John Marciari: Welcome to Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, I am John Marciari, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints and Curatorial Chair at the Morgan, and the curator of this exhibition. This Church Interior provides the perfect introduction to Piranesi’s drawings. It shows how the artist made preliminary studies for his etchings, but it also demonstrates how he would often return to those studies years later, reworking drawings and repurposing old ideas for new projects. The sheet began life around 1742, when the young Piranesi was developing his first publication, the Prima parte d’architettura, e prospettive, a compendium of imaginary buildings: it is one of several studies for the Vestibule of an Ancient Temple plate in that work. The black chalk underdrawing, the thin brown lines, and the neatly applied gray wash are typical of a young architectural draftsman, worried about the careful delineation of perspective. The thicker, freely drawn lines in medium brown ink then represent modifications to the original idea. However careful the original design, Piranesi did not treat his drawings as precious objects, and it is captivating to see him quickly crossing out some elements and drawing over others with heavy, quick lines.

It is also fascinating that we can place this sheet of paper back in Piranesi’s hands multiple times over the following decades. Around 1760, probably as he prepared to move to a new workshop, Piranesi gathered a group of his earlier drawings together, glued them to mounts like that seen here (with its double border), and signed them. Moreover, when Piranesi finally had commissions to design church buildings a few years later, around 1763, he returned to this sheet again, for he reused the idea of an apse screened with columns in his plans for the Lateran Basilica and Santa Maria del Priorato, as you will see later in the exhibition.

John Marciari: Around 1748, about five years after publishing his Prima parte, Piranesi conceived a new publication of imaginary architectural designs. Rather than buildings of many different types like the earlier work, however, this new publication would consist entirely of dark vaulted spaces, fourteen etchings that he entitled “Capricious Inventions of Prisons.” Imaginary prisons and subterranean crypts had long been a mainstay of theater set designs and architectural treatises—Piranesi had himself included one in the Prima parte—but a work consisting entirely of such spaces was something new, and it speaks to Piranesi’s tendency to embrace the most imaginative schemes.

The Carceri were published in 1749 or 1750, but in the preceding years, Piranesi had made many drawings of shadowy interiors viewed at oblique angles, perspectives that made the full scale of the spaces impossible to grasp, thus heightening a sense of drama and mystery. Only a handful of drawings correspond directly to the published prints, but many other sheets document his preliminary experiments with the idea, including the Interior Arches and the other drawings seen here.

Typically, Piranesi did not leave the idea of the prisons behind once he published the set. He continued making drawings of similar spaces, and in 1761, he reworked the etching plates, added two new prints, and republished the series with the new title Imaginary Prisons.

This sheet is one of Piranesi’s latest architectural fantasies, for after the mid-1760s he would largely abandon such exercises in imaginary spaces and would concentrate instead on archaeological study and classicizing designs. On the one hand, we can see how a study like this Fantasy of a Magnificent Forum looks back to his earlier architectural drawings, with its creative combination of a triumphal arch and a colonnaded forum, ideas that we can see in many earlier works. On the other hand, we see how far Piranesi has come as a draftsman, for this study is apparently drawn freehand, with no careful preliminary perspective drawing made with a ruler and black chalk. The bold lines and jagged hatching suggest instead that it was thrown off in a fury of invention. It may in fact have been done as a sort of command performance, for a similar drawing at the National Gallery of Art has an inscription indicating that it was drawn “in the presence” of a young English visitor to Piranesi’s studio. We can imagine this drawing was created in similar circumstances, as an end in itself, the outpouring of a mind filled with grand architectural visions, the very epitome of Piranesi’s “sublime ideas.”

For rare and special ceremonies such as the visit of a prince, Venetians produced designs for gondolas and other boats and barges that would be covered with elaborate temporary ornaments. There is no evidence, however, that such a ceremony occurred during Piranesi’s return to Venice in the mid-1740s. Instead, when Piranesi spent time in the studio of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, the leading Venetian artist of the day, he likely encountered drawings for earlier ceremonial watercraft and was thus inspired to make this exuberant study of his own. The proliferation of ornament is staggering: we see heroic nudes, shells, satyrs, an eagle, crowns, and medallions, with a dragon at the stern and a shining sun at the prow, all set amid complex rococo curls. It is difficult to imagine that such a boat could ever exist. Never one to let an imaginative drawing go to waste, however, Piranesi would find other opportunities to repurpose the inventions on this sheet. The decorative motifs would reappear in his later Grotteschi series of etchings, while the center of the gondola would be turned into an elegant coach in his etched view of the Vatican. Look for these, later in the exhibition.

John Marciari: At the center of this drawing, we see a design for a richly decorated pulpit, meant to be built around a column of a church. Such pulpits were occasionally added to older Venetian churches in the eighteenth century, but no built examples rival the complexity of that which Piranesi presents here, with prophets holding tablets at the corners, a roundel depicting the Baptism of Christ at the front, and a range of rocaille ornament. Yet, Piranesi offers not merely an elevation view of the pulpit, but also—at left—a plan for the structure, even showing the steps necessary to mount it. It seems plausible that this could have been a presentation drawing, made for a prospective patron, although there is no evidence that Piranesi was ever granted such a commission.

