Piranesi's 300th Birthday Celebrated with Major Exhibition at Istituto Centrale per la Grafica

A major exhibition at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome marks the tricentennial of Giambattista Piranesi's birth. The show centers on the complete corpus of around 1,500 copper matrices engraved by the Venetian architect, housed in the institute's calcography. Piranesi arrived in Rome in 1740 at age twenty, bringing influences from Giambattista Tiepolo and Canaletto, and became captivated by the city's monuments and archaeology, which became the subject of his most famous etchings. The exhibition includes a dreamlike multiprojection on the vault by Associazione Civita Mostre e Musei. A parallel show at Palazzo della Calcografia features architectural fantasies by Russian-German architect Sergej Tchoban, who reinterprets Piranesi's engravings with anachronistic hybridizations. The article also notes a perceived consonance between Piranesi's aesthetic and the thought of Giambattista Vico, who sought to restore dignity to imagination and myth in the Enlightenment.