The great 18th century architectural artist and master
engraver
"Piranesi was as savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michelangelo,
and exuberant as Rubens... he has imagined scenes that would
startle geometry and exhaust the Indies to realize." -- "Horace
Walpole"
One the greatest architectural artists of all time, and certainly
the most famous copper engraver of the 18th century, Giovanni
Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is most known for his terrifyingly
original series of etchings of labyrinthine and megalomaniac
prisons, Carceri d'Invenzione. In his own day, he was most
celebrated for his Vedute, 137 etchings of ancient and modern Rome;
so renowned were these startling and dramatic chiaroscuro images,
imbued with Piranesi's romantic feeling for archaeological ruins,
that they formed the mental picture of Rome for generations after.
Indeed, Piranesi could be said to have shaped a whole strain of
contemporary architecture, as well as the wider visualization of
antiquity itself. In our time, he has had a direct influence on
writers such as Borges and Kafka and on filmmakers such as Terry
Gilliam and Peter Greenaway. Anyone who contemplates Piranesi's
etchings will confront the existential nightmare of human existence
and its infinite mysteries.
General
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