Published in 1765, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's "Osservazioni" is
an impassioned defence of the superiority of Roman architectural
"invention" over the "beautiful and noble simplicity" of Ancient
Greece. In this three-part polemical work, the engraver and
designer not only praises the structural audacity of Etruscan
architecture and contends that the Etruscans - not the Greeks -
were the artistic mentors of the Romans, but also argues for a
Roman-inspired exuberance in design that draws freely on all forms
and traditions of ancient art Although Piranesi's essentially
Baroque vision set him at odds with the austere aesthetics of
Neoclassicism, his ideas were inspirational to such gifted
18th-century architects as Robert Adam, John Soane, Claude-Nicolas
Ledoux, and Etienne-Louis Boullee. Piranesi's plea for imaginative
eclecticism remains topical, as practitioners and theorists
continue to debate the relative merits of a rational and minimal
architecture versus an architecture rich in ornament and historical
references.
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