![]() The Serpent and the Stylus marks the first time, however, that Piranesi as a cultural corporation and interlocutor has ever been fully examined. The peaks of Piranesi scholarship have moved from Henri Focillon’s first modern monograph some 100 years ago to the first catalogue raisonné of his work in 1918, to the heady discoveries of unknown drawings in American collections in the 1970s, to greater appreciation of the innovative qualities of his most famous etching series, the Carceri and the Caprici, in the wake of applying the more refined techniques of graphic analysis that now exist. The editors trace the convoluted path of Piranesi’s rise to fame and recognition in both his day and ours. The mention of his legacy in the nineteenth century as inspiration to Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust immediately brings to mind Piranesian images that match the teeming Parisian streets of realism’s pen, softened by the pathos of Romanticism, as well as images that may have populated Baudelaire’s dreams and designed the scaffolding of Proust’s psyche. The cowritten introductory essay by the editorial team of Bevilacqua, Minor, and Barry reminds the reader immediately of the magnitude of Piranesi’s activity and the difficulties inherent in doing justice to “an architect, engraver, antiquities restorer and dealer, draftsman, archaeologist, furniture and fireplace designer, author and bookseller” (1). Whether glorious or nefarious, Piranesi’s output always dazzles, treading the line between intimidation and playfulness that made his work a favorite among aficionados of the pittoresco, the tamed grandeur of his style that appealed in particular to the foreign eye. The four parts establish the range, in time and field, of Piranesi’s activity, while the essays of each section delve into Piranesi’s art in the study of the richly nuanced milieux of Grand Tour patronage, artistic collaborations, evolutions, rivalries, and jealousies coupled with their glorious or nefarious aftermath, as the case may have been. ![]() This organizational structure provides the reader, both casual and academic, with a grid for approaching Piranesi’s copious output. Piranesi’s Early Years: Drawings and Etchings III. Divided in four parts, the volume addresses in chronological order: I. Piranesi, this collection focuses with clarity and precision on specific aspects of Piranesi’s multifaceted career. ![]() True to the second part of the title, Essays on G. Both are explored in the set of nine essays that make up The Serpent and the Stylus. However, this lack of attention is easily forgiven when his reach and itinerary are recognized and evoked. Artist, architect, and engraver, both itinerant and serially stable throughout the Adriatic at the height of the Italian Enlightenment, Piranesi has received short shrift in the world of interdisciplinary eighteenth-century studies. They also teach just as many afresh as they show us what this renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Piranesi, was able to achieve. From Venice, to Rome, to Zagreb, and to Gorizia: the essays and engravings discussed and displayed remind us of a number of things at once about Italy’s eighteenth century. While it is hard to find meaning in the first state of the series, the second state includes explicit references to the justice system under the Roman Republic and to the cruelty for which certain emperors were known.The peripatetic and eclectic span of the life and oeuvre of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Venice 1720–Rome 1778) is fully explored in this exhibition and these volumes dedicated to his career. The reworked plates are even darker and more complex, with added details and inscriptions. ![]() About ten years later, Piranesi reworked these plates and added two new images to the series. Spatial anomalies and ambiguities abound in all the images of the series they were not meant to be logical but to express the vastness and strength that Piranesi experienced in contemplating Roman architecture. Actual prisons in the Italy were tiny dungeons. The fourteen plates depicting prisons - probably Piranesi's best-known series - were described on their title page as ‘capricious inventions.’ These structures, their immensity emphasized by the low viewpoint and the diminutive figures, derive from stage prisons rather than real ones. Piranesi studied architecture, engineering and stage design, and his first plans for buildings reflect his training combined with the tremendous impact of classical Roman architecture. Rome was the inspiration for and subject of most of his etchings that number over a thousand. A native of Venice, Piranesi went to Rome at age twenty and where he remained for the remainder of his life.
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