Piranesi gli scritti

Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani (1761), Parere su l’architettura (1765), and the other writings reproduced in this book shed light on the motives that shaped the work of Giovan Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). Starting from his claim of the primacy of Etruscan-Roman history deduced from Giambattista Vico’s De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), “the relationship between art and truth, different and decisive for the treatises of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and the refusal to recognise the connection between Greece and Reason, characterise Piranesi’s universe,” argues Pierluigi Panza, who explains its complexity and origins in these pages. The contrast between inventio and imitatio and the recognition of subjectivity underpinning the interaction between fantasy and method are leitmotifs of Piranesi’s thought, a saturnine restlessness reflected in his writings, such as Parere su l’architettura, which offer eloquent anticipations of the disquiets troubling contemporary culture.