Whatever the original purpose of the drawing, we must admire its artifice. The pulpit elevation is shown as though it is on a just-unrolled piece of parchment, with a string of medallions used to hold the sheet open, while the plan appears on a tablet placed underneath. And as is so often the case with Piranesi’s drawings, this sheet outlived its original function. Piranesi would take it back to Rome, and it would become part of the thinking behind an etching in the Grotteschi series he published a few years later.

John Marciari: This drawing represents an important evolution in the way we understand the workings of Piranesi’s studio. Because the sheet is part of a collection that comes intact from Piranesi’s workshop, it was long thought to be a study by Piranesi himself. It was also accordingly believed that he had restored the ancient relief that it represents, a lunette installed in the Villa Albani around 1760. What now seems to be the case instead is that Piranesi acquired the drawing from Nicolas Lhullier, a French artist who supplied careful renderings of Roman antiquities to many artists and architects in Rome. It’s one of many studies by Lhullier found among Piranesi drawings at the Morgan and elsewhere, works that were clearly acquired so that they could be added to the studio’s source material for later inventions. Piranesi was forever interested in works that bore evidence of the applied arts in ancient Rome, and acquiring this study from Lhullier was perhaps more expedient than attempting to make his own drawing of the relief. Moreover, while the depiction of arms and armor were surely the primary interest in the drawing, the winged serpents of the spandrels would reappear in one of the chimney place designs published by Piranesi later in the 1760s.

John Marciari: This double-sided drawing tells us much about the use and reuse of drawings in Piranesi’s workshop. The sheet was clearly preserved because of the large figure drawing on one side. It is one of many studies of figures whom Piranesi encountered during his daily life; these were not made in preparation for prints but were instead simply the output of Piranesi’s constant sketching. In this case, the man in a cap and apron, working at a table, can be identified as one of the printers who in Piranesi’s later years worked to satisfy the enormous demand for his etchings.

The back of the drawing tells a different but equally interesting tale. It is a fragment of Piranesi’s preparatory drawing for the View of the Arch of Septimius Severus, a plate added around 1770 or 1772 to the Vedute di Roma, his series of Roman views. We have already seen how Piranesi preserved and later reused so many of his drawings, but the studies for his views were apparently a different matter: once he made the corresponding etchings, he generally reused the backs of the view drawings for other purposes. Most of Piranesi’s preparatory studies of this type thus survive only as fragments like this one. There are others that can be seen later in the exhibition.

John Marciari: Piranesi’s began his series of large Roman views, the Vedute di Roma, in the mid-1740s, and he continued adding to it for the rest of his life, eventually publishing more than 130 depictions of Rome’s principal monuments. This drawing is a preparatory study for one of the later additions, a view of the Tiber River and the mouth of the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer that drained the low-lying areas between Rome’s hills, and which eventually became the main sewer of the Roman city. Piranesi and others praised the Cloaca as a masterful feat of Roman engineering.

Intact preparatory studies for the Vedute are very rare, but this is one of a handful of examples that survive from Piranesi’s last years. The drawing is at the same scale as the print and is clearly a study for it, but what is fascinating is how little information is actually captured in the drawing. The architectural frameworks of the embankment wall and the riverside buildings are set out, but the masonry is not indicated, and the ancient round temple and medieval belltower that rise above the central building are missing completely. Piranesi seems intent on capturing only the most transient aspects of the scene: the overhanging vegetation and the wooden structures erected by the fishermen at left. Piranesi probably made a few additional studies, but when one of his contemporaries asked how he could manage to produce prints from such slight sketches, Piranesi replied, “The drawing is not on my paper, I agree, but it is all here in my head. You’ll see it in the etching plate.”

John Marciari: The façade and nave of the ancient basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano had been the focus of extensive restoration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the altar end of the church was ill suited to the needs of the modern liturgy, with a very shallow apse and essentially no choir. Pope Clement XIII thus turned his attention to the project, and by the fall of 1763 was said to be reviewing proposals from various architects. Piranesi emerged as the pope’s favorite, and he presented Clement with a number of different proposals for rebuilding the church. By 1764, however, work had been canceled. Rome was in the middle of a terrible famine, which put a strain on Vatican finances, but rivalries between Piranesi and the architectural establishment may have played an equally important role in stopping the project. Luigi Vanvitelli, then the leading architect in the city, jealously opined that “Maybe, if the Pope reflects well on the matter, he will suspend the renovation of San Giovanni in Laterano; the real reason for so doing is that he should not allow a madman, like Piranesi, to direct such work, because he is not capable of it.”

The most detailed of the drawings connected with the project, this sheet shows the entire basilica, with the nave as rebuilt by Francesco Borromini, the transept renovations done around 1600 at center, and—at right—Piranesi’s most elaborate scheme for a high new apse, which is flooded with light from a window above, and with the altar set in front of a screen of columns. This last motif harks back to one Piranesi’s earliest architectural fantasies, which is seen at the start of the exhibition.

