Giovanni Battista Piranesi Research Paper

The Lasting Influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th century printmaker and architect with a fascination for ancient Roman architecture, but to future generations of artists, he was a visionary who the rebuilt the ruins of classical Roman architecture into macabre and overwhelming structures of fantasy. Piranesi’s Le Carceri infuses his own imagination into each of the 16 plates in this series, manipulating space, light and perspective to create a striking atmosphere that imbues the same sense of dread experienced by Le Carceri’s prisoners into the viewer. Not only was Piranesi an inspiration for other architects and artists during the 18th and 19th centuries such as John Soane, but he also had …show more content…
English architect John Soane is perhaps one of Piranesi’s most outspoken admirers who, much like Piranesi, attempted to “push the boundaries of invention” to their extremes in the pursuit of original concepts and designs . Soane was an avid collector of Piranesi’s etchings, and his paintings and sketches exhibited much of the same experimentation with light and space as seen in those pieces. Soane’s greatest artistic achievement, was an eponymous museum whose interiors exhibited the same imaginative structures and spatial ambiguity showcased in Le Carceri. During the 20th century, a new movement known as Visionary Architecture arose, and with it a new generation of artists who sought to construct the idealistic and extravagant worlds that could only be possible in the wildest of imaginations. Piranesi is widely regarded as one of the key inspirations behind this movement, specifically his series Le Carceri, influencing artists such as Bernard Tschumi, whose work dealt with the same inventive use of architectural space in pieces such as The Manhattan Transcripts. Tschumi believed that space can never truly exist without something occurring in that space, and his pieces imbue a sense of movement and energy into ordinarily inanimate buildings, resulting in scenes that are reminiscent of the controlled chaos behind the architecture in pieces such as The Lion Bas Reliefs. Artist Lebbeus Wood’s drawings, particularly in his series Views of Einstein Tomb, borrow heavily from Piranesi’s etchings, from the bold line work that accentuates the relationship between light and dark, to the buildings whose designs are seemingly untethered to the laws of reason . There is dreamlike nature to Wood’s work which echoes back to same wild imagination and creativity that made Le Carceri so remarkable. The Situationists, a branch of surrealists that formed in