Piranesi’s Fragmentary Eloquence

There is no shortage of scholarship on Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78). The Venetian-born, Rome-based printmaker and his intriguing, prodigious output relating mostly to Roman antiquity have been the focus of countless exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, edited volumes, as well as monographs from the eighteenth century to the present.¹ So Piranesi is not someone who needs to be rediscovered, like some newly unearthed ruin of the past—of just the sort he depicted in his famous etchings. But as Heather Hyde Minor demonstrates in her stimulating, wide-ranging Piranesi’s Lost Words, there is still much to learn about this fascinating character.

Minor’s primary goal is to redress an incomplete understanding of Piranesi’s body of work by considering him as an author as well as an artist. Scholars, connoisseurs, curators, and dealers have long treated his striking prints as self-sufficient images. Left out of the equation are the copious texts that Piranesi penned, sometimes with collaborators, to complement those images. Minor argues that this state of affairs has left our conception of Piranesi’s larger project both denatured and impoverished—that his words and images were intended to be mutually reinforcing and reciprocally informative—so she sets about reconstituting Piranesi’s work. The result is a new and fresh perspective onto his seemingly boundless creative energy and intellectual acuity. Piranesi, it turns out, was never at a loss for words; it’s just that his words got lost somewhere along the way.

Minor’s book consists of an introduction and seven roughly chronological chapters focused on individual publications. The first two chapters, on Piranesi’s Antichità di Roma (1756) and, secondarily, his Lettere di Giustificazioni scritte a Milord Charlemont (1757), provide a foundation for the rest of the book—first, by giving a wonderful experiential tour through the volumes, enhanced by original photographs that offer a keen sense of their scale and weighty presence, then by exploring the genesis of the publications and the intellectual culture into which they emerged. In this way, Minor brings to life not only the multifaceted production and commerce of printed works in Piranesi’s Rome, but also the lively literati scene of eighteenth-century Europe. She discusses the experts involved in printing the four volumes of the Antichità, as well as the consumers and critics who responded to it. In certain ways, Piranesi’s working methods—his manner of composing his works from a wide variety of material and textual evidence, and of borrowing liberally from others—were typical, but a distinctively imaginative and free (or fast and loose) approach characterizes his “sampling.”

These tendencies became more pronounced over time, as Minor demonstrates in chapters 3 to 5, which address the Campus Martius antiquae urbis (1762), Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani (1761), Osservazioni . . . sopra la Lettre de Monsieur Mariette (1765), and Diverse maniere d’adornare i cammini (1767). These chapters all return to the key question of Piranesi’s relationship to the scholarly norms of his time. Classical language abilities aside, he seems to have been just as well read and erudite as many of his most learned contemporaries, able to martial a wide range of evidence (objects and texts; primary and secondary sources; ancient and modern) to construct an argument. It was fairly common practice, Minor points out, to “borrow” from other scholars, as Piranesi does frequently. However, he pushes that practice to an extreme, such that at times he seems to teeter on the edge of plagiarism, even by the looser standards of his own era. Perhaps more questionably, at times he knowingly presents his own creative fictions as observed facts.

Minor downplays Piranesi’s dissimulations, but a more cynical observer might label him a forger—a charge that some of his critics did in fact make, and that was leveled at others long before him, like Pirro Ligorio—whom Minor mentions, although for other reasons—and Annius of Viterbo, whom she does not.² Minor essentially sidesteps this thorny problem by suggesting that it is...