piranesi's lost words - introduction

PIRANESI’Slost words

H E AT H E R H Y D E M I N O R

The Pennsylvania State University PressUniversity Park, Pennsylvania

Publication of this book has been supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Campus Research Board, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A previous version of a portion of chapter 5 appeared in “G. B. Piranesi’s Diverse Maniere and the Natural History of Ancient Art,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 56–57 (2012): 323–51.

Frontispiece: Piranesi volumes owned by Charles-Nicolas Duclos du Fresnoy (1733–1794). Private collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

1

On All Saints’ Day, one of the greatest artists of the eighteenth century lay dying (fig 1) Few Romans would have noticed Nearly everyone was attending to their own dead, gathering sweet almond biscuits and candles to take to the city’s cemeteries to celebrate the feast of All Souls the following morning For eight days the bladder ailment that had tormented him for more than a decade intensified its assault on Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1 He believed that his family was trying to poison him, insisting in the days before his death that one of his workshop assistants bring him his food to prevent his family’s access to his plate 2 His son suggested a doctor Piranesi refused, pointing to his copy of Livy’s history of Rome and saying, “I believe only him ” But belief was not a cure On November 9, 1778, Piranesi died Learning of his death, an old Venetian friend wrote, “I heard rumors here that before he died he hid his money (which must have been abundant) so well that his children despair of finding it Indeed, it is said that he died crazy If the strange things that people are saying are true, it cannot be otherwise ”3

Attended by his wife, five of their children, at least one servant, and probably some of his shop assistants, the baroque death scene that provided the final chapter of Piranesi’s life is fitting For more than two hundred years, Piranesi has been remembered most famously as an engraver, but a return to the eighteenth-century sources reveals a much more complex character He was not a typical artist, if such a character exists The word

artist, even in its most expansive definition, does not capture his diverse talents and interests

Piranesi was born in Venice in 1720 into a family of stone carvers 4 Like many early modern artists, he owed his initial training to his family, studying architecture with his uncle Unable to find work, he traveled to Rome in 1740, thanks to his godfather’s son, who recommended him to the new Venetian ambassador to the papal court 5 Rome became Piranesi’s home and his subject matter, enabling his transformation into one of Europe’s most celebrated artists

The draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, antiquities restorer, art dealer, collector, archaeologist, publisher, author, and family man died surrounded by the material evidence of his multiple, overlapping identities Though he was born a stonemason’s son in a small house on a narrow Venetian calle, he died a gentleman in a twenty-room palazzo in Rome’s chic strada Felice, just a short distance from the summit of the Spanish Steps (fig 2) 6 Palazzo Tomati, which served as the artist’s home, studio, and showcase, was also known as Piranesi’s museo It was one of the marvels of the Eternal City As the Rome-based English antiquities dealer and banker Thomas Jenkins wrote to a Lancashire client, “The Cavalier’s [Piranesi’s] house is really the most Curious thing that Ever was Seen, I really Wonder it does not Tumble down, the Landlord with reason has Entered a Protest in Case of Accidents ”7

The most eye-catching parts of the large

I N T R O D u C T I O N

introduction

2 piranesi ’s lost words

Fig. 1 Joseph Nollekens, bust of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ca. 1760.

3introduction

collection crammed into the palazzo were the colored stones 8 Fragments of white alabaster and green porphyry, golden giallo antico capitals, and a black basalt lion’s paw were scattered in Piranesi’s center of operations So many marble fragments lay strewn about that they could not be contained in the building proper Thirty-six pieces escaped the premises and dotted the street leading up to the piazza at the top of the Spanish Steps Indeed, Piranesi may have considered the house itself an antique In the basement, there was a room with a ceiling “divided into squares, which certainly formed part of the buildings of Lucullus,” whose gardens sprawled across the Pincian Hill in antiquity 9 Thomas Jenkins also reported that Piranesi was loath to sell his ancient

fragments: “notwithstanding this I have reason to believe without being a conjurer that the Cavalier [Piranesi] is as sanguine to be tempted as ever an old Lady was to be ravished ”10 Words and objects attest to Piranesi’s work as a collector, restorer, and dealer in ancient artifacts

The entrance to the building, its staircases, and its corridors were ornamented with eighty-six life-size plaster casts of the Column of Trajan These reproductions of the nearly ten-story-tall shaft document Piranesi’s study of antiquity 11 Drawings of Hadrian’s Villa, a site that he spent decades exploring and excavating, often while living in a tomb at the complex, record his work as an archaeologist 12 A fireplace made to Piranesi’s specifications, two vases, and several

