Piranesi Unbound - by Carolyn Yerkes & Heather Hyde Minor (Hardcover)

About the Book

"One of the greatest graphic artists of any age, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known as the virtuoso etcher responsible for print series such as Imaginary Prisons and Views of Rome. These largescale engravings depict scenes in and around Rome, taken from first-hand examinations of antiquities and classical structures. Piranesi combined these vistas with exaggerated compositions, scale, and perspective, in order to create immense, ambiguous scenes that have inspired generations of artists-Piranesi's 18thcentury biographer named him "the Rembrandt of ruins." But Piranesi was also a gifted and prolific scholar, architect, and designer, who printed and published twelve books over the course of his career. While most of his visual work was created to appear alongside texts that explain his theories of space, architecture, and drawing, their study has historically separated the images from the texts for which they were designed. Co-authored by two leading scholars, this is the first book to examine Piranesi's complete printed volumes and career as a maker of books, and argues that his engravings cannot be fully understood without studying them in the context of the books he designed. Individual chapters examine how Piranesi's drawings and prints became pages, how pages and plates became volumes, how volumes became books, and how books were marketed, sold, and read. Embedded within these essays are several focused explorations of each theme: illustrations with texts designed to explicate aspects of Piranesi's production and distribution"--

Book Synopsis

Why Piranesi's greatest works weren't his famous prints but rather the books for which he made them

A draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly inventive Imaginary Prisons. Yet Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor argue that his single greatest art form--one that combined his obsessions most powerfully and that he pursued throughout his career--was the book. Piranesi Unbound provides a fundamental reinterpretation of Piranesi by recognizing him, first and foremost, as a writer, illustrator, printer, and publisher of books.

Featuring nearly two hundred of Piranesi's engravings and drawings, including some that have never been published before, this visually stunning book returns Piranesi's artworks to the context for which he originally produced them: a dozen volumes that combine text and image, archaeology and imagination, erudition and humor. Drawing on new research, Piranesi Unbound uncovers the social networks in which Piranesi published, including the readers who bought, read, and debated his books. It reveals his habit of raiding the wastepaper pile for cast-off sheets upon which to draw and fuse printed images and texts. It shows how, even after his books were bound, they were subject to change by Piranesi and others as pages were torn out and added.

The first major exploration of the lives of Piranesi's books, Piranesi Unbound reimagines the full range of the artist's creativity by showing how it is inextricably bound to his career as a maker of books.

Review Quotes

"Piranesi Unbound . . . rematerialize[s] the codex as a material repository of practice"---Luisa Calè, European Romantic Review

"

Piranesi Unbound occupies a special place as a volume clearly aligned with the "material turn" of art history. 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.

"---Lola Kantor-Kazocsky, CAA Reviews

"Piranesi Unbound is a beautifully made book about a maker of beautiful books. Giambattista Piranesi (1720-78) is remembered mostly for his etchings, but art historians Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor make a strong--and charmingly wonkish--case that his true medium was the bound volume. They're helped enormously by the designer Yve Ludwig, who strengthens every step of their argument with vivid closeups of the maestro's work. Her gold-on-terracotta color scheme is the icing on the cake: Ms. Ludwig evokes Piranesi's love for red chalk and Moroccan leather in a way that suggests the Roman genius might have a living heir."---Jackson Arn, Wall Street Journal

"[Piranesi Unbound is], an academic book [that] contains plenty of visual material exploring the Italian artist's work, and . . . dives into the world of bookmaking."---Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Washington Post

"A handsome treatment of [an] unheralded aspect of Piranesi's career."---Benjamin Riley, New Criterion

"A scholarly and visually rich history that . . . should appeal to fans of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. . . . A beautiful book about books."---John Hill, A Daily Dose of Architecture

"Beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated . . . the book is a testament to the kind of scholarship Piranesi stood for."---Richard Calis, International Journal of the Classical Tradition

"By treating Piranesi's books as a distinct and specific medium, Yerkes and Hyde Minor draw attention to a feature of early modern publications that scholarship rarely fully acknowledges: their inherent instability and 'openness'. From Piranesi Unbound, the book emerges as a site of a continuous reconfiguration of content and printed matter, and this over the entire course of its life: from its conception, when plates are reused and content is cribbed, over its production and sale, when pages and fascicules are combined, bound and personalised, to its distribution and dispersal in collections of books and prints. . . . By casting Piranesi primarily as a bookmaker, Piranesi Unbound begins to liberate his work from his overbearing presence in its interpretation."---Maarten Delbeke, Architectural History

"If you liked Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, you might want to look at Piranesi Unbound by Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor. It's an academic book, but it contains plenty of visual material exploring the Italian artist's work, and it dives into the world of bookmaking."---Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Independent

"In Piranesi Unbound . . . Carolyn Yerkes and Heather HydeMinor show how books represented an alternative business model for [Piranesi], one that required technologies of production and routes of distribution that were different from those for prints. According to the authors, Piranesi the bookmaker has been shouldered aside in the literature by the suitable-for-framing hero of exhibitions and catalogues. Their Piranesi, by contrast, is to be found in libraries more often than in print cabinets. . . . This is a book lover's book."---Joseph Connors, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"Piranesi Unbound is a thoroughly researched and stimulating discursive study of Piranesi as a creator and seller of books. This will be a valuable book for students of Piranesi, book arts and patronage in Eighteenth-Century Rome."---Alexander Adams, Alexander Adams Art

About the Author

Carolyn Yerkes is associate professor of early modern architecture at Princeton University and the author of Drawing after Architecture. Heather Hyde Minor is professor of art history at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Piranesi's Lost Words and The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome.