Important Sale Week
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To be sold at Uppsala Auktionskammare’s Important Sale Week 10 – 13 December 2024.
Lot 828 Piranesi’s Remarkable Views of Rome Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778). Vedute di Roma Disegnate ed Incise da Giambattista Piranesi Architetto Veneziano. Rom, circa 1760–1778. 134 engravings depicting buildings, monuments, ruins, markets, fountains, parks and more of Rome. Plates mainly in the most desirable state, published during Piranesi’s lifetime, printed on thick paper. Large double folio, circa 52,5 cm x 75 cm. Bound in two volumes, plates folded once as per usual, contemporary calf with raised bands and gilt meander borders, rebacked preserving parts of original spines and titles, all edges gilt, marbled nineteenth-century endpapers, bookplate of James Franck Wright as well as Frank and Sigrid Bensow. The present copy lacks two engravings and has one duplicate engraving.
600.000 – 800.000 SEK
€ 52.000 – 69.000
James Franck Bright, probably sold with his collection at Sotheby’s in 1918.
The collection of Engineer and Major Frank Bensow (1883-1969), Norrköping.
Thense by present to the present owner.
Arthur M. Hind: Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A Critical Study (1922) pp. 30-73.
Norrköpings museum. Grafik ur Frank Bensows samling (1961), no. 57.
John Wilton-Ely: Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The Complete Etchings (1994), [and included there:] “Watermarks” by Andrew Robison, pp. 1150-1182.
Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778) is a solitary among eighteenth-century graphic artists, and the print series Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) is considered to be his magnum opus, containing some of his absolute masterpieces.
The first leaves, which he executed already in the 1740s, did not attract much attention at the time of publication. As the decades passed and the work grew in scope, however, it became evidently clear that Piranesi was both an innovator and a pioneer, and, above all, an artist with a unique perspective and an outstanding capability to transfer his visions onto copper and paper.
Piranesi grew up in Venice as a son to a master builder, and received training in architecture, building techniques and construction along with engineering and stage design. His deep knowledge in these different fields were put to use to create his visual works. He held architecture at highest esteem, viewing himself as an architect throughout his life and even referring to himself as “architetto” on the title leaf of the present work.
The unmatched ability to blend different traditions and genres became Piranesi’s distinctive feature as an artist. In Vedute di Roma, he lets the delicate Venetian light from his youth meet the dark interiors of ruinous Roman buildings. From an art historical point of view, he moves from richly flowing Baroque to restrained Classicism, only to end up as an emerging romantic.
Although the images in Vedute di Roma to some extent can be seen as realistic representations, they are densely populated by Piranesi’s highly personal fantasies, his vertiginousness alters the viewpoints, and his dreams bleed into the ink of the brickwork.
After a few years of working on different projects in Rome during the 1740s, Piranesi began in around 1747 on what would become Vedute di Roma. The plates were successively published over three decades, and the auction’s copy includes all plates except two. Leafing through this work, one is struck by the dramatic and imaginative vistas, with its dreamy scale and proportion and meticulous attention to detail, such as the grandeur of Colosseum and the restful harmony of the Pantheon. Here we can stroll along Piazza Navona that buzzes of street life, or find our way to the outskirts of Rome where ruins are embedded in pastoral landscapes. Page by page, we see how Piranesi unveils each layer of time and space that make up the eternal city.
At first, Piranesi had a publisher for his views, the Frenchman Jean (or Giovanni) Bouchard, but eventually he began selling them on his own account from his studio in Palazzo Tomati. The catalogue of the pictures was published in the form of an engraved sheet. On this sheet Piranesi added line after line as he completed the new editions of the plates. The last plates of the work by Piranesi’s hand were published in 1778, the same year as his death. After this, Piranesi’s son produced two supplementary views, but these are not included in works published during Piranesi’s lifetime and thus not present in this copy.
After Piranesi’s death his family continued to sell his images, creating new impressions from the preserved plates. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the plates were located in Paris, from where new editions were published, for a period by Didot. But all of these more recent impressions suffer from lower quality due to worn plates and simpler paper. The auction’s copy, by contrast, belongs to the most desired variant that was published in sharp impressions by Piranesi himself during the 1760s and 1770s, on thick paper of highest quality, and here in very fine condition. The watermarks are mainly variations of a fleur-de-lis within double circles (Hind 2 and 3; Robison 33–39), but occurring is also a fleur-de-lis within a single circle, and on at least one plate the watermark that Robison catalogues as number 61.
The copy’s earliest history is unknown; the first owner possible to identify is James Franck Bright (1832–1920), teacher of history at Oxford. Parts of his collection were sold at Sotheby’s in 1918. Most recently the copy was in the collection of Frank and Sigrid Bensow. Frank Bensow (1883–1969) was a military by profession and an avid collector of older prints, as well as interested in graphic illustrations in older books. Sigrid Bensow was an artist. Books and prints from the Bensow collection were exhibited in 1961 at Norrköpings museum; in its catalogue, this volume is described in number 57. Some pencil markings on the plates, along with loose notes, further shows that the copy has been handled by Axel Widstrand (1866–1956) who collected privately and, by the end of his life, worked with the collections of Sweden’s Nationalmuseum. ■