Fig. 2 Detail of the 1818 catasto urbano of Rome. The arrow indicates Palazzo Tomati, which is number 1135 on the map. The Spanish Steps appear at lower left.


candelabra fusing ancient and modern marble sat ready for sale in the six rooms of the gallery, evidence of Piranesi’s output as a furniture and interior designer, as well as a dealer 13 Alongside the marbles and the manufactured goods, a compass, a pen, and a holder for graphite that served as a mechanical pencil sat together in a tortoiseshell case with a tool used to remove earwax These implements served Piranesi in his career as a draftsman, and some of them were undoubtedly used to create the twenty-six volumes of drawings that resided in the house 14

Two of these were pocket-sized, well-worn notebooks filled with Piranesi’s jottings about Roman architecture, ancient and modern 15 In these sheets, we find Piranesi learning to be an architect from his earliest days in Rome in the 1740s 16 Although he completed only one building, the church of Santa Maria del Priorato, Piranesi often described himself as an architect, signing his copperplates “Piranesi Architect ”

These instruments and drawings joined bales of paper, burins, other tools for etching and engraving, and two rolling presses, the material that fueled Piranesi’s activities as an etcher and engraver 17 The more than one thousand etched copperplates that formed the core of his artistic patrimony were safely stored in a loft in the family quarters They acted as a counterpoint to the eighteen-foot-long wooden counter used to craft, store, and display the fruits of the Piranesi printing workshop’s labors This counter sat in the first room of the studio, with locked compartments underneath for sheets of prints and paper 18 With it, Piranesi practiced the art of commerce Like print sellers across Europe, he offered other artists’ sheets for sale and sent off his own works to be put up for sale When he died, shops in Venice and Paris owed him money for his etchings that they had sold 19 A broken basket containing two bags filled with money in

three currencies, probably received as payments for purchases made by visitors to the museo, sat in the room where Piranesi stored most of his plates

Paramount among his possessions were his bodies Piranesi’s physical form was only one of his many corpi that were in the house on that autumn day in 1778 The word corpo in eighteenth-century Italian referred not just to the human body but also to unbound books 20 There were more than three hundred such corpi in Piranesi’s museo on the day he died (fig 3) These strikingly beautiful large-format books combined visual and verbal content Piranesi designed and manufactured twelve of these volumes over the course of his career This highly diverse production included images that take traditional forms like vedute (city views), along with others that relied on new tools for conveying visual data, like ichnographic maps and stratigraphical and other technical diagrams The more than six hundred pages of letterpress found in these books take many forms Composed in Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and English, his texts often appear translated into several different languages in a single volume These vary in length from a 198-page history of the engineering accomplishments of the Romans to a thirty-eight-page essay on the origins of all ancient peoples Some volumes rely on narrative, part of the earlier rhetorical tradition for writing histories, while others borrow the form of epistolary exchange, a new literary genre made popular by French and English novels Slender satirical pamphlets and mammoth folios both rested in the beautiful chaos of the museum Piranesi’s books were his most powerful and successful art form

While Piranesi fashioned himself into an artist, architect, archaeologist, businessman, and printmaker, he also made himself an author

5introduction

(fig 4) Although he became one at the age of thirty-five, with his publication of the Antichità

romane, four volumes that intertwine more than two hundred printed images with seventy-two pages of text, he wanted to become an author much earlier As Mario Bevilacqua’s rich analysis of Piranesi’s notebooks shows, there are traces of texts to accompany his plan for a magnificent college (1750) and his city views (1747–48) that date to when Piranesi was in his twenties 21

Why did Piranesi want to be an author?

Words offered both practical and ethereal rewards They allowed Piranesi to rise socially, to join the bustling European scholarly community interested in antiquities, and they provided a key credential in securing employment Later in his career, Piranesi sought to become the commissario

delle antichità (superintendent of antiquities) for the papal court Although he failed in this attempt, establishing his scholarly bona fides in print was a prime source of eligibility 22 Beyond Rome, the currency of the imaginary learned

Fig. 3 Some of Piranesi’s books.


Fig. 4 Piranesi’s Catalogo delle opere, a broadsheet listing all of his works for sale.

