Exhibit
Creation Date
1756
Height
43.5
Width
60
Medium
Genre
Description
Piranesi’s Antichità Romane is a four-volume work whose images depict ruins, tombs, bridges, and masonry in vedute, plans, cross-sections, and close-ups. This image depicts the sepulchral chamber of freedmen and domestic slaves who labored for Lucius Arruntius. Discovered in 1733, it was one of the few intact tombs from a Roman necropolis and the subject of 14 of Piranesi’s images in this volume. As its caption notes, this is where inscriptions, frescoes, and domestic objects were found; detailed studies of each type of remnant follow in the volume.
It is worth noting that, in the famous passage from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he is actually looking at images from this work and only learns of the Carceri from Coleridge’s description of them. Antichità Romaneas a whole is emphatically documentary. While its shadowy ancient tombs, littered with human remains and gravediggers, are presented from dramatic vantage points which may suggest the romance of the past, the work explicitly seeks to display and contextualize the evidence and experience of archaeological study. Underground tombs of this kind drew archaeological interest because they were preserved, but they meshed easily with gothic, romantic, macabre tastes that Piranesi fostered and to some extent shared. This variety of visual genres generates a sharp contrast between atmospheric perspective and striking chiaroscuro in vedute such as the one above and almost abstract objectivity in the close-up detailed studies. These generic and tonal contrasts in the volume might suggest that the disorder and decay of subterranean burial vaults summon the regularity and exactitude that Piranesi supplies in the volume’s enlarged close ups.
The content of this image’s lengthy caption ranges from burial methods to aesthetic value judgments. He mentions ashes of corpses and sarcophagi that contain corpses with their medals in their mouths, likely a grim reference to an ancient custom for the deceased to pay for passage into Hades. He also admires the excellent taste and fine skill of the artisans who produced the frescoes. These frescoes, which appear in frontal close-ups on following pages, are in this image dramatically illuminated by a lantern held by the man on the far left. The crumbling, broken corner wall is the focus of the composition, and the left side of the vault suggests enclosure while the opening to the right and the staircase visible in the background renders an expansive three-dimensional space within the compact limitations of a single page.
The perspective borrows from the elaborate methods and mechanics of stage design in the early decades of the eighteenth century by taking advantage of the ability of scena per angolo to suggest expanding space within narrow physical limitations of either stage or page. Alternations in light and shadow, textures that crumble to expose layers or display intact and ornate embellishments lend this scene a sense of the dramatic. Its actors add the pleasurable admiration of the grand tourists and antiquarians as well as the plunder of two gravediggers clamoring into the depths of the altar on the right. This juxtaposition between aesthetic, historical education and commercial acquisition—between pleasure and plunder—aptly conveys the often overlapping aspects of antiquarian pursuits.
Publisher
Firmin Didot
Collection
Accession Number
NE 662.P5 A2 vol. 2
Additional Information
Printing Context
The versions of the etchings included in this exhibit come from the Didot edition of Piranesi’s Opere [Works] published in Paris between 1835 and 1839. They thus of course represent the final state and include any reworking for printings that followed the plates’ original pressings. The journey of Giambattista Piranesi’s original copper plates from Rome to Paris is directly tied to international military and state affairs. In 1798 during the upheaval following the French Revolution, Neapolitan troops invaded Rome. The Piranesi print shop and museum was ransacked, and all of the copper plates stolen. Francesco appealed to French officials to have the plates returned; after an interception by an English warship, the plates were reunited with Francesco and his brother Pietro, who had both fled to Paris. After Francesco’s death in 1810 and many potential and actual sales, the plates were eventually acquired by the Didot press. A dynastic printing house for two centuries, the Didot family were major innovators in printing and recipients of international awards for typography.
Provenance
This digital image is from a complete 29-volume set of Piranesi’s posthumous Opere (1835-1839) held by the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University Libraries, at the University of South Carolina. It was scanned in the Digital Collections Department. The set was likely acquired directly from the publisher, and the cover of each volume bears the imprint of the name of the university up through 1866: South Carolina College.