Chapter 8 - Laura Piranesi incise

Summary

Today, only twenty signed etchings by Laura Piranesi, daughter of the famous printmaker Giovanni Battista, are known. Her work has never been assessed independently from that produced by her father and brother. Documents newly discovered in Roman archives bring to light fresh biographical details and important milestones including her education in her father’s studio making vedute (cityscapes or vistas), a genre much appreciated by foreign tourists. In this chapter, her prints held in museum collections are, for the first time, catalogued separately from those of her family members. Showing great ability as an etcher, her small views of ancient and modern Roman monuments are in keeping with the subjects of larger views by her father; conversely, her picturesque style is very different.

Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929¹

Even though more than a century and a half separates Laura Piranesi’s artistic activity and this chapter’s opening epigraph excerpted from Virginia Woolf, these words may well pertain to the artist and printmaker who, despite her talent, was not as well-known as her illustrious father, Giovanni Battista Piranesi.² From childhood onward, the daughter of the great printmaker and architect breathed the fertile and creative atmosphere of a laboratory crowded with assistants. This was the intaglio workshop and studio that Giambattista had opened in Rome’s Palazzo Tomati, Strada Felice – ‘vicino alla Trinità de’ Monti’, as it was written at the bottom of the prints he conceived, created, and sold at that address, in the so-called Street of the Artists. Laura’s work until now has only been marginally cited in dictionaries and in biographies about her father and to a lesser degree about her older brother Francesco.³ Although the great celebrity of her father has long eclipsed her etchings, this chapter brings to light for the first time biographical information and important milestones in Laura Piranesi’s life based on newly discovered documents in Roman archives. Further, always treated within the context of her father’s and brother’s production, her prints have yet to be catalogued separately and studied for their own merit. Befitting her inclusion in a volume dedicated to women and print, this chapter endeavours to enhance our knowledge of Laura Piranesi’s life and work.

To date, only twenty prints have been ascribed to Laura Piranesi,⁴ and all represent views of Rome, a venture similar to her father’s which earned him widespread acclaim. Nevertheless, these prints reveal that she was an accomplished printmaker. In her lifetime, contemporary critics lauded her talent and elegant style:

Allevava altresì i suoi figliuoli per la via delle belle arti a lui tanto obbligate, ed insino una sua figliuola incide elegantemente sulle singolari tracce del padre.⁵

Laura’s known vedute (cityscapes or vistas) take up some architectural subjects and the perspective of her father’s most famous views in a smaller format. On the copperplates after her name, we read incise or sculp, both meaning ʻetchedʼ, a clear indication of the fact she made the etching by herself, and above all, that she reinterpreted the paternal views with brighter chiaroscuro and a few changes to the composition signalling that she was the inventor of the design. If we look at her etching style and technique, and especially if we reflect on the idea behind the composition, we understand that there is a certain difference between the two artistic visions. As Mario Bevilacqua and Heather Hyde Minor have pointed out, Giambattista conceived his etchings as illustrations in books, therefore always in a tight dialogue with written texts. In this way he must be considered as the author of books in their entirety, texts and images intertwined.⁶ While her father maintains a somewhat scientific and archaeological approach, filling the composition with reference numbers and notes, and a crowded under-title legend specifying historical details with long descriptions, Laura’s plates are easier to enjoy. They convey a fresh and peaceful view of landscape, monuments, and archaeological ruins; her graceful scenes are animated by characters engaged in daily gestures, contributing to a representation of the life of the Eternal City.

A Family Business

Laura Maria Gertrude Piranesi was born in Rome in the late summer of 1754. While we do not know the exact date of her birth, we do know that she was baptized in the church of San Francesco ai Monti on 17 September.⁷ Her godfather was Monsignor Guido Bottari, brother of the more famous Giovanni Gaetano (Florence 1689 – Rome 1775), scholar, theologian, philologist, archaeologist, and librarian, and protector of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the Eternal City since the early years of his residence, in the 1740s. Laura was the eldest daughter of Giovanni Battista, who identifies himself as ‘architetto Veneziano’ and of Angela (or Angelica in some documents) Pasquini, daughter of Domenico, gardener of the Corsini princes, who lived in the palace of the Florentine nobles across the Tiber on Via della Lungara. Giovanni Battista had married Angela the previous year in Santa Maria (Trastevere), the parish to which Angela belonged, and this marriage brought him a dowry of 300 scudi which he put towards a supply of huge copperplates, allowing him to establish and sustain his independent career as a vedute maker.⁸

