In 1762, the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma collection of engravings was printed. In 1761, he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing house of his own. In the meantime Piranesi devoted himself to the measurement of many of the ancient buildings: this led to the publication of Le Antichità Romane de' tempo della prima Repubblica e dei primi imperatori ("Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic and the First Emperors"). In 1748–1774, he created an important series of vedute of the city which established his fame. He then returned to Rome, where he opened a workshop in Via del Corso. ![]() It was Tiepolo who expanded the restrictive conventions of reproductive, topographical and antiquarian engravings. According to Legrand, Vasi told Piranesi that "you are too much of a painter, my friend, to be an engraver."Īfter his studies with Vasi, he collaborated with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to produce a series of vedute (views) of the city his first work was Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), followed in 1745 by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna.įrom 1743 to 1747, he was mainly in Venice where, according to some sources, he often visited Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, a leading artist in Venice. Giuseppe Vasi found Piranesi's talent was much greater than that of a mere engraver. He resided in the Palazzo Venezia and studied under Giuseppe Vasi, who introduced him to the art of etching and engraving of the city and its monuments. His brother Andrea introduced him to Latin literature and ancient Greco-Roman civilization, and later he was apprenticed under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, who was a leading architect in Magistrato delle Acque, the state organization responsible for engineering and restoring historical buildings.įrom 1740, he had an opportunity to work in Rome as a draughtsman for Marco Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador of the new Pope Benedict XIV. At the top of the plate is a quote from Le Roy: "The Ionic capitals one sees in Rome seem poor and defective," to which Piranesi responds by illustrating many of the "magnificent" Ionic capitals of Rome.Piranesi was born in Venice, in the parish of S. ![]() In the plate, Piranesi has surrounded Le Roy's own engraving of a capital from the Erechtheion in Athens with an elaborate array of more complex Roman variants. Piranesi's lengthy essay in Italian and Latin expressed his conviction of the superiority of Etruscan design and was accompanied by thirty-eight engraved illustrations, including this foldout of Roman Ionic capitals. Le Roy wrote of the Roman Composite order, "t is only a fairly imperfect mixture of the Ionic and Corinthian and by altering the proportions of the column from the Doric order and by multiplying the moldings of its entablature, they have perhaps made it lose a lot of its male character, which was a distinguishing feature in Greece." Partly in response to such contemporary polemical salvos touting the significance of Greek architecture, including Marc-Antoine Laugier's 'Essai sur l'architecture' (1753), which demonstrated the evolution of wood to stone architecture as exemplified by the Greek Doric temple, in 1761 Piranesi published 'Della magnificenza ed architettura de' romani' (Concerning the magnificense and architecture of the Romans). ![]() In 1758, the French architect Julien-David Le Roy published 'Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce' (The ruins of the most beautiful monuments of Greece) in which he proclaimed that the architectural orders were a Greek invention inherited by the Romans who imitated and subsequently debased them. ![]() Rogers Fund, transferred from the Library. Various Roman Ionic capitals compared with Greek examples from Le Roy, mid-18th century.
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