Starting with the idea that the drawings must be made on pages from a book, she began reconstructing these passages about tombs, which included italicized text signaling content quoted from other sources.
“This was very exciting because I knew that just a few months prior, Princeton University had acquired another sheet by the artist that also had text on its back,” Minor said. One was a Piranesi drawing, and when Minor turned it over, she found a printed text.
When Minor arrived at Notre Dame in 2015, Cheryl Snay, curator of European art at the Snite Museum of Art, pulled some drawings based on Minor’s research interests. Later in his career, he became a publisher himself. Many of Piranesi’s early works were copperplates sold to Roman publishers as illustrations for Grand Tour guidebooks.
Piranesi print how to#
“He also knew how to use images to make arguments in service of advertising.” “Piranesi loved to make ancient Rome look grandiose and overpowering,” Minor said. The research, recuperative in method, serves as a biography of Piranesi’s books, bringing text and image together to reveal a learned mind alive with biting wit and unflinching big-picture questions. The researchers work from the perspective that these prints were meant to be pages in a dozen volumes about the monuments and history of Rome, and also about the limits of what can be known about the past.
Minor’s “ Piranesi Unbound,” co-authored with Carolyn Yerkes, associate professor of early modern architecture at Princeton University, examines nearly 200 of Piranesi’s engravings and drawings. While early modern artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi has been principally known for his drawings and etchings of ancient Rome, new research from Heather Hyde Minor, professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame, reinterprets Piranesi’s artistic oeuvre by flipping the works over and reading what is written on the backs. (Princeton University Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections) Piranesi's depiction of the Lex Parieti Faciundo Puteolana with an imaginative reconstruction, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de'Romani, (Rome, 1761), plate xxxvii.
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