#Piranesi rome series#
Later in Le Antichità Romane and other publications, Piranesi would inscribe his reconstructed plans on slabs of fragmented marble, often illusionistically held to the surface with metal clamps. In his Views of Rome (Vedute di Roma), a series of copperplate engravings, the artist, architect, author, and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 1778) portrayed the monuments of the Eternal City and its environs not just with precision and splendor, but as part of a living landscape. At the age of 20 Piranesi went to Rome as a draftsman for the Venetian ambassador.
Here, Piranesi’s Rome emerges from the old fragments. The small numbers that label these sites link the reader to entries on subsequent pages. The map of Rome in the center of the print represents ancient monuments as they appeared in Piranesi’s day. The numbers that appear alongside the marble fragments correspond to entries in the detailed index that follows, in which Piranesi lists each surviving fragment and posits its identity and location in the city. In this image, Piranesi scatters pieces of the marble plan around a map of the walled city. Piranesi was well acquainted with the Severan fragments, and frequently drew inspiration from them for his own plans and images of antiquity. This fragmentary evidence of ancient Rome’s urban layout influenced early modern cartographers and antiquarians, who attempted to reconstruct Roman topography from extant ruins and writings from antiquity. Fragments of the Severan Plan were discovered in 1562 but had recently been put on public display at the Capitoline Museums. It’s one of the richest collections in the world, spanning his career from his arrival in Rome in 1740, as a young man of twenty, to his death in 1778 as one of the most influential and admired advocates of ancient Roman architecture.
The etched plates and printed text that follow work together to index the surviving ruins of ancient Roman monuments known in the eighteenth century and the fragments of an ancient marble plan of Rome known as the Severan Marble Plan, or the Forma urbis romae. Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity presents all 51 of the Museum’s drawings by Piranesi. Monuments of ancient, early Christian, Renaissance and Baroque Rome. This plan of Rome begins a lengthy section on two specific types of ancient Roman fragments. Piranesis masterful representations of architecture are now reprinted in large. His views of Rome are especially valuable as historical documents. His architectural etchings still draw us in with their dramatic style and keep us looking with their intricate details. This print appears early in the first volume of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane, following the dedicatory frontispiece and the standard preface and imprimatur, which provided proof that the papacy had granted proper permission for the publication. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was Italy's most prolific and innovative printmaker in the 18th century.
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