The Digital Piranesi

FAIN: PW-264046-19

University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)
Jeanne MacDonald Britton (Project Director: July 2018 to present)

Production of a comprehensive, searchable, and open-access version online of the works of Piranesi. Work would include preservation, scanning, custom page-level metadata creation, translation, digital collections management, web design, exhibit curation, and public events planning.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an innovative graphic artist most known for his architectural studies of Rome and imaginary prisons. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make this rare material accessible in a complete digital collection and, in an interactive digital edition, to make it visible, legible, and searchable in ways that the original works are not. The scale and breadth of Piranesi’s works require innovative methods of presentation, discovery, and analysis. By digitally illuminating and enacting many of the graphic features of his designs, this project will provide new ways of seeing this unique historical material.

Associated Products

“Graphic Constructions of Knowledge in Piranesi’s Maps and Diderot’s Encyclopédie” (Article)
Title: “Graphic Constructions of Knowledge in Piranesi’s Maps and Diderot’s Encyclopédie”
Author: Jeanne Britton
Abstract: The encyclopedic maps of Giovanni Battista Piranesi literalize the metaphor that “the map is the encyclopedia.” This essay compares two of his heavily annotated maps to the French Encyclopédie: where Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert theorize the map and the cross-reference as methods of organization, Piranesi employs both. With their references to annotated images, Piranesi’s encyclopedic maps ultimately expose the disorder and multiplicity hovering beneath the ordered objectivity of literal and figurative expressions of Enlightenment cartography. Additionally, this essay argues that his works are a productive site through which to consider aims and strategies of digital design.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802449
Primary URL Description: Project Muse site
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Eighteenth-Century Studies
Publisher: Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Digital Piranesi (Web Resource)
Title: The Digital Piranesi
Author: Jeanne Britton
Author: Zoe Langer
Author: Mike Gavin
Abstract: Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an innovative graphic artist most known for his architectural studies of Rome and imaginary prisons. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make this rare material accessible in a complete digital collection and, in an interactive digital edition, to make it visible, legible, and searchable in ways that the original works are not. The scale and breadth of Piranesi’s works require innovative methods of presentation, discovery, and analysis. By digitally illuminating and enacting many of the graphic features of his designs, this project will provide new ways of seeing this rare and complex historical material.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/piranesidigitalproject/index
Primary URL Description: The Digital Piranesi
Secondary URL: http://digitalpiranesi.org
Secondary URL Description: Short url for the Digital Piranesi

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