![]() His work has always appealed to a wide audience and has to a large extend determined the image foreigners have of the city of Rome. Piranesi was also interested in archaeology and his drawings of antiquities as well as his city views were extremely popular with tourists who were making a cultural ‘Grand Tour’ through Europe to conclude their education. In his architectural drawings and designs for furniture and vases, he combined Venetian rococo flamboyance, Egyptian statues, Etruscan symbols and Roman grandeur. Above all he enjoyed altering the architectural and design styles of his own day and age. He couldn’t care less about the rules and experimented with different styles from the past in order to come up with new designs. His ‘liberal’ approach provided a fertile imagination for some extraordinary pre-Romantic fantasy ruins. He would become known for his drawings of monuments in Rome and amazing ruins. This exhibition is part of a series of three exhibitions at the Kunsthal in the context of the city-wide project ‘Boijmans Next Door’.įrom the moment he moved to Rome, in 1740, Piranesi started focusing on imaginative representations of reality. Prints of rare quality are shown from both these series, as well as eight colossal books that highlight the dizzying imagination of Piranesi – as an artist, researcher and designer. In his famous series of prints featuring imaginary prisons, the ‘Carceri d’Invenzione’, Piranesi – who was originally an architect – expressed his spatial fantasies. As an artist, Piranesi became known in the eighteenth century for his ‘Vedute di Roma’, an extensive series of etchings of impressive views of the ruins and monuments of Rome. The Kunsthal is presenting over seventy large-format prints by Piranesi from the impressive graphic art collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. For the first time in a decade, a large Piranesi exhibition will be shown in the Netherlands. 07-09_1937, 128.The Italian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) is considered to be the greatest print artist of his time. Records of the Department of Public Information. Yet in the first state of the plates, represented by the Brooklyn Museum set, the whole intention has been really expressed and the greater simplicity and freshness carry with a sincerity of inspiration which is somewhat lost in the conscious elaboration of the plates in their late state.īrooklyn Museum Archives. In the later edition of the prints, the effect is complicated by additional structures of stone and wood, additional engines of torture and additional striving figures the dramatic effect is also intensified by terrifying contrasts of bright light and darkened shadows. ![]() It is not only an imaginary prison but the prison of the imagination, in which fancy is tortured by huge space, confining walls, the temptations of a maze of unfinished projects and the hopelessness of all of them. It is indeed so madly fashioned by the imagination that it could never have been completed. Half finished arches reach out in mid air toward supporting piers that have not yet been built, galleries lead nowhere, and there are wooden scaffoldings, fragments of machinery and groups of workmen almost lost in the great spaces of the building. These large prints, admired by the poet Coleridge and described by De Quincy in The Opium Eater, depict scenes in the interior of an imaginary prison of huge proportions fashioned of Cyclopean masonry. The Carceri, or Prisons, etched in 1742, are regarded as Piranosi’s finest work, and the first issue by Bouchard in 1745–1750 is from many points of views more beautiful and interesting than the later issue, called Carceri d’Invenzione, and comprising the fourteen plates elaborated and two additional plates not known to have appeared in the Bouchard edition. ![]() The set is in excellent condition and extremely rare. Of these, thirteen are first states and the title page a second state, the first state of the title page differing only by an error in spelling the name of the publisher, Buzard for Bouchard. From July 9th through the summer, the Print Department of the Brooklyn Museum will exhibit a set of the fourteen plates in the first issue of the Invenzioni Capric di Carceri by Piranesi.
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