a jailer’s assistant in a Neapolitan prison. These etchings were destined to influence countless scenic designers in preparing their sets of dungeons and torture chambers.Among the varied appeals of 17 th and 18 th century Italian capricci and vedute are the robust, vividly polychromatic lives of the artists who painted them. They may be seen in two states: the first more freely drawn and lightly etched, the final one (to which this illustration belongs) reworked with deep, dark lines and more ominous interiors. They were reissued about sixteen years later. Piranesi was twenty-two when he composed his sixteen fantasies. De Quincey never saw Piranesi's plates, but obviously was very moved by the verbal description of them given by his friend, the poet and essayist Coleridge. A famous description comes from De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It is believed that during his residence in Venice he also knew and studied the etchings of Tiepolo.Ĭertainly Piranesi's most often discussed prints are in his etched Prison series, the Carceri d'Innenzione. From Giuseppe Vasi he had learned etching and engraving, and most of his plates are a mixture of these two techniques. In 1831 Francesco Piranesi did, however, publish an account of his father's career, part of which reads: "In an age of frivolities, he boldly and singlehanded dared to strike out for himself on a new road to fame: and in dedicating his talent to the recording and illustrating from ancient writers the records of former times, he met with a success as great as it deserved, combining, as he did, all that was beautiful in art with all that was interesting in the remains of antiquity."īorn in Venice, Piranesi yearned for Rome, and there he lived and worked most of his lifetime, dedicating himself to studying, measuring, and drawing its architectural treasures. His two sons knew this manuscript and, with additions based on their recollections, prepared their own version, which was submitted to an English publisher. Piranesi prison full#Giovanni Battista Piranesi not only produced an incredible number of etchings and engravings, but is known to have written an autobiography which was reputedly as full of swashbuckling incidents as that of Benvenuto Cellini. ![]()
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