GIAMBATTISTA PIRANESI (Italian 1720-1778) “Dimostrazione in Grande delle parti del second ordine del teatro diu marcello”
$1,500
“Dimostrazione in Grande delle parti del second ordine del teatro diu marcello,” Vol. IV, Plate XXXVI, “Le Antichite Romane,” early state, 1757
Etching, 17 x 10 inches
Signed in the plate, “Piranesi Archuit. dis. et fec.”
Giambattista Piranesi’s early training in Venice was in architecture, engineering and stage design. His apprenticeships coincided with the golden age of the Venetian “vedutisti,” or topographical artists, and the rise of Canaletto as supreme master of the genre.
Piranesi pushed etching and engraving to unsurpassed limits, transforming them from tools of illustration and reproduction into expressive art forms on a par with painting and sculpture, not least because Piranesi did a great deal of his work directly on the plates using his etcher’s needle and engraver’s burin as a painter uses a brush, adding nuances and subtleties by handling of inks during the printing process.
Piranesi revealed himself as a visionary whose views of ancient Roman architecture and ruins, although closely observed, owed much to a fantastic imagination. In his eyes Roman architecture took on awe-inspiring complexity, superhuman proportions, and overwhelming grandeur.