Although specialist engravers could cut letters on to figural plates, for whole pages of text, moveable type was required, which was under the purview of a text printer. (Over 60 sketches on printed sheets are extant.) It is significant that Piranesi had to send sheets to a book printer in order to have text printed. A chapter covers the way Piranesi used off-prints, faulty sheets and test proofs as waste paper on which he would sketch. The authors analyse Piranesi as a book producer. Numerous illustrations show us sketches where the artist refines ideas and improvises. Piranesi etchings often have diminutive figures to demonstrate the size of buildings they also exhort viewers to behold the wonders of the ancients. His drawing on the spot before motifs was complemented by invented and observed figures. The authors outline Piranesi’s career and method of operation. The texts assisted in selling bound collections of prints by adding intellectual coherence to views of disparate buildings and antiquities. He collaborated with scholars on texts for his books, later writing alone. Piranesi produced prints for authors but soon moved to producing prints of his own subjects, both individually and bound as books. His books of etchings – mainly the Views of Rome and Imaginary Prisons – presented architectural views and fragments of antiquity, which came from Piranesi’s efforts as an archaeologist-antiquarian. His skill for as an architectural draughtsman led to him recording the ruins of Rome in his painterly, exaggerated picturesque style in drawings and etchings. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) arrived from Venice aged 20, with an ambition to become an architect. Our consumption of Piranesi’s art has distorted our appreciation of it and left us ill-equipped to understand how Piranesi saw his work. They posit that the product was ultimately the book rather than individual prints or – in our age of catalogues raisonnés and universal access to a lifetime’s oeuvre – a body of prints, and that consequently it was the individual books that provided Piranesi’s a metric of his own success. Plates 545 x 410 mm.In Piranesi Unbound Carolyn Yearkes and Heather Hyde Minor reframe discussion of Piranesi not as solely or principally as a printmaker/artist but “as a writer, illustrator, printer, and publisher of books”. 35) second state (as usual for this issue), published by Giovanni Bouchard, Rome, 1750-58 with Raccolta di varie vedute di Roma, including the title page and 94 etchings, including 48 by Piranesi, the others by Anesi, LeGeay, Duflos and Bellicard, Second Edition, published by Bouchard, Rome, 1752 Trofei di Ottaviano Augusto, with the title page and nine plates, First Edition, published by Bouchard, Rome, 1753 and two plates from Vedute di Roma ( Veduta del Tempio di Cibele & Veduta del Tempio di Giove tonante), 17, both first state (of five and six, respectively), before Bouchard's address and price all with margins, in very good condition, the double-page plates bound with wide paper guards in an 18th century Italian vellum binding, with contemporary end-papers, the binding lacking the spine and with some wear (book) The complete set of 14 etchings, circa 1749-50, on laid paper, watermark Fleur-de-Lys in Single Circle (Robison 5), a very fine, early set of the First Edition, Second Issue, printed with a light, selectively wiped plate tone, all but two plates in the first state, the Title Plate (R.
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