Imperfect Ruins: A Study of Italian Artist and Antiquarian Figure Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)

FAIN: FT-58493-11

Heather Hyde Minor
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

I am seeking funding to support the research and writing of one chapter of my book, Piranesi's Imperfect Ruins. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was one of the most celebrated cultural figures of eighteenth-century Europe. As an antiquarian, antiquities restorer, archaeologist, architect, art dealer, author, bookseller, draftsman, engraver, entrepreneur and publisher, he collaborated or quarreled with the most important men of his day. Yet while Piranesi's fame as an artist still shines brightly, his role as a public intellectual, one who actively participated in the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past, remains obscure. This project recasts this key artistic figure, studying both his famous images and his forgotten texts. It also recaptures the important associations between Piranesi's concerns and the creation of the modern cultural sciences devoted to the study of the past.

Media Coverage

Lost and Found (Review)
Author(s): Frank Salmon
Publication: Times Literary Supplement
Date: 5/6/2016

Associated Products

Piranesi's Lost Words (Book)
Title: Piranesi's Lost Words
Author: Heather Hyde Minor
Abstract: Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the most important artists eighteenth-century Europe produced. But Piranesi was more than an artist; he was an engraver and printmaker, architect, antiquities dealer, archaeologist, draftsman, publisher, bookseller, and author. In Piranesi’s Lost Words, Heather Hyde Minor considers Piranesi the author and publisher, focusing on his major publications from 1756 to his death in 1778. Piranesi designed and manufactured twelve beautiful, large-format books combining visual and verbal content over the course of his lifetime. While the images from these books have been widely studied, they are usually considered in isolation from the texts in which they originally appeared. This study reunites Piranesi’s texts and images, interpreting them in conjunction as composite art. Minor shows how this composite art demonstrates Piranesi’s gift for interpreting the classical world and its remains—and how his books offer a critique of both the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past and how eighteenth-century scholars explicated this past. Piranesi’s books, Minor argues, were integral to the emergence of the modern discipline of art history. Using new, previously unpublished archival material, Piranesi’s Lost Words refines our understanding of Piranesi’s works and the eighteenth-century context in which they were created.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-06549-6.html
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-271-0654
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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