PIRANESI GIOVANNI BATTISTA, View of the Basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le mura in Rome, on the Appian Way, circa 1750

Etching (sheet dimensions 53.5 x 76.6 cm; image dimensions 41.5 x 66 cm) from the Views of Rome series. Impression in the first state (I/IV), with “double circle and fleur-de-lis” watermark.
Excellent condition, very slight trace of a central fold, not visible in the composition, slight foxing on the untrimmed margins.

Bibliography
Hind 13 (A.M. Hind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A Critical Study, London, 1922)
Focillon [X: number]

Commentary
On the left, in the foreground, a gate between two pillars topped with vases. At the center, the façade of the basilica, with the three-arched portico, the work of Flaminio Ponzio and Giovanni Vasanzio (1612-1613). On the right, a ruin and the Via Appia, animated by small figures of travelers, horses, and loads. At the lower left, the caption with the title.

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 scenography 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 center 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: immense architectures of stairs, 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 profoundly 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 greatest achievements of eighteenth-century etching and, through their visionary quality, anticipate Romantic sensibility.
Alongside the Prisons, the Views of Rome, begun in the late 1740s and continued for approximately thirty years with more than one hundred plates, conveyed to generations of travelers the grand and melancholy image of the ancient ruins. These were joined 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 line, rich in contrasts, is unmistakable.