Week_01- Giovanni Battista Piranesi

For the rest of the semester, I would like to research and analyse the Artist
Giovanni Battista Piranesi. If Piranesi is too popular, I would like to choose MC Escher :D

What interested me with Piranesi's prision etchings was that, even though he is not an architect, he can roduce many detailed shetched ans etchings of architectural structures.
 He is most famous for his etchings of prisons, certainly, but what interested me was the fact that they are all fictional pieces.

I understand that I am to only analyse his prison etchings, BUT I believe that some context in his Rome etchings must be explored first:

I look back to his early works, with the sketches of Rome, where he used pre-existing buildings as reference for his drawing, and I believe that he he learned to some extent, his architectural, foundation and analysis from doing these sketches.

The Colosseum Etching, 1757

The Arch of Trajan, as it would have been in the 18th Century

However, through further reading of his works in Rome, I was more and more drawn to the fact that, with the remains of Rome as bases for his drawings, he included smaller details in his drawingas to complete the architcture: that is to say, he drew the remains as they would have looked all those centures ago when they were still fully intact.
They are very convincing and intricate in design and details, that it's fascination how wide his imagination and accuracy is in depicting them, even though they weren't fully intact when he drew them.

Not only did he use reality as a canvas for his works, but he visualised on the (somewhat) abstract plane to create a more complete picture of the ruins.

The Prisons (Carceri)
This collection of sketches consist of 16 Prints which were unnamed by Piranesi and titles were allocated according to content description. These prison sketched intrugue me with their grandiose and amazing designs, of subterranean spaces and trhe presence of machinery and various stairs and walkways.

Piranesi influenced the surrealist and romantic movement. This is and odd combination, yet is somewhat correlated- The Romantic period consisted of flights of imagination and feelings, more focused on human perception rather than rationality and science. Surrealism, from what I myself can understand, is a movement in which imagination and reality mingle together to create an entirely different viewpoint of the world.

I think Piranesi would be a very interesting person to explore in the following semester and it certainly is different from just simply choosing an architect and working with them. Piranesi is an artist, yet he is able to attain essential qualities the same as an architect would through his works.

VI- The Smoking Fire

VII- The Draw Bridge

XI- The Arch with the shell ornament

References:
Author Unknown, Date Unknown. Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Images and information]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi  
(accessed 4/8/13)