John Marciari: The Morgan’s collection is particularly rich in Piranesi’s designs for chimneypieces. These include many that would appear in the plates of his Diverse Maniere, and others that—although unused for prints—show even more clearly Piranesi’s wild imagination at work. The Chimneypiece with Masks, a Bird, and a Rabbit is particularly evocative. It began as a quick sketch in blunt red chalk, which was then revised and refined with messy penwork. Some of the motifs, such as the masks and the panpipe on the right jamb of the chimneypiece, are those which Piranesi associated with Etruscan style. They are a reminder that the Diverse Maniere was, at least in part, a polemical treatise concerning the use of Etruscan, Egyptian, and Roman style in modern design. Yet, the bird at left, the strange, indistinguishable creature at upper right, and the small animal at lower right labeled “Coniglio”—a rabbit—can hardly relate to such polemics and represent instead Piranesi’s more fanciful, inventive side.

John Marciari: Although Piranesi’s project to rebuild the Lateran never came to fruition despite the support of Pope Clement XIII, the pope’s nephew, Giambattista Rezzonico, soon afterwards gave our artist a commission to rebuild the Priory of the Knights of Malta. Located high on the Aventine Hill above Rome, the Priory was on the outskirts of the city. Visitors accessed the site either by walking up from the river, or else by taking a carriage that left them at the end of a narrow road at the back of the site. To provide a grander entry to those arriving by carriage, Piranesi created a new piazza. He surrounded this with a high wall that masked the vineyards beyond, which also gave Piranesi a blank canvas to decorate with the signs and symbols of the site, the patron, and the Knights. The Maltese cross refers to the Knights, the medallions with towers to the Rezzonico coat of arms, and the masks, panpipes, and lyre to the Etruscan ceremonies that Piranesi imagined as occurring on the Aventine Hill in antiquity.

First sketched in black chalk, and then refined with pen and ink, this drawing even includes measurements and is clearly the working drawing provided to the stucco artists who brought Piranesi’s plan into being.

John Marciari: While Piranesi’s pen drawings had become bolder and bolder over the years, there is little that truly prepares us for the dramatic drawings that he made during a trip to Southern Italy in the last year or two of his life. Over an initial sketch in black chalk, he then worked this drawing up with thick lines of ink, perhaps drawn with a reed pen rather than the traditional quill. We can recognize his typical figures in the foreground—a gesturing guide, a hatted Grand Tourist, and a heavily cloaked monk or beggar at right—but these figures have become abstractions. Perhaps this was just the natural evolution of Piranesi’s drawing manner. Alternately, the ailing artist, who had been in poor health for some years, might have realized that his assistants would ultimately translate these drawings into prints, and so adopted a schematic style to highlight the essential forms and necessary chiaroscuro.

While most of Piranesi’s drawings from his late trip to Southern Italy document Pompeii and Paestum, this sheet depicts the remains unearthed at Pozzuoli, the ancient town of Puteoli. There was much confusion about the site. It was believed to be a temple dedicated to Serapis, but it was actually the ancient marketplace. This confusion may explain Piranesi’s decision to show it as a jumble of ancient ruins, with the modern town beyond.

As all the sheets shown in this wall make clear, Piranesi constantly recycled the paper in his workshop. Drawings of imaginary buildings, studies of ornamental motifs from antiquity, or chimneypiece designs like those on the other sides of these sheets might be kept for decades, to be consulted, reworked, and reused. Other kinds of drawings, however, most notably the studies for views of Rome, were turned over and reused for new ideas. Similarly, proof states of prints were not, in Piranesi’s view, items for collectors, but rather, paper to be reused once refinements were made and the final states of the etchings were set.

This preparatory drawing for Piranesi’s view of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the City of Cori, a plate in his Antichità di Cora of 1763, is akin to other studies of its type, most of which only survive only as fragments. As with other studies for the views, the schematic nature of the drawing is surprising: Piranesi has carefully transcribed the inscription and the rich Corinthian capital. These are logical decisions given the related plate’s appearance in an archaeological publication. Yet other elements are in a kind of shorthand, as we see in the terracotta tiles of the roof, the projecting beams and flowerpot at the window, and the patchwork peeling of the stucco between the columns.

John Marciari: It is a remarkable coincidence that the Morgan’s three late drawings of sites in Southern Italy—the drawing of Pozzuoli, and two studies of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii—all came to light together at an English country auction in 1950, were divided and subsequently passed through multiple owners, and yet came back together when acquired by the Library, one by purchase and the others as gifts from different donors. There were, however, five Piranesi drawings in total at that English auction: the three now at the Morgan and two that remain in the Ortiz collection. The group of five is here reunited for the first time in many decades.

The Ortiz drawing showing the tombs of the Via dei Sepolcri, just outside the Herculaneum Gate of Pompeii, is the most complex and remarkable drawing of the entire set, for it is a collage of several different sheets, stitched together as Piranesi reworked and expanded the design. Look closely at the structure of the drawing. It began on a small scale, as the sheet to the right of center, but Piranesi first added the revision of the sheet further to the right, before then attaching both to the large, final backing sheet and unifying the composition with his thick lines of dark ink. It is one of several studies of Pompeii that have similar revisions, which suggests that Piranesi only settled on his grand format after making a few initial drawings of the site.