He died in Rome in 1778, and was buried in the church he had helped restore, Santa Maria del Priorato. In 1761 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing facility of his own. In 1748–1774, back in Rome, he created a series of vedute of the city which established his fame. From 1743 to 1747 he was back in Venice where he often visited Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. He worked with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to produce a series of vedute (views) of the city. He was apprenticed of his uncle, who was a leading architect in Magistrato delle Acque, the state organization responsible for engineering and restoring historical buildings.įrom 1740, he worked in Rome as a draughtsman for Marco Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador. "Invenzioni capric di carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)," Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 153.ġ7Marchesano, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” 151.Giovanni Battista Piranesi, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" (Le Carceri d'Invenzione), was born in Veneto, the Republic of Venice in a family of stonemasons and architects. 17ġ4Lucchi, Lowe, Pavanello, The arts of Piranesi, 125.ġ5Marchesano, Louis. The prisons of I Carceri stand out as one of his major achievements. For example, in Italy, a popular representation of the sublime involved depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting, a terrific and devastating event. The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice.
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