Piranesi possessed a style so intensely individual that every print he produced is recognizable as his by any person who has ever looked at two or three of his plates with moderate attention, yet this style never degenerated into manner; that is to say, into an imitation not of nature, but of the peculiarities of other men or of one’s own earlier work. It became a manner or process in the hands of his son, Francesco, but with Giovanni Battista it always remained style, which is the expression of an original intellect observing nature before consciously varying the relations of elements drawn by it from nature, to the end of producing a work of art. This style, whose faults lie in excessive contrasts of black and white, in inadequate handling of skies, and, at times, in a certain general hardness of aspect, is marked by great boldness, breadth, and power, both in conception and in actual execution, but it is never marred by crudity or roughness. It is a remarkable fact that the immense force, which first of all impresses one in Piranesi’s work, does not exclude, but is, on the contrary, often combined or contrasted with extreme elegance and fineness of touch. To cite but one instance: in that wonderful print which forms the title-page of “The Prisons,”—the figure of the chained man, who imparts such a sense of terror to the whole scene, is handled with a grace and delicacy worthy of Moreau or any of those French contemporaries who filled the land with their exquisite creations for the endless delight of later generations. It is this contrast, together with his dramatic introduction and grouping of the human figure, which gives to Piranesi’s style a character that has been aptly qualified as scenic. An etching by Piranesi produces very much the same curious effect that a person experiences on entering a theater after the curtain has risen, so that he receives from the stage a sudden, sharp impression, not of a passing moment of the play, but of one distinct, dramatic picture. His etchings are never theatrical in the sense of something factitious and exaggerated beyond likeness to nature, but are always truly dramatic.
Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate VIII
Size of the original etching, 21½ × 15¾ inches
Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate XI
Size of the original etching, 16 × 21½ inches
It will have been noticed that plates by Piranesi have been referred to both as etchings and engravings; this is because he used both etching and engraving in the same plate, a proceeding which, if decried by theoretical writers, has none the less been habitually employed by many of the greatest masters of both means of expression. Despite his faults and his Latin exuberance, Piranesi is technically one of the great etchers, in whose hands, particularly in certain plates in “The Prisons,” the etching-needle attained a breadth of vigorous execution that no one has surpassed. In judging an artist, the obvious precept, to consider what he was aiming to do, is unfortunately too often neglected. To expect of Piranesi either the incomparable delicacy of Whistler, or the unsurpassed crispness of Meryon would be futile, but he does possess certain forceful qualities which are not theirs. When he used the burin, he could handle it with the greatest precision and skill. In such a plate as the one known as The French Academy, the building is engraved with a skill not at all unworthy of the engravers who were at that time doing such wonderful work in France, while the plate, as a whole, gains a delightful quality,—that neither pure etching nor pure engraving could have given,—from the contrast which the sharp and delicately engraved lines make with the figures that are etched with a consummate freedom and dash worthy of Callot, who, one cannot but think, must have influenced Piranesi.
In his valuable monograph on Piranesi, Mr. Arthur Samuel makes the statement that “architectural etching has culminated with him”; and it is certain that in this field his work surpasses, both in architectural correctness and in artistic merit, any that has been done either before or since his day.
