Ruine di Sepolcro Antico

Etching with engraving and drypoint, signed on plate at lower left.

Example in the second state of five. This work is part of the project, begun in 1743, called 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.