Piranesi Unbound

"One of the greatest graphic artists of any age, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known as the virtuoso etcher responsible for print series such as Imaginary Prisons and Views of Rome. These largescale engravings depict scenes in and around Rome, taken from first-hand examinations of antiquities and classical structures. Piranesi combined these vistas with exaggerated compositions, scale, and perspective, in order to create immense, ambiguous scenes that have inspired generations of artists-Piranesi's 18thcentury biographer named him "the Rembrandt of ruins." But Piranesi was also a gifted and prolific scholar, architect, and designer, who printed and published twelve books over the course of his career. While most of his visual work was created to appear alongside texts that explain his theories of space, architecture, and drawing, their study has historically separated the images from the texts for which they were designed. Co-authored by two leading scholars, this is the first book to examine Piranesi's complete printed volumes and career as a maker of books, and argues that his engravings cannot be fully understood without studying them in the context of the books he designed. Individual chapters examine how Piranesi's drawings and prints became pages, how pages and plates became volumes, how volumes became books, and how books were marketed, sold, and read. Embedded within these essays are several focused explorations of each theme: illustrations with texts designed to explicate aspects of Piranesi's production and distribution"--