Vuë des 18 Colonnes des côté dessinées du côté opposé à celles qui sont indiquées...

Etching with engraving, 1778, signed on plate. Magnificent work, printed on contemporary laid paper without watermark, with margins, in good condition.

The series of the views of Paestum, realized in 1778, is the last work Piranesi realized before his death. Although he was already an archaeology expert, he went to visit the three temples in 1777 to realize his preparatory drawings for the engravings (twenty plates and the front page). Only 18 of these plates have been signed by Giovan Battista, while three bear the signature of his son, Francesco.

Actually, probably all the plates have been realized by the father with the help of his son, who might have realized the figures included in the landscape.

The great Venetian engraver visited Paestum for the first time in 1770, and then in the last year of his career and life, 1778, on which occasion he produced a series of engravings entitled Differents vues de Pesto ("Different views of Paestum") that had the merit of further spreading interest in the temples of the ancient city. In his engravings, Piranesi offers us precise and meticulous descriptions: the temples are grand and majestic, emerging from a cumbersome thicket and, indeed, are themselves part of it, since the ruins are covered with vegetation and offer shelter to shepherds, peasants, pilgrims, horsemen and vagabonds of all kinds. The evocative power of Piranesi's art is such that the temples of Paestum appear almost disquieting, so great is their size and so daring are the perspective views adopted by the artist: one gets a sense of the sublime that even anticipates Romanticism. A spectacular grandeur that, moreover, is charged with allegorical meanings: Despite their sumptuousness, and despite the idea of opulence that they might suggest, the temples of Paestum, in Piranesi's engravings, preserve only the memory of what they once were, because the present is marked by ruin and decadence, and even the most magniloquent and superb achievements of man must yield to the force of time, which flows by demolishing civilisations, leaving rubble and bringing emptiness and misery even where life prospered happily. In some of these engravings, the presence of the ruins is so suffocating (thanks also to the skilful use of perspective) that not even the horizon can be glimpsed: the composition is entirely occupied by the columns of the temples, as in the case of the engravings depicting the interior of the Temple of Neptune.

The human figures are tiny compared to the enormous ruins: one almost feels a sense of impotence, it seems that man can do little to halt, or at least slow down, the course of nature, which appropriates what man has made without any regard and is obviously the victor in the unequal battle. And if the austerity of the temples is also suggested by the richness of the details, surprising if we think that Piranesi produced these views in a state of ill-health, the human figure acts as a counterpoint, symbolising also the meanness of the times experienced by the author when compared to the splendid times (in the view of the neoclassical artists) of antiquity: a past, in short, to be looked at with nostalgia.

And that Piranesi nurtured a profound admiration for the creators of these temples is also testified by the comments made by his son Francesco on the cartouches of the engravings when the prints were published. We read, for example, in the long commentary on the engraving depicting a view from outside the Temple of Neptune "L'exactitude des proportions caracterise ce batiment pour une production de plus parfaites, et des mieux éxécutées dans ce genre, et l'on peut dire que l'Architecte a tiré de son art de quoi s'attirer l'admiration de ses contemporains comme de la posterité", i.e. 'The exactness of the proportions characterises this construction as one of the most perfect and best executed of its kind, and it can be said that the architect has done so in such a way as to earn the admiration of both his contemporaries and posterity'. Piranesi's experience would prove to be fundamental for the development of neoclassical poetics: the views of the ancient temples of Paestum would become a common feature of many artists who came after him, starting with the aforementioned Francesco Piranesi.

Bibliografia

H. Focillon, Giovan Battista Piranesi 1720-1778 (1918): n. 586; J. Wilton-Ely, Giovan Battista Piranesi, The complete etchings (1994): n. 721.