Lecture 18: Eisenstein’s Piranesi and Cinematic Space
March 1st, 2023
Who Was Piranesi?
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) was an archaeologist famous for his books of engravings of
the ruins of the Roman empire as they existed in the 18th century
● Even more famous for a series of engravings of fictitious prisons (the Carceri), some of
which represent impossible geometries and thus contest the “laws” of perspective
● Piranesi established his own printing house in order to produce his engravings and books
exactly as he wanted them
The Books of Piranesi
Few books by Piranesi remain intact because the engravings on their own can be sold for more
than an individual book ($$$)
● We have therefore not fully appreciated what Piranesi was seeking to do with the idea of
the book in his many publications
● One thesis is that he was proposing the book as a new sort of monument: “he has been
seen as eschewing gilded vellum-covered folios in favor of the rough remains of ancient
buildings” (7)
● A recent study of Piranesi is titled Piranesi’s Lost Words, and with that title, the author,
Heather Hyde Minor, seeks to highlight precisely the fact that our understanding of
Piranesi has been warped by extracting his engravings from the books in which they were
published
In Piranesi’s image, the long, neatly grooved lines of his marble tablet that hold metal characters
invoke the typesetter’s stick loaded up with letters. Here, paper is used to depict an inscription
that is made of marble and bronze … the dedicatory inscription fuses ancient and modern but
directly reproduces neither. It displays enthusiasm for the graphic and formal aspects of
inscriptions while calling attention to printing.
● Piranesi published only 12 books (remarkable in being monumentally proportioned)
● Piranesi born in Venice to a family of stone carvers
A number of Piranesi’s books “relied on new tools for conveying visual data, like ichnographic
maps and stratigraphical and other technical diagrams” (4)
● ICHNOGRAPHIC: a drawing of the ground plan of a building
● STRATIGRAPHIC: a map showing the historical layers of a place
Piranesi transformed the possibilities of print in his books through his understanding of ancient
engraving and its relationship to modern printing.
● Saw his books as monuments that would outlast the ones pictured in his books
● His texts were rediscovered only as recently as the 1930s; until then, it was thought that
he had only produced engravings
March 1st, 2023
Who Was Piranesi?
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) was an archaeologist famous for his books of engravings of
the ruins of the Roman empire as they existed in the 18th century
● Even more famous for a series of engravings of fictitious prisons (the Carceri), some of
which represent impossible geometries and thus contest the “laws” of perspective
● Piranesi established his own printing house in order to produce his engravings and books
exactly as he wanted them
The Books of Piranesi
Few books by Piranesi remain intact because the engravings on their own can be sold for more
than an individual book ($$$)
● We have therefore not fully appreciated what Piranesi was seeking to do with the idea of
the book in his many publications
● One thesis is that he was proposing the book as a new sort of monument: “he has been
seen as eschewing gilded vellum-covered folios in favor of the rough remains of ancient
buildings” (7)
● A recent study of Piranesi is titled Piranesi’s Lost Words, and with that title, the author,
Heather Hyde Minor, seeks to highlight precisely the fact that our understanding of
Piranesi has been warped by extracting his engravings from the books in which they were
published
In Piranesi’s image, the long, neatly grooved lines of his marble tablet that hold metal characters
invoke the typesetter’s stick loaded up with letters. Here, paper is used to depict an inscription
that is made of marble and bronze … the dedicatory inscription fuses ancient and modern but
directly reproduces neither. It displays enthusiasm for the graphic and formal aspects of
inscriptions while calling attention to printing.
● Piranesi published only 12 books (remarkable in being monumentally proportioned)
● Piranesi born in Venice to a family of stone carvers
A number of Piranesi’s books “relied on new tools for conveying visual data, like ichnographic
maps and stratigraphical and other technical diagrams” (4)
● ICHNOGRAPHIC: a drawing of the ground plan of a building
● STRATIGRAPHIC: a map showing the historical layers of a place
Piranesi transformed the possibilities of print in his books through his understanding of ancient
engraving and its relationship to modern printing.
● Saw his books as monuments that would outlast the ones pictured in his books
● His texts were rediscovered only as recently as the 1930s; until then, it was thought that
he had only produced engravings
