Egyptian Decoration of the Caffe degli Inglesi (Spaccato della bottega ad uso di caffe detta degli Inglesi)

Date1769

MediumEtching

Credit LineEgyptian Purchase Fund

DimensionsMat: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm) Maximum: 8 1/8 × 10 1/2 in. (20.6 × 26.7 cm)

Object number2002.017.001

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 HistoryTravelers in an Antique Land: Artists and Ancient Egypt, Michael C. Carlos Museum, August 30, 2003 - January 11, 2004
Piranesi's Pages: Rome in Books and Prints, 1756-1776, Michael C. Carlos Museum, February 13 - April 4, 2021
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, September - November 2003.

ProvenancePurchased by MCCM from Philographikon-Galerie Rauhut, Munich, Germany.

Status

Not on view

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