It is, in fact, thanks to Angela’s personal assets that Piranesi’s early years were a period of professional growth and investment for his activities as a printmaker in Rome. Prior to their marriage, Piranesi had already etched a certain number of plates of the Views of Rome, intended for individual publication or in series of varying numbers, and had published thirty-four of these with Jean (Giovanni) Bouchard, a French publisher and bookseller originally from the Provencal Alps near Briançon, who arrived in Rome in the early 1740s.⁹

The French bookseller published many of Piranesi’s works starting with the first edition of the Invenzioni capricciose di carceri, and then the Opere varie di architettura and the Magnificenze. Only in 1761 did Piranesi stop his collaboration with Bouchard and move his residence and his chalcography laboratory to Palazzo Tomati in Strada Felice (via Sistina, 48), where he started printing on his own. Laura, who was about seven years old at the time of the move grew up between her home and the studio-workshop. The name Laura is the name of Giovanni Battista’s mother, chosen following a family tradition that tells us of his attachment to his Venetian homeland. Two other siblings were born: Francesco (c. 1759) and Faustina Clementina Ludovica, baptized on 3 January 1761 in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, but who died prematurely. Angelo (1763), Anna Maria (1766), and Pietro (1768) followed. The first biographers – Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi and Giovanni Gori Gandellini – report that the two eldest sons continued the family business and Bianconi affirms that all the children were ‘raised in the way of the fine arts’.¹⁰

Consequently, it appears that Laura was educated to follow in her father’s footsteps. While Francesco was trained by the best masters according to Giovanni Battista, who clearly directed him towards the archaeological survey, Laura had been directed by her father towards the veduta, a genre much appreciated by foreign tourists, and perhaps a trendy and fashionable theme for the English culture that Piranesi knew well. It seems probable that Piranesi’s father thought of organizing his business by diversifying the artistic abilities of his children, to entrust each of them with a branch of the family business; Laura probably would have been responsible for the production of small-size views, which were easy-to-sell souvenirs.

Although there is little documentation about Laura’s early experience in the studio and her training in the techniques of etching, it is likely that Laura learned by watching the activities in the busy studio, and that she practised copying smaller versions of her father’s large views of Rome. The artistic education of a young woman in eighteenth-century Italy followed established protocols based on family wealth and class. Perhaps Laura’s artistic education was similar to that of Angelika Kauffmann (1741 Chur – Rome 1807), the Swiss painter who was thirteen years older than she was. Kauffmann’s precocious talent was nurtured by the study of plaster models and prints owned by her father and enhanced by trips to Parma, Modena, and Bologna to see the Carraccis, Guido Reni, and Guercino, and finally to Rome, where Pompeo Batoni made nude drawings available for her to copy. Furthermore, Giovanni Battista Piranesi himself seems to have given her lessons in perspective.¹¹ While we are not aware of any other female artists who worked in his workshop, we can speculate on what Laura may have learned in her father’s studio based on what is known about other eighteenth-century women artists and especially Giovanni’s contributions to their training and knowledge of their published work. If Laura’s father in the mid-1760s gave architectural drawing lessons to the young Kauffmann who was active above all in the field of portraiture and eager to tackle history painting, it is possible that he also found it natural to teach his own daughter perspective rules in view of her contribution to the family business. Likewise, Maddalena, the daughter of Piranesi’s first publisher-bookseller Jean Bouchard, who was three years older than Laura, engraved illustrations for volumes of botany that were sold in the paternal workshop on the ground floor of Palazzo Mellini, opposite San Marcello, in via del Corso.¹²

Giovanni Battista was the undisputed head of the entire organization, and at his death (in 1778), in the absence of a will, according to the statutory law of Rome (in the sense of a local authority of the Papal State), it was the eldest son who should inherit the entire paternal estate.¹³ According to Jacques Guillaume Legrand’s biography, no decision was made regarding the succession as Francesco, due to his young age, was feared unfit to manage the family business.¹⁴ The entire worth of the business was 60,000 scudi.¹⁵ We learn from the documents that as soon as their father had died, Francesco wanted to liquidate Laura’s dowry and get her married immediately in order to get rid of her and thus take over the business. He had no other ‘rivals’ among the rest of the family as Anna Maria was a nun and both Angelo and Pietro were too young. The dowry agreed upon for Laura was a rather meagre sum: 800 scudi established by her father when he was still alive, and 1,500, which was further raised to 2,650 by Francesco after his father’s death.¹⁶

