Gb Piranesi; View Of The Royal Academy Of Painting And Sculpture

Among 18th-century European engravers, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) stands out as an artist with a uniquely recognizable style, a taste for the most fantastical architecture (his prisons caused a sensation), and the newly rediscovered antique decorations from the escalating excavations, whose iconography he helped to disseminate. He began his career with vedute (views) and contributed to a collection of views of Rome. The engraving presented here is from his early period, still treated in a traditional manner, but he already saturates the space with faithful architectural elements and scenes of daily life. It was hand-colored at the time, somewhat in the style of optical views, but it is much larger (Piranese generally worked on large sheets of paper). The Royal Academy of Rome, founded by Colbert under the Sun King in 1665, after two previous moves, occupied the Palazzo Mancini from 1725, a location it retained until Napoleon's move to the Villa Medici. The engraving is framed in a pitch pine frame with keys, which has been in place for a long time; for this reason, the side margins have either been cut or folded (I haven't opened the back). It has a few creases that could be smoothed out. Otherwise, it is in good overall condition.