Investigating such scraps of paper reused for proofs and drawings, while (literally) piecing this puzzle together again, Minor and Yerkes have reconstructed a printer’s colophon from a title page dated to 1753, as well as small portions of an unpublished antiquarian text. When conceiving his staffage personages, Piranesi hastily drafted various figures, mainly his own printers at work, using wastepaper from the workshop for this purpose. The investigation of some proofs of his prints and of a particular group of his drawings enables a close-up view of Piranesi’s practice in his triple capacity as artist, publisher of antiquities, and head of a print workshop. Interestingly, she has demonstrated Piranesi’s own attention to the material qualities of Latin written words, whether as inscriptions in cast bronze, metal coinage, or stone, since he referred to all these techniques in his vignettes.Īn important discovery enriching our knowledge of Piranesi emerges from observations on his habit of using and reusing paper as his material. The declared focus on the book page as medium is reified in Yerkes’s meticulous discussion of Piranesi’s vignettes and decorated capital letters. Knowledge of this technical background enables one to regard Piranesi’s work with a more informed eye. Instead, he either inscribed his texts directly onto plates for printing or, more frequently, entrusted them to an outside press. The two workshops were hardly compatible in a single enterprise, or at least Piranesi himself chose not to buy a letterpress. While the production of prints entailed supervising a workshop, letterpress printing required a different team working on different machines. To achieve his goal-which was to become an author of antiquarian publications illustrated with prints of the utmost quality-Piranesi needed the assistance of a team of writers, translators, and scribes. In their joint introduction and in the following six (individually authored) chapters, each devoted either to a case study or to an aspect of book production, Yerkes and Minor demonstrate that a close analysis of the techniques, culture, and economy of bookmaking can furnish Piranesi studies with new materials and modes of discussion. Minor already laid the foundations for this approach with the publication of her Piranesi’s Lost Words (Penn State University Press, 2015) now those ideas have been supported with interesting new findings. However, Minor and Yerkes do shift the inquiry from the framework of intellectual history to that of “book history.” Whatever Piranesi’s sublime vision as an artist, architect, and scholar of antiquities, the authors assert that he communicated it to his public through a material carrier-which is to say, books-and that the book page was his primary medium. In fact, analyzing his artistic works as component elements of his publications on Roman topography, history, and architecture stands as a commonplace of Piranesi studies. The authors’ statement (in the introduction) that Piranesi’s prints, as a rule, had previously been considered outside the book context is provocative but not entirely correct. Thus, the color of paper, the battered underlying pages, and the leather cover edges of a particular copy all form part of the message.Īll in all, Piranesi Unbound proposes a view of Piranesi focused on book production and trade as the presumed real kernel of his world. The tome, moreover, is illustrated with color plates that convey the material sense of Piranesi’s work: some of the reproductions include not just a print, nor even the flat image of a whole page, but rather a photograph of the entire original book opened to the desired place. From one chapter to the next, the narrative is liable to be interrupted by a checklist, say, or by a minute description of the intellectual “laboratory” of attribution. Utilizing variegated forms of writing, Yerkes and Minor draw the reader into the experience of a close study of individual material objects. The coauthors, experts on architectural drawings and prints, are implicitly and productively critical of the canonical type of art historical research, concentrating specifically on what classical art history has regarded as parerga-the technical, material, and economic aspects of artistic production.
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