Laura did marry that year. In addition to the biographical details disclosed by Heather Hyde Minor,¹⁷ documents newly discovered while researching the archives for this chapter indicate that she wed Josef Anton Schwerzmann on 8 December 1778. Schwerzmann, of Swiss origin, was born in Rome on 22 March 1754. Laura and her husband relied on her dowry to begin commercial activities in via Frattina. In 1780, Laura and Josef had a daughter, Luisa Clara Maria Gertrude Fortunata Schwerzmann.¹⁸

Laura’s Views of Rome

As Heather Hyde Minor and John Pinto observe, Legrand’s biography ‘emphasises the role played by Piranesi’s son, Francesco (1759–1810), in completing a number of projects that were underway at the time of his father’s death in 1778’;¹⁹ but Legrand and other Piranesi biographers of the nineteenth century remain silent as to Laura’s artistic production, simply mentioning her together with her brother Francesco at the bottom of notes about their father. A small yet important exception to this neglect lies in the aforementioned comment by Ludovico Bianconi in Antologia Romana (1779) which highlights the remarkable quality of her prints. It should be said that Gori Gandellini also notes her technical abilities, likening her work to her brother Francesco’s (but incorrectly giving her birth date as 1850!),²⁰ while Nagler and Thieme-Becker note that she produced small Roman views which she etched in the manner of, or after, her father’s designs.²¹ Laura has her own entry in a 1799 German handbook for art lovers and collectors that states that she excelled in the art of engraving no less than her brother Francesco, and an English Biographical Dictionary of 1806 notes that Laura ‘engraved a set of views in the manner of her father with great success’ (the entry gives an incorrect date for her death).²²

A first biography, albeit short, dedicated to her, independent from her father and brother, appears in Michael Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers.²³ It was only in 1923 that A. M. Hind, art historian and curator of the Prints Department of the British Museum, published a note in which he reported the acquisition by that museum of a volume containing over sixty views of Rome, eighteen of which bear the signature of Laura Piranesi.²⁴ These are etchings with dimensions of about 130 (height) by 200 (width) mm, reproducing various views of the city with ancient and modern monuments. Another collective volume, which contains twenty views signed by Laura together with forty-eight others from the Antichità Romane by her father Giovanni Battista, is kept at the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; BAV).²⁵ Also, several loose sheets signed by Laura are preserved in various public collections around the world: twenty loose print-views are kept in the Quirinale collection, almost all representing the same subjects as the British Museum volume. The following is a list of subjects of Laura’s views traced in Italian and foreign public collections:

1. 1. Veduta di San Giovanni in Laterano, 140 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

2. 2. Veduta della Piramide di Caio Cestio, 140 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

3. 3. Veduta del Campidoglio, 142 × 209 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

4. 4. Veduta del Tempio della Concordia, 138 × 205 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.21)

5. 5. Veduta del Tempio di Antonino, oggi Dogana di Terra, 140 × 206 mm (specimen in Quirinale collection signed ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, the one in the British Museum erased, 1923,0612.11.8)

6. 6. Veduta del Tempio di Cibele nella piazza della Bocca della Verità, 132 × 197 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

7. 7. Tempio di Giano, 139 × 229 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

8. 8. Veduta del Portico di Ottavia, 99 × 132 mm, attribution to Laura Piranesi, London, British Museum (1922.1113.2)

9. 9. Veduta dell’Arco di Settimio Severo, 130 × 196 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

10. 10. Veduta del Tempio di Bacco oggi detto S. Urbano, 139 × 220 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

11. 11. Veduta degli avanzi del Tempio della Pace, 138 × 207 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

12. 12. Veduta del Ponte Salaro, 144 × 206 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi incise’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

13. 13. Veduta dell’Arco di Tito, 139 × 206 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.39)

14. 14. Veduta della Rotonda, 139 × 200 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’ Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, 140 × 230 mm, London, British Museum (1923,0612.11.3)

15. 15. Veduta della Fontana di Termini, 131 × 190 mm, unsigned, London, British Museum (1922,1113.3)

16. 16. Veduta della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, 141 × 209 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi incise’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica (Figure 8.1)

17. 17. Veduta di Ponte Molle, 140 × 230 mm, British Museum unsigned (1923,0612.11.10), Quirinale signed ‘Laura Piranesi inc.’

