Piranesi continued to make prints of Rome and other locations in Italy with classical remains throughout the rest of his career. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Veduta with the Temple of Jove (c 1750-58), etching, 37.5 x 59.5 cm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. That accounts for some of the sculpture being incomplete. Work to create the modern version had started in 1732, but had been interrupted, and wasn’t completed until 1762. The largest fountain in the city, it dates from 19 BCE, when it was built at the end of the Acqua Vergine aqueduct. If you’ve ever visited Rome, you’ll surely recognise the famous sight of a Side View of the Trevi Fountain, one of the prints included in Piranesi’s hugely successful Views of Rome, in 1747-48. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Side View of the Trevi Fountain, formerly the Acqua Vergine from Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) (1747-48), etching, 51.6 x 69.7 cm, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. The Temple of Diana, etched in 1748 for Piranesi’s first major series of views of Roman ruins, shows the remains of one of the oldest temples, by legend claimed to have been built during the initial rule of Rome by kings. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), The Temple of Diana (1748), etching on laid paper, 34.9 x 46.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. By this time, Piranesi had started work on the series of prints which depict his imaginary views of prisons, which I look at in tomorrow’s article. At the upper right is the zodiac, showing Sagittarius and Cancer. In this fantasy, the ruins appear to have come alive with the remains of the dead. The Skeletons from 1747-49 is an etching and drypoint with burnishing which already declares his interest in the ‘ghoulish’. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), The Skeletons (1747-49), etching, drypoint, burnishing on paper, 39.5 x 54.5 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia. In the late 1740s, Piranesi returned to Rome, where he started work on a major series of views of the city and its classical ruins. Wikimedia Commons.Ī Battle of Nude Men is a pen and ink drawing which Piranesi made in 1744-45, possibly when he was in Venice. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), A Battle of Nude Men (1744-45), pen and dark brown ink with brown and gray-brown wash over red chalk on laid paper pasted down on the remains of the artist’s original mount, 25.8 × 18.4 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In the mid-1740s, he worked in Venice, where it’s thought he became friends with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His first independent print-making started in 1743, when he made views of the city of Rome in conjunction with students at the French Academy in Rome. He started to learn to etch and engrave when in Rome, where he initially worked as a draughtsman. He developed an early interest in classical architecture and remains: his brother introduced him to the Latin language, his father was a stonemason, and he was indentured as an apprentice with his uncle, an architect responsible for restoring historical buildings. Piranesi was born in a town near Mestre, the city on the mainland adjacent to Venice. In this article I look at his career and work generally, and tomorrow I concentrate on his remarkable series of prints showing imaginary prisons, which has proved so influential on art. These similarities distinguished the historical drawings from the red chalk mock-up drawings, except for the drawings made with red chalk samples from the area near the town of Theley, Germany, which were shown to bear close similarities to those in the cluster of historical samples.Three hundred years ago tomorrow, one of the most famous and prolific print makers of Italy was born: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Subsequent FORS analysis of selected original drawings revealed the existence of several closely grouped clusters, implying similarities on the basis of the underlying spectral features among the historical red chalks used in Rome. The compositional differences of these reference chalks were confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It was possible to sort these mock-up drawings according to chalk type and application technique. The method was tested on mock-up drawings made with recently acquired natural and synthetic red chalks of known origin. The evaluation of spectra was supported by principal component analysis (PCA). The viability of fiber optics reflectance spectroscopy (FORS) for the differentiation of red chalk drawing media was investigated, focusing on the group of drawings from the workshop of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany.
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