Piranesi: The Complete Etchings

by Luigi Ficacci

The most famous 18th-century copper engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) made his name with etchings of ancient Rome. His startling, chiaroscuro images imbued the city’s archaeological ruins with drama and romance and became favorite souvenirs for the Grand Tourists who traveled Italy in pursuit of classical culture and education. Today, Piranesi is renowned not just for shaping the European imagination of Rome, but also for his elaborate series of fanciful prisons, Carceri, which have influenced generations of creatives since, from the Surrealists to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Loosely based on contemporary stage sets rather than the actual dingy dungeons of Piranesi’s day, these intricate images defy architectural reality to play instead with perspective, lighting, and scale. Staircases exist on two planes simultaneously; vast, vaulted ceilings seem to soar up to the heavens; interior and exterior distinctions collapse. With a low viewpoint and small, fragile figures, the prison scenes become monstrous megacities of incarceration, celebrated to this day as masterworks of existentialist drama.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

787 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 2022

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This large-format behemoth is the ideal way to examine Piranesi's works, which are worth looking at as big and as detailed as possible. As the title suggests, it's a full catalogue raisonnée of his etchings, from the vedute and the Roman antiquities to the weird fantasias of the ‘imaginary prisons’, along with a whole load of assorted illustrations and other designs.



I absolutely love etching as a style (if it is one; it seems more than just a medium, somehow). The intricacy of it all just makes these pictures endlessly fascinating to stare at and lose yourself in. Piranesi's visual excavation of Roman ruins was a major landmark in Neoclassicism, and yet, like a lot of the most interesting artists of the time, the wild emotion in his works seems also to anticipate Romanticism, especially in the deeply weird and somehow pathological Carceri d'invenzione.



Piranesi has been such a massive influence on later graphic design and art that it's hard to imagine how things would look without him. This is especially true with line drawing and comic book art, where the inheritors of this tradition are largely to be found; I am put in mind of people like the bande-dessinée maestro François Schuiten, who has a similar architectural sensibility (and whose La Tour paid direct homage to Piranesi). Piranesi's tendency to draw human figures as slightly less than life-size gives even his drawings of real Italian scenes an air of almost sci-fi gigantism.





I was not a huge fan of the opinionated, and often rather wanky, introductory essay from Luigi Ficacci, but after all that's hardly why you would get a book like this. The illustrations themselves are front and centre, and they are reproduced in fantastic and awe-inspiring detail.

[monkeysdontlaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Тут на каналі є горталка і декілька фотографій.

Для тих, хто планує купити цю книжку від Taschen - тут фактично збірник ілюстрацій. Тексту про автора чи історію самих гравюр ви тут не знайдете :)
Так як зараз готую невеликий пост про одну із серій художника, мені дуже не вистачило у цьому виданні пояснень і аналізу. Є назви гравюр і 2-3 речення про кожну серію. Але книжка зроблена дуже якісно.

А ще я створила канал з книжковими акціями :)

[B. A. Balfour · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5