PIRANESI GIOVANNI BATTISTA, View of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, circa 1748

Etching (sheet dimensions 53 x 76.7 cm; image dimensions 40.5 x 61.5 cm) from the series Views of Rome. Impression in the first state (I/IV), before the address of Bouchard and Gravier, with “double circle and fleur-de-lis” watermark.
Excellent condition, a very slight trace of a central fold not visible in the composition, slight foxing along the untrimmed margins.

Bibliography
Hind 6 (A.M. Hind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A Critical Study, London, 1922)
Focillon 723 (H. Focillon, Giovanni-Battista Piranesi. Essai de catalogue raisonné de son oeuvre, Paris, 1918)

Commentary
The basilica is depicted in perspective from the side of the portico, with its mosaic-covered facade, the bell tower on the left and, in the foreground on the right, a massive masonry ruin. The engraved caption, with numbered notes, states that it was “built by Constantine the Great” and recalls that the portico with seven arches was rebuilt in 1725, after the collapse of another similar one with nine arches. The basilica was later destroyed by fire in 1823, and this view preserves its ancient appearance.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Mogliano Veneto 1720 - Rome 1778), trained in Venice as an architect and engineer, moved to Rome in 1740 in the retinue of the Venetian ambassador Marco Foscarini. There he studied stage design with the Valeriani family and learned the art of etching from Giuseppe Vasi. After returning to Venice in the mid-1740s, he established his home and workshop in Rome, where he worked until his death.
At the heart of his fame as an engraver are the Prisons. The Capricious Inventions of Prisons were published in Rome around 1749-1750 by the publisher Giovanni Bouchard, in fourteen plates including the frontispiece: vast architectural spaces of staircases, vaults, arches and chains, rendered with a light, almost suspended line, in which space multiplies without an exit. In 1761 Piranesi republished the series under his own name, with the new title Imaginary Prisons, after reworking and heavily darkening the plates, introducing new elements related to punishment and torture and adding two plates, for a total of sixteen. The two editions, so different in atmosphere, rank among the highest achievements of eighteenth-century etching and, in their visionary quality, anticipate Romantic sensibility.
Alongside the Prisons, the Views of Rome, begun in the late 1740s and continued for about thirty years with more than one hundred plates, conveyed to generations of travelers the grand and melancholy image of the ancient ruins. These were accompanied by major works of archaeological study, such as the Roman Antiquities and the Campus Martius of Ancient Rome (1762), in which Piranesi became a passionate defender of Roman greatness against the supremacy of Greek art. His nervous, richly contrasted line is unmistakable.