Architecture in the manner of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Ornamental excess and the apotropaic function of grotesque representations

Giovanni Battista Piranesi\u27s architectural representations have made significant contributions to the historiography of early modern architecture. His achievements in this regard continue to enthrall many a contemporary scholar solicitous in identifying the larger polemical and theoretical context within which he imaginatively depicted architectural figures. The following dissertation maintains Piranesi\u27s inventive manner was largely characterized by his return to the prodigious number of ruins which demonstrated the presence in antiquity of forms of figuration incongruous, licentious and capricious. So vast had been their numbers, Piranesi adopted their eccentric characteristics in the creation of his own genres of representation. And revealing the extent to which he recognized in their midst ancient modes of ‘grotesque’ figuration is the aim of this dissertation. ^ Foremost in his embrace of antiquity had been the enthusiasm with which he penned hundreds of pages of text and etched thousands of ornamental fragments, sites which had privileged architecture\u27s narrative dimension. His obsessive preoccupation with paintings, sculptures and furnishings revealed, moreover, an unremitting fascination for ornamental surfaces. In this regard, he explored two distinct settings; the subterranean grotto and the pastoral landscape, locations in the Roman campagnia to which he had been compulsively attracted throughout his career as both had demonstrated the presence in antiquity of a plethora of grotesqueries whose meaning Piranesi sought to decipher. ^ To this end, he undertook a journey to the origins of ornaments in ancient ritual practices. Seminal in this regard had been the ancient city of Herculaneum in whose excavated fragments a culture endowed with a surplus of ‘licentious’ manners had been recognized. During the 18th century this ancient territory\u27s capricious proclivity was theoretically construed. And in hundreds of ornamental artifacts, forms of figuration were celebrated for their apotropaic functions. Ancient griffins, serpents, satyrs and sphinxes endowed with talismanic powers proliferated throughout the Bay of Naples, and their presence evidenced ancient forms of Bacchic worship. Piranesi\u27s unequivocal attention to this family of figures is the focus of this dissertation. For with every frenetic act of interlacing, he sought to resurface a narrative dimension of architectural ornaments increasingly obfuscated by modernity.