The Digital Piranesi Main Menu About The Digital Piranesi is a developing digital humanities project that aims to provide an enhanced digital edition of the works of Italian illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Works and Volumes Genres, Subjects, and Themes Bibliography Glossary

PERSPECTIVE

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Piranesi’s use of perspective can be arresting, imposing, or distorting. His thwarted career as an architect is often noted in biographical approaches to his works. Beyond that, the fundamental challenges of rendering three-dimensional space on two-dimensional paper, which by their nature make representation itself an issue, should also be seen to animate the use of perspective in his Vedute di Roma. In individual views that adopt a dramatically lowered vantage point, he seems to favor the aesthetic category of the “picturesque,” which William Gilpin theorized in the English context that shaped the perception of his images for much of Piranesi’s audience. But he also exaggerates the massiveness of the monuments whose magnificence he values over the “quiet simplicity and noble grandeur” of Greek aesthetics that Wincklemann praised, in keeping with his own aesthetics of magnificenza. His perspectival distortions have long been a subject of comment, from eighteenth-century tourists disappointed upon seeing that Rome’s monuments are, in reality, less imposing than Piranesi’s versions of them, to twenty-first century scholars who have documented their spatial inaccuracies (Rapp).
Finally, the vantage points his images adopt echo but significantly expand the compositions of his predecessors, such as Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (above) or Giuseppe Vasi (below), which are shown on the left in these pairs.
Many of his views, such as those of bridges from both the Vedute di Roma (top row) and Antichità Romane (bottom row) below, amplify the dramatic possibilities of sharp diagonals and sunken viewpoints.
In Piranesi’s hands, visual perspective often relates to verbal information. Many of his views of Renaissance palaces follow a harsh diagonal that ends, at the vanishing point, with an annotation. These distant annotations extend the visual effects of dramatic one-point perspective by making verbal information the destination for a viewer’s eyes. Other subjects are presented in ways that elaborate on this relationship between visual perspective and verbal information. In different etchings, Piranesi often depicts the same structure from many vantage points. In these views of  the same subject (such as the Colosseum, Antonine Baths, or the Baths of Titus), one view often enumerates architectural details in its captions while other views of the same structure aggrandize, from sunken perspectives, hulking, ruined shapes that have no annotations. Looking at one image and then another, viewers shift their perspective—from exterior to interior, from elevated to sunken positions—in ways that relate to Piranesi’s presentation of information. His Vedute di Roma, when they are seen as informational images in the sense James Elkins proposed, “can present more complex questions of representation, convention, medium, production, interpretation, and reception than much of fine art” (4-5). Piranesi’s correlation between, on one hand, shifting and dramatic perspectives and, on the other, the display of information returns to the connections between perspective and knowledge that Erwin Panofsky identified in “Perspective as Symbolic Form” and that Hubert Damish explores in The Origins of Perspective. In this way, his use of alternating perspectives, in conjunction with his captions, can be seen as reflections on the display and acquisition of information, the situatedness of historical conjecture, and the limits of knowledge rather than mere demonstrations of geometrical skill. (JB)

This page has paths:

  1. Themes across Piranesi’s Works Jeanne Britton

Contents of this tag:

  1. Plan of Rome and the Campus Martius
  2. Interior View of the Pronaos of the Pantheon
  3. View of the Colosseum (2 of 2)
  4. Ruins of the Antonine Baths
  5. Interior view of the Basilica of St. Peter's in the Vatican, near the Tribune
  6. Theater of Marcellus
  7. View of the Arch of Titus (1 of 2)
  8. View of the Arch of Constantine
  9. View of the Temple of Concord
  10. Interior View of the Colosseum (1 of 2)
  11. Interior view of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican
  12. View of the Tablinum of Nero’s Golden House (2 of 2)
  13. View of the Baths of Titus
  14. View of the Sepulcher of Piso Licinianus on the Ancient Via Appia
  15. View of the famous Vatican Basilica with its spacious Portico and adjacent Piazza
  16. Temple, commonly called the Temple of Janus
  17. View of the Remains of the Forum of Nerva (1 of 2)
  18. Remains of the Villa of Maecenas at Tivoli
  19. View of the Basilica San Giovanni Laterano
  20. Another View of the Temple of the Sibyl in Tivoli (2 of 2)
  21. View of the Piazza Navona above the Ruins of the Circus of Domitian (1 of 2)
  22. View of the Ponte Lugano on the Anio
  23. View of the Piazza della Rotonda [the Pantheon]
  24. View of the Palazzo Farnese
  25. View of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli
  26. View of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Roman Forum
  27. View of the Tomb of the Plautius Family
  28. View of the Palace of the Illustrious Barberini Family on the Quirinal Hill
  29. View of the Façade of the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano
  30. View of the Remains of the Forum of Nerva (2 of 2)
  31. Ruins of the Xystus, or the Grand Hall of the Antonine Baths
  32. Cross-Section of the interior of the Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura
  33. View of the Palazzo di Montecitorio
  34. View of the Palazzo Stopani
  35. View of the Palazzo Odescalchi
  36. View of the Fountainhead of the Acqua Giulia
  37. View of the Arch of Titus (2 of 2)
  38. View of the Atrium of the Portico of Octavia
  39. View of the Remains of the Buildings on the Second Floor of the Baths of Titus
  40. Interior View of the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano
  41. Ruins of One of the Soldiers’ Barracks in Hadrian’s Villa
  42. View of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis
  43. Villa Pamphili
  44. Remains of the Aqueduct of Nero
  45. View of the Ponte Salario
  46. View of the Palazzo della Consulta on the Quirinal housing the Papal Secretariat
  47. View of the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber Two Miles outside Rome
  48. View of the Tiber Island
  49. View of the Port of the Ripetta
  50. View of the Portico Built by M. Aemilius Lepidus and P. Aemilius Paulus
  51. View of the Interior of the Pantheon
  52. Remains of the Temple of the Speranza Vecchia
  53. View of the Flavian Amphitheatre, called the Colosseum

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