There is discussion of the various patrons who supported Piranesi. Many collectors had books bound to their own specifications, sometimes with a family escutcheon. “Reference works on Piranesi’s prints typically divorce images from their texts, summarizing his books as lists of illustrations, and organizational problems abound within them.”Ĭopies of Piranesi’s books were bound once they were sold, with presumably sample books held by Piranesi’s publisher-bookseller. The authors note that cataloguers have paid inconsistent attention to these vignettes, the plates for which have been lost. (Not all the sources are Piranesi’s books.) The artist designed his own letterforms and etched decorative vignettes of initial capital letters. The printed sheets used for sketches are analysed, with sources identified. Printing with movable type set in trays and printing from copperplates were two distinct specialities in eighteenth-century Rome, requiring different presses and teams of skilled laborers.” Type printing was relief matrix and copperplate was intaglio (recessed) matrix. “No matter how successful he became, Piranesi never owned a letterpress. Although specialist engravers could cut letters on to figural plates, for whole pages of text, moveable type was required, which was under the purview of a text printer. (Over 60 sketches on printed sheets are extant.) It is significant that Piranesi had to send sheets to a book printer in order to have text printed. A chapter covers the way Piranesi used off-prints, faulty sheets and test proofs as waste paper on which he would sketch. The authors analyse Piranesi as a book producer. Numerous illustrations show us sketches where the artist refines ideas and improvises. Piranesi etchings often have diminutive figures to demonstrate the size of buildings they also exhort viewers to behold the wonders of the ancients. His drawing on the spot before motifs was complemented by invented and observed figures. The authors outline Piranesi’s career and method of operation. The texts assisted in selling bound collections of prints by adding intellectual coherence to views of disparate buildings and antiquities. He collaborated with scholars on texts for his books, later writing alone. Piranesi produced prints for authors but soon moved to producing prints of his own subjects, both individually and bound as books. His books of etchings – mainly the Views of Rome and Imaginary Prisons – presented architectural views and fragments of antiquity, which came from Piranesi’s efforts as an archaeologist-antiquarian. His skill for as an architectural draughtsman led to him recording the ruins of Rome in his painterly, exaggerated picturesque style in drawings and etchings. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) arrived from Venice aged 20, with an ambition to become an architect. Our consumption of Piranesi’s art has distorted our appreciation of it and left us ill-equipped to understand how Piranesi saw his work. They posit that the product was ultimately the book rather than individual prints or – in our age of catalogues raisonnés and universal access to a lifetime’s oeuvre – a body of prints, and that consequently it was the individual books that provided Piranesi’s a metric of his own success. In Piranesi Unbound Carolyn Yearkes and Heather Hyde Minor reframe discussion of Piranesi not as solely or principally as a printmaker/artist but “as a writer, illustrator, printer, and publisher of books”.
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