Giovanni Battista Piranesi

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi [dʒoˈvanni batˈtista piraˈneːzi] , also Giambattista Piranesi (born October 4, 1720 in Venice , † November 9, 1778 in Rome ), was an Italian engraver , archaeologist , architect and architectural theorist.

Life

Piranesi was born in Venice as the son of a stonemason . The place of birth Mogliano Veneto, which is often found in older literature, is based on the biography of Giovanni Battista Piranesi by the French architect Jacques-Guillaume Legrande from the beginning of the 19th century. Legrande created it based on the questionnaire to Parisemigrated son Francesco Piranesi, whose statements have turned out to be imprecise. However, there is no other evidence for the alleged stay of the Piranesi family in Mogliano Veneto, which is sometimes referred to as a place of transit and another time as the place of summer residence. The first written document about Giovanni Battista Piranesi is his entry in the baptismal register of the parish of San Moisè in Venice on November 8, 1720.

The brother Angelo taught Giovanni Battista Latin and the basics of ancient literature. He began his training as an architect at the Magistrato delle Acque with his mother's brother, Matteo Lucchesi, a Venetian civil engineer who was responsible for regulating the lagoon . After falling out in an argument with his uncle, he continued his training with Giovanni Scalfarotto (1670–1764). In further training as a set designer, he got to know the possibilities of stage decoration. This enabled him to work intensively with the art of illusion and perspective. At this time, the art of vedute reached a high point in Venice - especially through Canaletto .

In 1740 he traveled to Rome as a draftsman in the suite of Marco Foscarini , the Venetian envoy to the Holy See . He took up quarters in the Palazzo Venezia and began to study Roman architecture. Very soon Piranesi realized that the prospects for architects in Rome were very bad. Opportunities arose more in the field of painting, especially through the beginning tourism to Rome. A year after his arrival in Rome, he began training with the vedute draftsman Giuseppe Vasi , who taught him the basics of etching and engraving . However, Piranesi soon fell out with Vasi and broke off his training in his workshop. Together with fellows from the French Academy, he worked on a series of smaller views of Rome, which then appeared in 1745 as Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna . As early as 1743 he published his first work, Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive - city views in a combination of engraving and etching. He dedicated the work to Nicola Giobbe, a Venetian contractor who had promoted him since his arrival in Rome.

From 1743 to 1747 he stayed mostly in Venice, where he also worked with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo . Eventually he returned to Rome, where he opened a shop on Via del Corso. In the years 1748 to 1774 he created further series of vedute of baroque and ancient monuments of Rome, the Vedute di Roma , which - mostly illuminated by harsh sunlight - develop a peculiarly monumental effect. These vedute also contain picture compositions in the manner of the Capriccio . In 1756 Piranesi researched and measured countless buildings in ancient Rome. The result was the publication of the views of Roman antiquities in four volumes, the Antichità romane . On February 24, 1757 he was admitted to the Society of Antiquaries of London and in 1761 to the Roman Accademia di San Luca . In the same year he set up a new atelier with its own print shop. He compiled his etchings with prices in a Catalogo delle Opere .

In 1763 Pope Clement XIII. Piranesi commissioned the renovation of the choir of San Giovanni in Laterano . However, he did not get beyond the drafting stage. The following year, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Rezzonico commissioned Piranesi to redesign Santa Maria del Priorato . In 1767 the Pope knighted him.

Piranesi died in Rome in 1778 after a long illness. He was buried in the church of Santa Maria del Priorato .

Three of his children, Laura , Francesco and Pietro Piranesi , were also well-known and successful artists.

plant

Piranesi achieved fame to this day primarily with the sixteen panels of the Carceri d'Invenzione di G. Battista Piranesi (invented dungeons by G. Battista Piranesi) from 1760 to 1761, architectural fantasies stimulated by stage sets, which also convey the feeling of loneliness that can be felt in the vedute , combined with monumentality, take it to the extreme. They influenced the construction of the new prison in Newgate in 1770, were used in copies to depict the horrors of the Bastille and ultimately left their mark on film architecture of the 20th century. The originally rather light-colored 14 panels of the first edition of the Carceri were reworked in 1761 at the instigation of Piranesi's publisher Bouchard and added two more panels to make them darker and more contrasting and thus to achieve a more theatrical effect. Most of the reproductions of the Carceri reflect this later state.

Much more extensive, however, was his documentation of ancient buildings and everyday objects in Rome and the surrounding area, Cora and Paestum , which artists all over Europe used as models for their own works.

