Artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, October 4, 1720–November 9, 1778)
Artist Francesco Piranesi (Italian, ca, 1756–1810)
Title Interior View of the Temple of Neptune (Vue interieure du Temple de Neptune decrit dans la planche X)
Plate Number Plate 12
Series Different Views of Paestum
Date 1778
Medium Etching on paper
Dimensions Image: 18 3/4 x 26 9/16 in. (47.6 x 67.5 cm)
Plate: 19 x 26 3/4 in. (48.3 x 67.9 cm)
Sheet: 22 3/16 x 31 11/16 in. (56.4 x 80.5 cm)
Credit Line Collection of Diether Thimme, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 98.278.10
About this Work
In 1777 Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his son, Francesco, traveled to the coast south of Naples to draw the famous Greek temples at Paestum. These three buildings, ranked along a marshy plain facing the sea, represented an austere classical tradition that predated the richness and variety of the Roman buildings that the elder Piranesi had studied so deeply. Years earlier, he had disparaged the importance of the Greek tradition in Roman architecture, but his encounter with these “grave” and “wise” buildings transformed his opinion.
In an impressive suite of twenty-one prints completed by Francesco shortly before his father’s death, Piranesi shaped the taste of the next generation of the classical revival, which would turn with respect to the more sober grandeur of the Greeks.
This print depicts the interior of the temple thought to be dedicated to Neptune, although more recent scholarship has suggested that this temple was actually dedicated to Hera. The best preserved temple at Paestum, its unfamiliar, austere Doric style fired the imaginations of eighteenth-century artists and scholars used to more elaborated modes of ancient architecture.
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has thirteen plates from this series(Eskenazi Museum of Art 98.278.1-.13) and the frontispiece (Eskenazi Museum of Art 98.277).
