Altro spaccato per longo della stessa bottega (Egyptian Decoration of the Caffe degli Inglesi)

Date1769

MediumEtching

Credit LineArt History Department Fund

DimensionsMat: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm) Image: 10 1/8 × 13 5/8 in. (25.7 × 34.6 cm)

Object number2003.072.002

Label TextIn the 1760s, Piranesi began to design furniture and interior decorative schemes. His innovative designs celebrated an increasingly vast variety of ancient architectural forms, incorporating Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, and Roman ornamentation. In 1769, Piranesi published his final polemical treatise, the Diverse manière. The book, featuring an essay in defense of Etruscan and Egyptian architecture and sixty-seven etched plates, many of which pictured ornamented fireplaces, dually functioned as a scholarly volume and as a sales catalogue advertising the artist’s designs. In the book’s text and images, Piranesi encouraged the modern architect to emulate the eclectic creativity of Romans and draw on a diverse range of models.

This plate from the Diverse manière reproduces the interior of the Caffe degli Inglesi, or British Café, designed and executed in Rome by Piranesi in the mid-1760s. The decoration, though subsequently destroyed, is celebrated as one of the first interiors created in an Egyptian style since antiquity. It invited a mixed reception from contemporaries, however. Despite the at times unenthusiastic response of his peers, Piranesi’s innovative use of Egyptianizing forms would prove incredibly influential in European design in the decades after the Napoleonic invasion, and even into the twentieth century.

The plate shows a screen of heavy, intricately decorated masonry pierced with openings that reveal an Egyptian landscape beyond, dotted with pyramids and other funerary structures. The illusionistic architectural structures, adorned with friezes of hieroglyphs and figural reliefs, are topped with Nilotic animals, including the bull, crocodile, and locust.
Exhibition HistoryPiranesi's Pages: Rome in Books and Prints, 1756-1776, Michael C. Carlos Museum, February 13 - April 4, 2021
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, March - May 2004.

ProvenancePurchased by MCCM from Gallery 539, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Status

Not on view

Collections

Works of Art on Paper

Technical NotesWritten on mat, G.B. Piranesi Diverse Maniere d'adornare i camini, Plate 45. F. 906 (907) Early issue, before the number. Original etching.