Un camino e due tavoli da muro, di cui uno riprodotto illusivamente su un foglio (Design for a Chimneypiece and Two Consoles)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Un camino e due tavoli da muro, di cui uno riprodotto illusivamente su un foglio (Design for a Chimneypiece and Two Consoles)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, artist

1720–1778

Un camino e due tavoli da muro, di cui uno riprodotto illusivamente su un foglio (Design for a Chimneypiece and Two Consoles), 1769

Portfolio/Series title: Diverse Maniere d'adornare i cammini ed ogni altra parte degli edifizi desunte dall'architettura Egizia, Etrusca, e Greca con un Ragionamento Apologetico in defesa dell'Architettura Egizia, e Toscana, opera del Cavaliere Giambattista (Diverse Ways of ornamenting chimneypieces and all other parts of houses taken from Egyptian, Etruscan, and Grecian architecture with an Apologia in defense of Egyptian and Tuscan architecture, the work of Cavaliere Giambattista Piranesi)

Where object was made: Italy

Material/technique: etching

Dimensions:
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 417 x 277 mm
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 7/16 x 10 7/8 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 553 x 411 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 21 3/4 x 16 3/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 25 x 20 in

Credit line: Gift of Barbara and Robert Seaver given in honor of Jim and Virginia Seaver

Accession number: 2004.0183

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Empire of Things," 2013, Kate Meyer
These four prints give a sense of the broad range of Piranesi’s antiquarian interests. Piranesi’s training as an architect informed his ideas about antiquity, which take the form of meditative fantasies (as in the Tomb of Nero, also known as Fantastic Landscape with a Stranded Dolphin), designs for objects that emulate Roman design (Design for a Chimneypiece and a Table), and careful renderings of the ruins and remnants of Roman buildings and inscriptions that remain useful to present-day archeologists (Capitoline Inscriptions and Plan of the Campus Martius). Through his careful documentation of ancient Roman architectural remains-“these speaking ruins,” as Piranesi once described them-he participated in the “Graeco-Roman debate,” arguing forcefully in his texts and polemical works (such as Capitoline Inscriptions and Plan of the Campus Martius) for the superiority of the eclectic Roman style in contradistinction to the “noble simplicity” of ancient Greek design and architecture