Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Ruins of Sixtus

The subject reflects the characteristics of the Vedutismo movement. Vedutismo is a genre born in the 18th century and developed primarily in Venice. View painters aimed to represent a landscape objectively and scientifically, placing it as the protagonist of the work. Leading exponents of the vedutista genre were Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, and Francesco Guardi. There are essentially two types of vedute: the realistic one, taken exactly from reality, and the "capriccio," a fanciful view invented by the painter. The work of Giovan Battista Piranesi can be considered an evolution of Vedutismo, as it was reworked in the midst of the Neoclassical climate and already shows some anticipations of the later Romantic spirit. Piranesi's vedute are mostly inspired by Roman antiquities, greatly developing the "capriccio" genre, through which he recreated, according to his imagination, highly evocative landscapes of ruins.

In Giovan Battista Piranesi's prints, we can find several aesthetic expressions typical of his era, in which a certain Romantic spirituality was already beginning to overlap with neoclassical culture. Indeed, his interest was focused on classical antiquity, especially Roman antiquity, whose remains he sought to document with a certain philological precision (and this also applies to his "capricci," in which every single element is nevertheless inspired by a realistic rendering). At the same time, however, Piranesi possessed a sense of the visionary and the irrational that already anticipated Romanticism, and his prints reflect two aesthetic expressions typical of that cultural sphere. On the one hand, the "picturesque," or the fascination with evocatively decaying and overgrown ruins. On the other, the "sublime," found in a certain sense of awe caused by the grandeur of the architecture compared to the viewer. The "sublime" is particularly developed in Piranesi's style, as we can see from the juxtaposition of architecture with the tiny human figures. But even formally, he sought to heighten the visionary feel of his views. First, by multiplying architectural elements, which almost seem to repeat in sequence. Then, in a strictly technical context, by accentuating the chiaroscuro in the engravings, thus heightening the looming nature of the ruins.

The print was taken from Giovan Battista Piranesi, born in Venice in 1720 and died in Rome in 1778. He considered himself primarily an architect, but his only work was the church of Santa Maria al Priorato and the layout of the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta opposite, completed in 1766. His artistic fame rests on his extensive production of engravings, which combine the neoclassical spirit of popularizing and celebrating Roman antiquities with a typically Romantic sense of the sublime. Among his most famous works are the "Carceri" and "Roman Antiquities" cycles.

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