  • From Carceri

  • From Carceri

  • From Carceri

  • The drawbridge

In the spring of 2014, an intern, Georg Kabierske, a twenty-year-old high school graduate, discovered 297 drawings and graphics from the hand of Piranesi and his environment in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe , which had previously been assigned to Friedrich Weinbrenner . In addition to this, there were an estimated 500 to 600 copies of Piranesi and his workshop around the world at that time.

Publications

  • Antichità romane de 'tempi della repubblica e de' primi imperatori (1748).
  • Alcune vedute di archi trionfali, ed altri monumenti inalzati da parte de quali si veggono in Roma, e parte per l'Italia (1748).
  • Opere varie di architettura, prospettiva, groteschi, antichitá . 4 volumes. Rome (1750).
  • Carceri (1750).
  • Trofei Ottaviano Augusto innalzati per la vittoria ad actium e conquista dell 'Egitto con varj altri ornamenti diligentemente ricavati dagli avanzi piu preziosi delle fabbriche antiche di Roma utili a pittori, scultori ed architetti (1753).
  • Le antichità romane (1756).
  • Lettere di giustificatione step a Milord Charlemont e à di lui agenti in Roma (1757).
  • Le rovine del Castello dell 'Acqua Giulia situato in Roma presso S. Eusebio e falsamente ditto dell' Acqua Marcia colla dichiarazione di uno de 'celebri recognized del comentatio frontiniano e sposizione della maniera con cui gli antichi romani distribuiva le acque per uso della città ( 1761).
  • De romanorum magnificentia et architectura (1761).
  • Campus Martius antiquae urbis (1762).
  • Lapides capitolini sive fasti consulares triumphalesq romanorum ab urbe condita usque ad tiberium caesarem (1762).
  • Antichità di Cora (1764).
  • Antichità d'Albano e di Castel Gandolfo (1764).
  • Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi sopra la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette aux Auteurs de la Gazette Littéraire de l'Europe (1765).
  • Della introduzione e del progresso delle belle arti in Europe ne 'tempi antichi (1765).

literature

Reference books

Ulya Vogt-Göknil : Piranesi Carceri . Zurich, 1958
  • Mario Bevilacqua:  Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. In: Raffaele Romanelli (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 85:  Ponzone-Quercia. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2016.
  • Henri Focillon: Giovanni-Battista Piranesi. InFolio Editio, Gollion 2001, ISBN 2-88474-504-1 .
  • Corinna Höper, Susanne Grötz: Giovanni Battista, Laura, Francesco and Pietro Piranesi: all etchings. VDG, Weimar 2003, ISBN 3-89739-376-X .
  • Luzius Keller : Piranése et les Romantiques Francais - le mythe des escaliers en spirale , Librairie José Corti, Paris 1966.
  • Petra Lamers-Schütze: Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Taschen, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-8228-5094-2 .
  • Norbert Miller: Archeology of Dream. Attempt on Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Hanser, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-446-12612-0 .
  • Bruno Reudenbach: GB Piranesi: Architecture as a picture. The Change in Architecture in the Eighteenth Century. Prestel, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7913-0459-3 .
  • Le Arti di Piranesi. Architetto, incisore, antiquario, vedutista, designer (= Collona Cataloghi di Mostre. No. 71). Marsilo, Venezia 2010, ISBN 978-88-317-0753-4 .

Fiction

exhibition

  • 2010 Le arti di Piranesi - The Arts of Piranesi: Architect, Engraver, Antiquarian, View-maker, Designer , Fondazione Cini , Venezia
  • 2016 "Piranèse, Les prisons imaginaires - Johannes Gachnang, The Byzantine Book - GO Melcher, Dal cimitero delle intenzioni", (Anton Meier Gallery, Genève)

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Battista Piranesi  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mario Bevilacqua:  Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI).
  2. ^ Pierluigi Panza: Piranesi e le dimenticanze di Venezia. In: fattoadarte.corriere.it. June 7, 2015, accessed October 4, 2020 (Italian).
  3. ↑ Sebastian Riemer: How a Heidelberg intern suddenly became an expert . Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, October 24, 2015, accessed on the same day
  4. ↑ Piranesi instead of Weinbrenner. Press release from the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe on May 21, 2014. Digital copy, PDF, 51kB
  5. ↑ ESD: Giovanni Battista Piranesi en la Biblioteca Nacional de España , 7 May - 22 September 2019
personal data
SURNAME Piranesi, Giovanni Battista
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Piranesi, Giambattista
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian engraver, archaeologist, architect and architectural theorist
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1720
PLACE OF BIRTH Venice
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1778
Place of death Rome