7introduction

society, the Republic of Letters, was words From its narrowest alleyways to its most sweeping piazzas, erudite men shared their ideas via texts, not images Words allowed Piranesi to commune with this European community on its own terms Texts also offered new forms of communication and fame Words let Piranesi claim a place as an antiquarian They allowed him to court controversy, to take up the forms of popular fiction, to borrow from the ancient language of satire, and to advertise his wares in ways that went beyond the reach of his brilliantly luminous prints

In exploring how artifacts, images, and words could work together in interpreting the classical world, Piranesi seems to have realized that he had something to say that no one else was saying The obsession with antiquity that marked the diverse contents of his museo is also impressed on the reams of images and pages of text married together in the volumes he created Careful study of his books demonstrates that he was one of the most gifted interpreters of the classical world and its remains Although he has been seen as eschewing gilded vellum-covered folios in favor of the rough remains of ancient buildings, Piranesi spent a great deal of time with books Texts, both ancient and modern, shaped his approach to understanding the classical past Although Piranesi is not often viewed as an author, in his corpi we see him exercising his skills in weighing ancient and modern visual evidence and crafting arguments about lost ancient civilizations At the same time that Piranesi’s books were being made, the modern disciplines of art history, history, archaeology, and classics were coming into being His protean volumes offer a view (and a critique) not only of the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past, but of the methods that scholars, from the eighteenth

century to the present, use to explicate that lost world

Piranesi transformed the possibilities of print in his books through his understanding of ancient engraving and its relationship to modern printing While the marriage between word and image was not consummated in print until the arrival of the Antichità romane, it seems that Piranesi conceived of his art as a composite one from the beginning Above a quick graphite sketch of the Basilica of Maxentius, Piranesi wrote, “The ancients did not have printing, and because of this, knowledge of these ancient things was lost, and by means of these [vedute] one will see what in the future will be destroyed” (fig 5) 23 In spite of Piranesi’s clotted prose and jolting time travel, this notation makes clear that he was thinking about intaglio printing as a means of preserving ancient architecture Recording a building like the basilica in a drawing, transposing it to a copperplate, and reproducing it again and again served to keep alive an ancient wonder Piranesi’s notation also highlights that he was using a tool that the ancients did not have: copperplate engraving Ancients did engrave gems These luxury objects were often used as seals, with users impressing the carved stone onto molten wax to reproduce its image and to authenticate documents Piranesi was fascinated by engraved or cast objects like inscriptions, gems, and even an enormous stone map from the ancient world Ancient incised or impressed things served not only as subjects for his chosen art form of engraving, but as a way to connect his own craft to the versions of it practiced in antiquity

How did he become an author? For Piranesi, the first step in the process of becoming an author was learning to be an artist To become a practicing engraver, he studied other prints with great care, copying parts of them into


Fig. 5 Page from one of Piranesi’s notebooks with a sketch for a veduta of the Basilica of Maxentius and his notes about the ancients’ lack of printing.

9introduction

his notebooks While examining the material qualities of artworks and copying had been part of the typical education of artists for centuries, Piranesi used these skills to produce breathtakingly creative results in his books His early training in the city schooled him in the practical means by which large, illustrated books were created His first hands-on experiences included working for Giovanni Battista Nolli and Giuseppe Vasi, who were both occupied with crafting ambitious books that combined texts and images Vasi’s project documented the city’s monuments in ten volumes and more than two hundred plates, while Nolli created a map of the city that was six feet by seven feet and included more than one thousand sites 24 Rome in the 1700s was a rich natural habitat for scholars and writers Libraries were plentiful, and access to them was largely unfettered One of his earliest biographers characterizes Piranesi’s first years in Rome as a time of “running without respite from ruins to libraries ”25 The city was packed with all sorts of great collections of books and prints Piranesi’s explorations led him to the collection of the wealthy master mason Nicola Giobbe at the base of the Capitoline Hill, as well as to the princely collections of the Albani and Corsini families The Eternal City was still an important center for the publishing industry, and large-format illustrated books were a Roman specialty His first years in Rome introduced Piranesi to this art form in the city’s rich repositories These experiences taught him how to use words with images and as images

E

This book is divided into two parts The first two chapters examine his earliest folio, the Antichità romane (Roman Antiquities, 1756, 4 vols ), offering an introduction to Piranesi’s

working method Because most viewers today encounter Piranesi’s work either on the walls of museums and galleries or in the pages of books that reproduce his searing images, chapter 1 introduces modern readers to the Antichità in its original form What is it like to encounter the images and texts contained in it? Chapter 2 answers the same question but considers instead its eighteenth-century audience Letters, journal articles, library and auction catalogues, and other sources from the eighteenth century illuminate how contemporary readers understood its form and contents This chapter also considers the literary spectacle spawned by the Antichità This carefully managed furor was deliberately staged by Piranesi through the publication of the provocative Lettere di giustificazione scritte a Milord

