And the Umbrian museum, meritoriously, decided to pull it out of storage, have it restored, and exhibit a selection, of sixty-one pieces, until next January 8, 2023, in an exhibition entitled Piranesi in the Collections of the National Gallery of Umbria, curated by Carla Scagliosi. Sold individually or in fascicles, they exerted, Fernando Mazzocca has written, “a decisive influence on the formation of a romantic conception of classical antiquity, conditioning our ideas about Roman civilization.” There are, in all, one hundred and thirty-eight plates: the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia is among the institutions that possess the complete collection. And among the volumes that contributed to feeding the myth of Rome and its antiquities, a not secondary role belonged to the collections of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which enjoyed an extraordinary fortune: success arisen in particular from the aforementioned Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome ), which, started around 1747, were continued by the artist until the last years of his career, with new plates being added almost annually.
We can imagine them this way, the travelers who descended slowly on the Italian peninsula from northern Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the Grand Tour always began after reading, after studying, after dreaming. In front of their eyes the imposing and threatening mass of the Alps, in their hearts the longing for the eternal Urbe, in their minds the images they saw at home while leafing through Piranesi’s Views of Rome.
Review of the exhibition "Piranesi in the Collections of the National Gallery of Umbria," curated by Carla Scagliosi (Perugia, National Gallery of Umbria, Septemto January 8, 2023.
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