If one leaves aside Piranesi's writings, often polemical, on the correct use of ornament or the origins of classical architecture, which form a minor part of his oeuvre, and whose authorship is still sometimes contested, the large majority of his output consists of a series of etchings showing the ruins of Rome and its environs, with some reconstructions, as, for instance, that of the Campus Martius. In this essay I want to consider more closely the nature of this visual history and its implications. They barely address the actual form of his publications on ancient Rome, in that his representations of Rome's past are not in the form of a continous narrative discourse, chronologically ordered, or even of a chronicle of facts, dates and material remains (of which Le Roy's chronological diagram of church ground plans is a rudimentary example), but a visual history. They concentrate on his position in the Graeco-Roman debate and in the controversies of the 1750s and 1760s between archaeologists, art historians and antiquarians on the origins of architecture, the nature and the legitimization of ornament. Yet common to all these new approaches, however valuable and innovative, is that they favor the content, the arguments, of Piranesi to the neglect of the actual visual form of his historical work. The Graeco-Roman debate on the origins of classical architecture between, on one hand, Julien-David Le Roy and, on the other, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Piranesi, has thus become the point of departure for recent studies of Piranesi's activities as an architectural historian. In the past decade Lola Kantor, Fabio Barry, Mario Bevilacqua and Francesco Nevola have situated his writings in the context of Venetian debate on the relationship between architectural forms and function, exchanges between representatives of the new disciplines of art history and archaeology and the humanist antiquarian study of Roman ruins. In his wake John Wilton-Ely and Manfredo Tafuri have developed a reading of his work as a precursor of modernism, favoring, like his fellow Venetian Lodoli, the simple expression of a building's function, and rejecting the traditional Vitruvian view of Greece as the cradle of classical architecture. Instead, in one of the first articles he wrote after his arrival at the Warburg Institute in London, he drew attention to Piranesi's importance as an architectural theorist and historian. Rudolf Wittkower was one of the first to break both with the tradition that considered Piranesi mainly as a vedutisto, a brilliant and highly original producer of evocative views of Rome, and with the Romantic tradition that saw him as the inventor of irrational space and of prophetic visions of the modern predicament. This perspective lies within the very scope of understanding the reasons of the misinterpretations, the post-Romanticist perception of the ‘artist’, and Piranesi’s main arguments on the aesthetics, origins of architecture, and law.Ī Visual History of Architecture One of the major developments in recent Piranesi studies is to consider his work as an integral part of the aesthetic and historical debates sparked off after the 1750 rediscovery of Pompei, Herculaneum and Paestum, and the resulting publications by Winckelmann and Julien-David Le Roy. Thus the paper aims at offering a new perspective to be adopted while examining Piranesi’s works. Therefore, the present study firstly demonstrates that such observations derive not from an investigation of the work itself, nor from an appraisal of the historical context, but owe to the long-standing view in western culture that identifies the creator’s ethos with the work and interprets the work so as to cohere with that pre-constructed ethos. One of the most important vectors of approach yielding misinterpretation of Piranesi derived from the phenomenon comprising the early nineteenth-century Romanticist reception of Piranesi’s character and work. But Piranesi was misinterpreted both in his day and posthumously. He is numbered foremost among the founders of modern archaeology. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) is an important Italian architect with his seminal theses in the debates on the ‘origins of architecture’ and ‘aesthetics’.
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