Charlemont (Letters of Justification written to

Lord Charlemont , 1757), which combined the ancient forms of satire with a modern publicity campaign

The second part of the book considers four more of Piranesi’s volumes Here we find him shifting from primary to secondary sources, from ancient texts and material remains to recent learned books Chapter 3 takes up the beautiful Campus Martius antiquae urbis (The

Field of Mars of Ancient Rome, 1762), a history of part of the city It examines Piranesi’s working method, how he collected ancient textual and visual evidence and shaped it to form the Campus

Martius Ruins and antique texts are both treated as incomplete material objects, a strange but brilliant contention that courses through the river of books he produced in the 1760s Della

magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani (On the

Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans, 1761) is the subject of chapter 4 This striking volume makes a learned argument based on a single ancient text while at the same time extending the working method of the Campus


Martius to include modern books and images as evidence It establishes a dialogue with modern printed works, from journal articles to books, rejecting aesthetics in favor of history With Della

magnificenza, Piranesi launched himself into the Greco-Roman controversy, a noisy quarrel over the relative merits of Greek and Roman culture and art When the book was panned in a review by a French critic, Piranesi crafted an artful rebuttal, his Osservazioni di Gio. Battista Piranesi

sopra la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette aux Auteurs

de le Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe (Observations

of Gio. Battista Piranesi on the Letter of Monsieur

Mariette to the Authors of the Gazette Littéraire

de l’Europe, 1765) Chapter 5 takes up Piranesi’s last treatise, his Diverse maniere d’adornare i

cammini (Different Ways of Ornamenting

Chimneys , 1769), which points to the limitations of prevailing historical models in the creation of a system for classifying ancient art and architecture, and ultimately reveals the inadequacy of words and images to order the visual and material culture of the past Chapter 6 tracks how Piranesi’s words faded from view in the years immediately after his death, exploring precisely how his corpi came to be dismembered His texts literally went missing, from his death in 1778 until 1835, because they were not printed It traces this history from the story of his spendthrift heir through the political upheavals of late eighteenth-century Europe By following the movements of his copperplates as they passed from Rome to Paris and back to Rome, this chapter examines the practical consequences of these transfers The final chapter continues the story to the present day, focusing on how Piranesi’s ideas came back to life after a long dormancy While many people today are acquainted with Piranesi’s prints, even specialists are sometimes unfamiliar with his texts 26 The images contained in Piranesi’s volumes have

received great attention, but often in isolation from the texts that he created to accompany them How did this happen? The subject of Piranesi’s texts and the quirkiness of his arguments certainly have a role to play Chapter 7 explores how the norms and codes of the academic world, polite learning, and the modern art market all helped to decouple his words from his images It takes in a broad panorama of a wide range of sources, from a wicked eighteenth-century biography to a pithy book review written by a twentieth-century archaeologist and spy It recovers the unusual circumstances of the rediscovery of Piranesi’s texts in the 1930s Finally, it explicates the currency of his ideas in the modern disciplines devoted to the study of the ancient world, as well as their relationship to broader humanistic models that undergird our understanding of the past today

E

While the Antichità romane appeared in 1756, Piranesi’s training as an author and an etcher stretches back to his earliest years on the Venetian lagoon Giovanni Battista’s paternal ancestors probably came from Piran, a town known for its stone workers just across the Adriatic from Venice His earliest biographers record that he learned the rudiments of drawing from his maternal uncle Matteo Lucchesi, and that he studied architecture with Giovanni Antonio Scalfarotto, who had strong ties to the Piranesi clan 27 As an author and serious student of antiquity, Lucchesi undoubtedly taught Piranesi more than the fundamentals of design He published a book on the history of the Tuscan order and studied Etruscans, the pre-Roman people who populated central Italy 28 Employed as a proto (engineer) for the Venetian water authority, Lucchesi helped build and maintain

11introduction

the murazzi, sea walls made of massive boulders of Istrian stone Giovanni Battista’s older brother Valentino Domenico Piranesi was a Carthusian monk who lived on an island in the lagoon, worshipped in a fifteenth-century Byzantine-style church, and studied in his monastery’s rich library 29 This learned hermit was well versed in both Latin and Greek Giovanni Battista’s later interest in the marvels of ancient building technology, the Etruscans, and Roman history were all fired during his early years 30

