Artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, October 4, 1720–November 9, 1778)
Artist Francesco Piranesi (Italian, ca, 1756–1810)
Title Another View of the Façade of the Pronaos (Autre vue de la Façade du Pronaos, dessiné et décrit dans la planche V)
Plate Number Plate 6
Series Different Views of Paestum
Date 1778
Medium Etching on paper
Dimensions Image: 19 3/16 x 27 3/4 in. (48.7 x 70.5 cm)
Plate: 19 1/4 x 28 1/4 in. (48.9 x 71.8 cm)
Sheet: 22 1/4 x 31 5/8 in. (56.5 x 80.3 cm)
Credit Line Collection of Diether Thimme, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 98.278.5
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.
The so-called "Basilica" at Paestum was a century older than the Temple of Neptune and more ruined, although still one of the best-preserved examples of sixth-century Greek architecture. As in most of the prints in this series, Piranesi combined the intimacy of a close perspective with the brookding, almost crushing quality of dark and sober forms. Striking effects of light and texture also suggest the gravity of archaic Greek building and the ravages of time.
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).
