Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Gruppo di Colonne, che regge due archi d'un gran Cortile ... (Group of columns which support two arches of a great courtyard ...)

Gruppo di Colonne, che regge due archi d'un gran Cortile ...  (Group of columns which support two arches of a great courtyard ...) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Artwork Detail

… the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour. Savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michel Angelo, and exuberant as Rubens, he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realise. He piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales Heaven with mountains of edifices. Yet what taste in his boldness! What grandeur in his wildness! What labour and thought both in his rashness and details!

(Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 1765)

Title
Gruppo di Colonne, che regge due archi d'un gran Cortile ... (Group of columns which support two arches of a great courtyard ...)
Artist/creator
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Production date
1748
Medium
etching
Dimensions
395 x 245 mm
Credit line
Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, bequest of Dr Walter Auburn, 1982
Accession no
M1982/1/4/13
Other ID
002 Auburn Catalogue
Copyright
No known copyright restrictions
Department
International Art
Display status
Not on display

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