Russian tsarina Catherine II admitted that she was crazy about Piranesi’s “architectural treatises”. Those who did not see Rome live successfully imagined it after Piranesi. Whole generations of architects grew up on Piranesi’s etchings albums, his works were enthusiastically collected and passed on by inheritance. They created engravings and theatrical scenery à la Piranesi, built palaces and bridges, wrote essays and novels. In general, the “paper architect” managed to catch the beginning of piranesimania during his lifetime - not so much imitation as passionate and delighted succession. Goethe was rather sceptical about Piranesi’s activity (we’ll tell you why later). Both his work and his very personality have a powerful charisma that few can resist. Surely, Clarke is not the first to fall under the spell of the greatest “architectural science fiction writer” Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720−1778). The novel is full of implicit, but clearly distinguishable references to his work. The protagonist who explored the endless Halls decorated with Statues in anticipation of the Tides is named Piranesi, just like the Italian engraver of the 18th century. TuIp (1623) and the Anatomy Lesson of Dr.In 2020, almost the main literary sensation was the parable novel by the English writer Suzanne Clarke, Piranesi. Yourcenar's reference to dissection reminds one of two paintings by Rembrandt on this subject: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. His antiquarian research, furthermore accustomed him to recognize in each fragment of antiquity the singularities or specifications of kind they were for him what the dissection of cadavers is for a painter of the nude. Piranesi's studies as an architect taught him to reflect thoroughly and continuously in tenns of balance and weight, of blocks and mortar. Many painters of genius have been architects as well very few have thought solely in terms of architecture in their painted, drawn or engraved work. He was an artist, who throughout his whole life focused on only one object, manmade structures: Marguerite Yourcenar links Piranesi's scientific method to the fact that he thought like an architect. What Piranesi's work ultimately offers is a form of visual archaeology. He worked, as Ficacci described, "under the banner of a radically new scientific empiricism drawing on the power of the imagination in an inseparable whole perfectly represented by the organic unity of the four volumes of Antichita Romance" (38). What then accounts for the interest in Piranesi, who, in his own time, had been known primarily as the manufacturer of hundreds of views of Rome, past and contemporary, as popular souvenirs for the privileged travelers of the grand tour? What Piranesi did achieve in his Antichita Romane and other such precisely measured and described engravings of classical monuments is nothing short of creating the beginnings of serious scientific archaeology. Gobrich The Story of Art, (2) do not mention Piranesi at all, while others might give a little information such as that he had been a Venetian architect who never built anything in the city of his birth, and next to nothing in Rome where he spent most of his life. Older art histories directed toward a general readership, such as the excellent book by E. The intensity of interest in our time in an eighteenth-century engraver is surprising, because he had for so long been considered a minor artist. In 2000, two publications were of interest: the English translation of Gerhard Kopf's novel Piranesi 's Dream, an imaginary autobiography of the artist, and Luigi Ficacci's catalogue raisonne of Piranesi's etchings in a trilingual edition.' Exhibits of his works followed during the next two years in Rome and Stuttgart, accompanied by the publication of catalogues, as had been the case with the Padua exhibit. In the same year his etchings of imaginary prisons, Le Carceri d'Invenzione, were dramatized in a film that 'was part of the PBS series Inspired by Bach. In 1997, Piranesi's works were featured with those of two other Venetian artists, Tiepolo and Canaletto, in an exhibit in Padua. For readers with broader cultural interests, it was not too difficult to spot a trend in the latter part of the 1990s: the renewed vigorous interest in the person and the works of Giambattista Piranesi.
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