18. 18. Veduta dell’Anfiteatro Flavio d.o il Colosseo, 141 × 208 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

19. 19. Veduta del tempio della Sibilla in Tivoli, 131 × 195 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

20. 20. Sepolcro di Cecilia Metella or detto Capo di Bove, 140 × 207 mm, ‘Lavora Piranesi inc.’, Rome, Istituto centrale per la grafica

21. 21. Veduta del Castello Sant’Angelo, 140 × 200 mm, ‘Laura Piranesi sculp.’, Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale

Up to now, Laura’s views have never been analysed as complete and autonomous works. Instead, they have always been treated only in relation to the work of her father and brother and known as sheets inserted in collective works. As noted in the prints, she appears as ‘Laura’ or ‘Lavora’, probably a distortion of her name made by those who added etched titles and texts on the plates, and identifies herself as the etcher. Laura engraved the plates – and invented part of the design or composition – and if we compare the etching technique, we notice many characteristics that unequivocally identify Laura’s style. First of all, the quality of the lines is very different from that of her father. Giovanni Battista’s compositions are magnificent, impeccable, full of details: his etching lines are extremely precise. Those that delineate the architecture are thin and regular. Highly stylized parallel lines and cross hatching produce skillful tonal effects that define and order the space. The slow process of multiple etchings using a mordant of strong vinegar, copper sulphate, and ammonia salts rather than the nitric acid used by his contemporaries, bites sharper lines while repeated acid baths achieve a wide range of tones, from silvery greys to intense and velvety blacks. Conversely, Laura’s etching is very free. Her use of the etching needle to gently expose the metal plate beneath the protective ground to the bite of the acid produces a line that appears as if drawn with a stylus: her lines are soft and sometimes repeated like the pentimenti of a sketch, thereby creating very vivid compositions. Laura does not use a scriber, her scenes are drawn freehand, while her father makes use of various precision tools to draw the architectural reliefs on the metallic surface. Moreover, it seems that she prefers to dip the plate only once into the acid bath; in this way the longer the exposure, the deeper and wider will be the recesses created by the acid. These recesses will retain more or less ink during the printing process, resulting in a greater or lesser presence of blacks in the composition. Unique biting gives the prints a spontaneous and pleasing effect.

Figure 8.1 Laura Piranesi, Veduta della Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, 14.1 × 20.9 cm.

Rome Istituto centrale per la grafica. Courtesy of Ministry of Culture.

We can generally observe a formal balance between blacks and whites in Laura’s compositions, and a skilfully judged amount of etching, such as to make the subtle lines of the perspective backgrounds and the skies very clear, with the close-ups, the shaded areas, and the figures being very dark. Skies are not stormy and clouded as are her father’s; the views are more intimate, and figures, although sketched and elongated in a way very similar to Giovanni Battista’s, never assume the same attitudes and positions inside the scene. It is undoubtedly a studied and sought-after result, which suits perfectly the small format of her views, giving a picturesque effect. The twenty known subjects represent views of ancient and modern Roman monuments, and the views and perspective cuts of the compositions are the same as her father’s, while the atmosphere is pleasantly easy and not solemn. Laura creates views of Roman ruins and monuments as independent images rather than illustrations for books as her father did.

In two cases (Veduta del Tempio di Antonino and Veduta del Ponte Molle), the prints kept in Palazzo del Quirinale seem to have been printed before the British Museum specimens: the former include a signature, whereas it appears to be abraded in the two subjects in the British Museum (for the Ponte Molle see also the BAV; for the Veduta del Tempio di Antonino, see the National Gallery of Art, Washington, both unsigned). Hind records that eighteen of these compositions (the series kept in British Museum) are miniature reproductions of her father’s greatest Vedute Romane, including a new version of the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. Laura’s etchings are almost always present in collective volumes along with views signed by her father and her brother. The known volumes are uneven in the number of plates (sometimes sixty, sometimes sixty-one, sometimes sixty-two; the album of the Fondo Cicognara in the BAV contains sixty-eight plates). Many of these albums are difficult to trace because when they entered public collections they were disassembled for conservation reasons. When they are located in private collections, we can only register their passage to auction houses for sale. Therefore, in examining Laura’s views contained in different volumes, we can note that the signature on etchings associated with her vary in completeness or absence.²⁶

