Piranesi, who I'm just learning about, is a strange and somewhat intimidating artist. There's a lot of architectural detail, not surprising since he was an architect himself. Still, no one draws this anymore.
There's a definite family resemblance to Escher's work. But Piranesi doesn't seem to be trying to create illusions on paper, which is the difference between him and Escher. It's just very different.
2 comments:
It's the sense of tremendous scale that makes these images so compelling and somewhat terrifying. In most of them the first thing I noticed was the sculpted figures and then the wild architectural motifs of stairways and arches. Then I saw the tiny figures of people and was amazed. I'm not sure anyone else ever drew pictures like these.
Nice find and a very interesting one. He was obviously a highly skilled and driven artist.
You point out the scale and that's a good point. At the time, as has been true of most of history, the largest built projects most people would see would be a house, maybe bigger and fancier than their own, and the local church. Really big buildings existed in just a few cities, and it was exceedingly rare that new ones went up. The ones Piranesi saw made a great impression on him.
Yes, definitely a visionary of some sort.
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