The master Italian etcher

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 - 1778), also know as Giambattista,  is considered the last great exponent of the eighteenth century Venetian engraving.  In his youth he defined himself as a Venetian architect but once he moved to Rome he became famous for his engravings representing classical ruins and ancient monuments.  

 

Inspired initially by Marco Ricci’s ruined intuitions and assimilated the lesson of Tiepolo and Canaletto, Piranesi gradually transformed his style. His celebration of ancient Rome was also of a theoretical nature when, as opposed to Winckelmann’s neoclassicism, he placed the emphasis on the superiority of Roman art over the Greek one.  

 

Ancient Roman amphitheatres disintegrated by time, obelisks swallowed by greenery, fantastic and grotesque masks, aristocratic palaces flooded with  light, hallucinatory visions of dark and terrible prisons, ruins of spas, bridges and banks of the Tiber, constitute the inexhaustible themes of its extraordinary production of etchings.  

 

The exhibition presents two series of works dedicated to the Eternal City: Roman Antiquities (1756) and Views of Rome (1748-1778) in which Piranesi, through the skillful use of lights and shadows, has been able to celebrate the sense of monumental and artistic magnificence of ancient and modern Rome.  The exhibition ends with the famous Prisons of Invention (1761), impossible and obscure architectures that will influence Romanticism and Surrealism and that in the centuries-old flourish of different interpretations keep their inexhaustibility intact.