Giovanni Battista Piranesi
1720-1778Shortly before 1750, Italian architect and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi treated time, fame, death, and decay in a remarkable series of four etchings that are now known at the Grotteschi. These etchings are like dreamy sketches of the artist’s meditations on antiquity, organic decay, and architectural ruination. The four prints in this series of “grotesques” have been conventionally titled The Skeletons, The Triumphal Arch, The Tomb of Nero, and The Monumental Tablet. The Spencer recently acquired The Tomb of Nero, a fantastic collision of images that seem to float in a cloudbank.
What is this image of a tomb bearing the name of the Roman emperor Nero about? Perhaps about everything that comes to mind as one names what can be seen in this vision: writhing and entangled serpents, ruined columns, an artist’s palette and brushes, a quiver of arrows, ornamental passages based on shell forms a dolphin stranded on a fragment of masonry wall, and a welling up of vegetation that might easily be mistaken for the turbid waters of a breaking wave.