Giovanni Battista Piranesi

As I am constantly iterating my proposal for my final project, I am learning more and more about the history of Circus Maximus. I am really impressed about how Romans managed to build such a structure with so much history about it. I have to say the architecture is the most important thing in this kind of buildings.

In my search for references to support my research, I came across an article writing about this artist named Giovanni Battista Piranesi well-known particularly for his drawings or etchings. He was a master of capturing the 18th century of Rome. In the article they also conduct an analysis and describes how he uses specific techniques and controls the image to impact the viewer. By having an amazing knowledge about shape and perspective he uses it to craft his art work. (Rapp, 2008)

Here are some examples of his etchings:

The detail of his work put him apart as he was one of the greatest etching artist at that time. Unfortunately not a lot of his drawings survived as he might have destroyed some to protect his secrets and also some of them still remained unfinished. Because of his usage of perspective, being deceptive as some artists say nowadays, Piranesi was often blamed for an unreal representation of Rome. This was mainly because he exaggerated the measurements.

This was such a great article, describing not only the history of the artist, but also some techniques he might have used. Just amazing!

References

Rapp, J. (2008). A geometrical analysis of multiple viewpoint perspective in the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: an application of geometric restitution of perspective. The Journal of Architecture, [online] 13(6), pp.701-736. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com.login.library.ucs.ac.uk/doi/full/10.1080/13602360802573868?scroll=top&needAccess=true [Accessed 1 Nov. 2016].

Theantiquarium.com. (2016). The Antiquarium - Antique Print & Map Gallery - Architecture. [online] Available at: https://www.theantiquarium.com/architecture [Accessed 1 Nov. 2016].