After arriving in Rome in 1740 in the entourage of the Venetian ambassador to the papal court, Piranesi set about visiting the city’s sites and ruins He continued his education informally, spending time with the students at the French Academy, founded by Louis XIV The French government provided annual awards to an architect, a painter, and a sculptor of a prix de

Rome, which allowed the winners to travel to the Eternal City for a period of three to five years Housed in a palace on the Corso, just down the street from the Venetian ambassador’s residence, these French students drew and explored with Piranesi He later set up his first workshop directly across from the academy 31

Piranesi also began to hear voices His first independent publication, the Prima parte, which he began in 1742, gathered together a dozen sheets of architectural fantasies with a frontispiece and a dedication that recorded his experiences with the city’s “speaking ruins ”32 Rome’s splintered remains became a kind of Ouija board for divining the past, the key preoccupation of his earliest publications

While Piranesi accomplished many things during his early years in Rome, financial success was not one of them His father cut off his allowance, forcing Giovanni Battista to return to Venice in 1744 Piranesi came back to the Eternal City definitively in 1747, financing his return

through a business agreement with a printmaker in Venice to sell his merchandise there 33 He marked his arrival with the mysterious Grotteschi (Grotesques, begun in 1743, printed 1747–49), a collection of four prints populated by skeletons, serpents, fragments of ancient sculpture, and tombs These sheets are complex visual ciphers in which Hercules’s club, Pan’s pipes, and moss-topped skulls intermingle His cryptic Carceri

(Prisons, begun in 1745, printed 1749–50), which comprise a title page and thirteen plates of imaginary prisons, continue in this vein

During these early years between Venice and Rome, in addition to his work with Nolli and Vasi, Piranesi collaborated with others on book projects, with varying success His print for a large volume to celebrate the birth of the son of Charles III was rejected in 1748 A small plate he made documenting the appearance of a Medici villa appeared in a Florentine publication in 1744 His etchings of vedute appear on a large foldout print in a 1746 book that traced the path of the Tiber for more than a hundred kilometers Densely packed with visual and numerical data that present the contours of the riverbed and depth measurements, this illustration supported the text, which presented practical solutions to periodic flooding and suggestions on how to render the Tiber navigable so as to stimulate Rome’s economy

Piranesi began to create vedute to sell as individual prints and offered them to booksellers to include in the collections of etched images of the city they gathered and sold He learned the variety of uses these prints could have City views allowed Piranesi to document Rome’s ruins and to capture the city’s complicated overlapping histories They could record an event, like the celebrations that marked a royal birth They could explicate complex hydrological and economic problems, as the Tiber map did


Sometime around 1746, Piranesi began to create vedute on larger copperplates and to print them on grander sheets of paper He became an artist of astonishing versatility, a magician who could turn a flick of his etcher’s needle into a telescope in the hands of a dandy standing in the Roman Forum, or a stream of urine cascading from a street urchin onto the Pantheon

Over time, Piranesi began to take on more traditional scholarly projects His Antichità

romane de’ tempi della Repubblica, e de’ primi

imperatori (1748), a book of prints of Roman bridges and arches, focuses on ancient buildings that bear inscriptions 34 While the study of inscriptions on site was a regular activity for Grand Tourists and artists in Rome, ruins marked with words were a special fascination of Piranesi’s, one that sustained him throughout his career Drawn to the richness of the city’s burial chambers, he published a collection of prints of tombs around 1750, Le camere sepolcrali

degli antichi Romani le quali esistono dentro e fuori

di Roma 35 He published the fragments of the so-called trophies of Marius, a pair of enormous ancient sculptures moved to the Capitoline Hill from the main fountain of the Aqua Julia aqueduct in 1590 In the captions of the ten sheets of prints in his 1753 Trofei di Ottaviano

Augusto, Piranesi argues that these sculptures were erected by Octavian after his victory over Marc Antony at the battle of Actium

Piranesi also began to create the enterprise that would support his artistic and authorial productions He met Grand Tourists These northern visitors to the Eternal City would become some of Piranesi’s most devoted customers He courted learned men who could get him work as an engraver and support his own independent publications He established himself in Rome’s fractious community of printmakers About three years before the Antichità romane

came out, Piranesi got married 36 His wife’s dowry improved his financial prospects, allowing him to purchase paper and copperplates

Piranesi’s decision to become an author was the result of many years of accumulating many different skills He would rely on all of them to create the Antichità romane

piranesi's lost words - introduction

Documents