Thus, we have at least two known states of Laura’s prints: a first state where her name is highlighted, a second without the indication of the etcher, or with the sole indication ‘Piranesi’; it can be assumed that these plates were published after the artist’s death under the surname of her famous father. It is not possible to determine the dating of these small views by Laura because they are not dated on the plates, and particularly because they are not traceable among the more than a thousand copperplates of the Piranesi chalcography recovered to Paris by Francesco and purchased by the Calcografia Camerale at the behest of Pope Gregory XVI, thus returning to Rome in 1839.

It’s not disclosed in past biographies if Laura was in possession of and authorised to sell the small views of Rome that she had made and signed with her name when her father was still alive. As just mentioned, it was not possible to trace the small etched plates in the Piranesian corpus managed by the brothers Francesco and Pietro in Paris, and then returned to the Calcografia Camerale in Rome, now preserved at Istituto centrale per la grafica, nor is there any trace of the prints by Laura in sales catalogues of Roman contemporary publishers.²⁷ In 1998 and 2001, two watercolour drawings depicting the pinwheel of fireworks in Castel Sant’Angelo were auctioned. Both drawings bore the inscription ‘Laura Piranesi f.’ One of the two was titled Veduta del Ponte e del Castello S. Angelo nel tempo che si spara la Girandola, the other Veduta del Castel S. Angelo di Roma, in tempo che spara la Girandola. Both drawings can be compared to the same subject etched with aquatint by Francesco Piranesi based on a drawing by the French painter Louis Jean Desprez. On 26 January 1781, Francesco Piranesi and Desprez set up a company for the production of watercolour and etched views. Several subjects are specifically mentioned in the agreement: the Pope’s Adoration of Holy Sacrament in Paolina Chapel in Vatican, the Illumination of the Cross on Good Friday in St. Peter’s, the pinwheel of Castel Sant’Angelo, the temple of Isis in Pompei, the Posillipo grotta, and the temple of Serapis, Pozzuoli.²⁸ The plates were originally etched by Francesco in outline, and were intended as a basis for Desprez to watercolour. After Desprez’s departure from Italy in 1784, Piranesi reworked the plates with etching and aquatint, in order to print them without them needing to be coloured. Chracas’s Diario ordinario di Roma in 1782 records: ‘Francesco Piranesi pubblica tre stampe di statue antiche e alcune vedute di Roma e Napoli colorate (fatte con il mons. Despres). Offerte al Pontefice’. ‘Francesco Piranesi publishes three prints of ancient statues and some coloured views of Rome and Naples (done with Mons. Despres). Offered to the Pope’.²⁹ The British Museum houses a watercolour drawing depicting the cave of Posillipo attributed to Desprez,³⁰ recognised by Campbell Dogson (curator of the museum’s Prints and Drawings department from 1912 to 1932) as preparatory for the etching made by Francesco Piranesi and retouched by hand by Desprez; it is one of the prints mentioned in the contract between the two artists. Assuming that the two signed drawings were made by Laura before her father’s death, it is interesting to note that the pinwheel of Castel Sant’Angelo, an evidently very popular and publicly requested subject, was designed and perhaps also coloured by Laura Piranesi, probably for an editorial project later carried on by her brother Francesco.

The presence of the prints signed by Laura, or with her surname only, both in miscellaneous volumes printed in Rome in 1802 and as images in a journal edited in Paris a few years later, does not dispel the doubt about what happened to the plates. This is an issue that still needs to be investigated and that promises to open up new lines of research towards a better understanding of the life and work of this neglected female artist.

Through documents newly discovered in the archives, we now know that Laura Piranesi died on 9 March 1790 at 34 years of age.³¹ This premature death left her promising talent largely untapped. Despite her short life, Laura Piranesi’s etchings reveal her precise, pure, and elegant touch. Her style, characterised by both a fluid line and the accuracy of technique, is in keeping with her free interpretation of the view genre in tune with the proto-Romantic current of Italian landscape painters. While many questions about her career and production remain unanswered, continued archival research may uncover new prints or documents about her work and its reception. Talent and skill evident in her etchings suggest that, had she lived longer, she might well have moved beyond following in her father’s footsteps to create a path of her own.