Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

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 temple, one of three in Paestum, Italy, is among the best-preserved Greek temples that remain. As part of the Grand Tour, 18th-century travelers would have visited this site along with other ancient sites in Rome and nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum. As souvenirs, they might have bought some of the prints of Paestum and Rome that Piranesi produced. He makes the composition more interesting by contrasting the ancient Roman splendor which he sought to extol with the contemporary local people and animals who appear oblivious to the ruins.

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).