Allegory with the statue of Minerva

Etching, engraving and drypoint, circa 1745/48, signed lower right, on the right-hand sheet: Piranesi inventò, incise in Roma.

Example in the rare first state of seven described by Hind before the addition of the address of the publishers Bouchard and Gravier and the burin retouches in the background. 

The Allegory with the statue of Minerva formed the second frontispiece to the Vedute di Roma. The work is dated by scholars to the period 1745/48, so it was made before the first frontispiece to the work, which is dated in plate 1748. According to Hind, this plate only becomes the frontispiece to the Vedute di Roma from his later issue of around 1760, those bearing the imprint Presso l’Autore a Strada Felice nel palazzo Tomati vicino alla Trinità de’ monti. A paoli due e mezzo.

The subject - the capriccio - indicates how the artist with this work continued the work he had begun in 1743, with the first plates of Prima parte di Architetture e Prospettive.

Prima parte di Architetture e Prospettive is a publication by the young Piranesi, who had just settled in Rome. The result is a work that is not entirely unified, characterized by the notable stylistic difference between the plates, but of great charm and that lets you guess and predict future artistic developments. The work continues a tradition of a well-established model, which included the whim and the view, the scenography and the treatise on architecture, but later, analyzing the artist's biography, it will be understood to be above all the outburst of a crisis as an architect and of an inner journey lived with intensity. In short, the result of the clash between a mind tied to Venetian culture, heir to the poetry of ruins evoked by Marco Ricci and taken up by Bellotto and Canaletto, and the new architectural culture that was forming in the young Piranesi. Prima parte di Architetture e Prospettive and the subsequent architectural fantasies that continue it constitute a decisive step towards the goal he set himself in the preface to the work: to ensure that architectural caprice would lead to free architecture from the chains of the material and social world, to make it a truly liberal art. The work was an immediate success with the public.

As mentioned, the first edition of the work dates back to 1743, and was dedicated to Nicola Giobbe, a great impresario at the service of the Camera Apostolica and protector of the young Venetian architect. Later it was included in a wider discourse that included the four Capricci and published in the Opere Varie di Architettura Prospettive Grotteschi Antichità Inventate ed incise da Giambattista Piranesi Architetto Veneziano printed by Giovanni Bouchard in 1750.

Magnificent proof, printed on contemporary laid paper with watermark "circle and fleur-de-lis with letters CB" (Robison 2) with small margins, traces of the usual central horizontal crease, in good condition.

Bibliografia

cfr. A. M. Hind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A critical study with a list of his published works and detailed catalogues of the Prisons and Views of Rome (1908): p. 38, n. 2, I/VII; A. Robison, Piranesi early architectural engravings (1986); H. Focillon, Giovan Battista Piranesi 1720-1778 (1918): n. 786; J. Wilton-Ely, Giovan Battista Piranesi, The complete etchings (1994): n. 135; A. Bettagno, Piranesi Incisioni-Rami-Legature-Architetture (1978); M. Praz, G.B. Piranesi, Magnificenze di Roma (1961);  AA.VV, Piranèse et les Francais (1978).