These drawings would have been worked up later in the studio, with the help of assistants. The drawings made by Piranesi on the spot in this still remote and disease-ridden spot would have been rough working sketches – not the elaborate drawings seen at the Soane, said Kierkuc-Bielinski.
The temples, buit by Greek colonists from the sixth century BC, lay virtually undiscovered in the malarial swamps of coastal Campania until the 1740s, when the architect Mario Gioffredo made the first measured drawings of the structures. "He is working in the tradition of drawing being used as an extension of thought." "You can see different things being investigated," said Kierkuc-Bielinski. "You can see that they start with drawing, that's then fixed with chalk, then there's ink washes and pen-and-ink."ĭifferent drawings show different stages in the creative process being worked through: one emphasises the deep shadows cast by the temple columns, for example another just lightly suggests the shadows through a hint of red chalk, while the lines of the architecture are focused on.
"They are incredibly carefully planned," he said. A separate pair of drawings in the museum, which he probably presented to the Scottish architect Robert Adam, for example, shows imaginary architectural scenes without the hint of a mistake or correction, apparently the product of a moment of unperfectable genius.īut these late drawings of Paestum, said Kierkuc-Bielinski, tell a different story.
Piranesi drawings series#
Best known for his engravings of views of the monuments of ancient Rome, and his fantastical series Carceri d'Invenzione ("imaginary prisons"), he liked his admirers to believe that his work was the product of immediate and profound moments of inspiration. The images were the working drawings for an elaborate set of engravings completed and published after the artist's death as Différentes Vues de Pesto (Various Views of Paestum).Īccording to Soane Museum curator Jerzy Kierkuc-Bielinski, Piranesi was somewhat secretive about his studio practice, and very few working drawings such as these survive. The heavily pitted doric colonnades march gloomily into the distance the crumbling masonry sprouts foliage. With typical Piranesian drama, they depict dark, gloomy and heavily shadowed ruins.
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