Introduction

By Nikolas Diakolios

A memory of Rome, its statesmen, philosophers, and most prominently, its architects, is preserved nowhere better in America than in Washington, D.C. It is fitting that the Luther W. Brady Gallery in the heart of D.C. is exhibiting Piranesi's Rome: Views of the Eternal City, highlighting the masterful etchings and engravings by the renowned eighteenth-century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi in The George Washington University's collection. 

Piranesi (1720-1778) was a Venetian artist renowned for his works depicting Ancient Rome's architectural marvels. As the son of a stonemason and master builder, Piranesi was destined to capture the grandeur and inevitable decay of Rome, and indeed, no one was better suited for this endeavor. Piranesi spent the first twenty years of his life studying architecture and stage design in Venice and considered himself an architect, consistently signing his work “architetto.” He initially apprenticed under his uncle, receiving practical training in structural and hydraulic engineering. This very background in architecture and technical knowledge set Piranesi’s work apart. 
Moving to Rome in 1740, Piranesi had intended to work as an architect; however, a lack of commissions propelled him towards another field that would define his artistic career. He became an apprentice of Giuseppe Vasi, the leading producer of the etchings and engravings of Rome. Piranesi created his most famous works from 1748 until his death in 1778 – including Vedute di Roma, or Views of Rome, a series of 135 plates of ancient and modern Rome. Piranesi worked in both etching and engraving, and examples of both can be seen in this exhibit. While both are printmaking techniques, engraving is a physical process while etching is a chemical process. Engraving involves cutting channels that allow ink to settle directly into a metal plate. Etchings, however, are made by coating a plate in a varnish that is then scraped away. Dipping the plate in an acid erodes the plate where the varnish was removed and creates the grooves for the ink. Both methods result in the creation of a metal plate that an artist would use to make multiple copies of the same print.

During Piranesi’s time, there was a thriving market for artistic prints of the scenery of Rome, supported by noble and aristocratic tourists visiting the “Eternal City.” The “Grand Tour,” as it was called, was a common feature of an aristocratic education in Europe from the seventeenth century until the widespread implementation of rail transport. For upper-class young men, going to Rome to visit and experience the sights of antiquity first-hand was seen as a right of passage. Seeking mementos of their pilgrimage, many visitors purchased prints depicting the sights of the Grand Tour. The wealth brought by these visitors was a driving factor in the creation of artistic renditions of Rome, including the works of Piranesi. 
Both the medium he utilized and the tradition of the Grand Tour contributed to Piranesi’s success. His process allowed him to make numerous copies of the same work, selling the prints to finance his career. The tourism that funded his work also disseminated it. Piranesi’s works were widely circulated among the European aristocracy in the eighteenth century, coinciding with the height of the Enlightenment as well as the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. His unique perspective on antiquity, particularly the monumental architecture of Rome, helped spark a desire to rediscover the classical world among European artists. From the late-eighteenth century onward, European art and architecture increasingly began to feature classical themes and motifs as Neoclassicism grew in Europe. 

Beyond the incredible detail in his etchings and engravings, Piranesi was able to capture the overgrowth and ruined state of these sites with a sense of forlorn beauty. In each of these prints, he is able to breathe life into a forgotten place. That view resonated deeply with the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Thus, in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poet describes the ruins of Rome as a reflection of the ancient civilization’s former glory and present decay. One way in particular that Piranesi was able to convey a sense of grandeur in his works was through his masterful use of the chiaroscuro technique, utilizing strong contrasts between light and shadow elements to render each structure vast and imposing. This is what motivated renowned German writer, poet, and thinker Johann Goethe to claim that the ruins depicted by Piranesi “could hardly satisfy” even an artistically-trained eye compared to Piranesi’s “rich imaginary impression.” Having seen the grandeur encompassed in Piranesi’s work, the extant monuments did not compare. 

Piranesi’s capricci, landscape art pieces done in a style that combines architecture with imaginary or exaggerated elements, encapsulate the monumental structures of Rome, its palaces, temples, and tombs, derelict within the early modern city and among the sublime Italian landscape. Many of the etchings and engravings in this exhibit depict iconic sites of antiquity in Rome, though Piranesi makes changes in his depictions. Some of his works, such as Internal View of the Atrium of the Portico of Octavia, portray a rather accurate image; yet, other etchings, like his depiction of the Tomb of the Plautii, border on complete fantasy. Piranesi does not portray the architecture of Rome as it stood in either his time or ours. Rather, he manifests with painstaking detail the Eternal City in an imaginary portrayal, a view that would be more familiar to a scholar who only knows Rome through history and myth.  

The exhibit also features Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione, or Imaginary Prisons, a project in which the artist’s imaginative series of labyrinthine prisons evokes a sense of entrapment through its physically impossible architectural structures. This exploration of scale and space contrasts with his Roman architecture depictions by inviting disorientation at the suspension of the onlooker’s belief regarding real-world laws of physics. Together, these series reveal Piranesi’s penchant to depict a maddening sense of scale and an imagined view of reality that present both the ruins of an ancient empire and the depths of the human psyche as equally monumental.

In collaboration with Gelman Library's Special Collections, the Luther W. Brady Gallery displays Piranesi's Rome: Views of the Eternal City with the help of students, faculty, and alumni from The George Washington University. This exhibit was made possible by the contribution of students in the summer 2024 class Discovering the Romans: Then and Now, taught by Dr. Rachel Pollack.

In an effort to further illuminate the connection between the works of Piranesi and the GW  Rome Now, a Pop-Up exhibition, displays .

Within the context of D.C.’s varied culture and diverse construction styles, the classically-inspired architectural structures of the city serve as concrete manifestations of the vivid, dreamlike works on display. Towering over the National Mall, the Washington Monument may appear, not as a monument in the nation's capital, but as one of Piranesi’s fantastical edifices come to life. 
 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey in Goethe’s Collected Works Volume 6. trans. Robert H. Heitner. Suhrkamp Publishers: New York, 1989. 363.