The Sources and Fortunes of Piranesi’s Archaeological Illustrations

Abstract

Susan M. Dixon earned her doctorate from Cornell University in 1991 with a dissertation on the archaeological publications of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. She studies the history of pre–scientific archaeology, from Pirro Ligorio to Piranesi, with a particular focus on illustration as a means to convey historical knowledge. She has published on this subject in a variety of venues, and is beginning a book–length manuscript on the subject. In 1995–96, she was awarded a J. Paul Getty post–doctoral fellowship to study the Accademia degli Arcadi, a society founded in 1690 primarily to restore good taste in literature, and its successes and failures in bringing about the reform of Italian society and architecture. She has written a book entitled The Bosco Parrasio: Performance and Perfectibility in the Garden of the Arcadians, which focuses on their garden meeting place as a breeding ground for a utopian society. Dr Dixon teaches art history at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) developed a way of representing the archaeological past by using the multi–informational image, an engraved illustration which appears to be a composite of various drawings, on various surfaces, and employing various modes of representation, scale and detail. The cartographic tradition, particularly maps from sixteenth–century Europe, offer a precedent for this type of illustration. Piranesi found theoretical underpinnings for it in contemporary discussions about the workings of the human memory, which was identified as a viable tool for those pursuing historical knowledge. His illustrations make visible the processes of memory on an assemblage of archaeological information, and they were a means to historical reconstruction.Archaeologists of the generation after Piranesi did not use the multi–informational image as the science of archaeology underwent a sea change at the end of the century. However, some compilers of travel literature, in particular Jean–Laurent–Pierre HoÏel, author and illustrator of Voyage pittoresque des isles de Sicile, de Malte, et de Lipari, found the format suitable to their purposes. Like Piranesi’s, Hoüel’s multi–informational images reveal the hand of the artist on the information he had diligently collected and ordered; Hoüel’s picturesque illustrations of the southern Italian islands’ people and places are self–consciously subjective. The format also makes apparent what was so appealing to many a voyager –the apparent survival of the past in the culture of the present.