Artist's 17 drawings of ancient Greek temples in Paestum, intended for set of engravings, on show at Sir John Soane's Museum
A set of rare Piranesi drawings is to be reunited at Sir John Soane's Museum in London for the first time since they were made, soon before the Italian artist's death in 1778.
The 17 drawings – 15 of which belong to the Soane, with the two on loan from institutions in Paris and Amsterdam – depict the three magnificent ancient Greek temples in Paestum, south of Naples.
With typical Piranesian drama, they depict dark, gloomy and heavily shadowed ruins. The heavily pitted doric colonnades march gloomily into the distance; the crumbling masonry sprouts foliage.
The images were the working drawings for an elaborate set of engravings completed and published after the artist's death as Différentes Vues de Pesto (Various Views of Paestum).
According to Soane Museum curator Jerzy Kierkuc-Bielinski, Piranesi was somewhat secretive about his studio practice, and very few working drawings such as these survive. Best known for his engravings of views of the monuments of ancient Rome, and his fantastical series Carceri d'Invenzione ("imaginary prisons"), he liked his admirers to believe that his work was the product of immediate and profound moments of inspiration. A separate pair of drawings in the museum, which he probably presented to the Scottish architect Robert Adam, for example, shows imaginary architectural scenes without the hint of a mistake or correction, apparently the product of a moment of unperfectable genius.
But these late drawings of Paestum, said Kierkuc-Bielinski, tell a different story. "They are incredibly carefully planned," he said. "You can see that they start with drawing, that's then fixed with chalk, then there's ink washes and pen-and-ink."
Different drawings show different stages in the creative process being worked through: one emphasises the deep shadows cast by the temple columns, for example; another just lightly suggests the shadows through a hint of red chalk, while the lines of the architecture are focused on. "You can see different things being investigated," said Kierkuc-Bielinski. "He is working in the tradition of drawing being used as an extension of thought."
The temples, buit by Greek colonists from the sixth century BC, lay virtually undiscovered in the malarial swamps of coastal Campania until the 1740s, when the architect Mario Gioffredo made the first measured drawings of the structures.
The drawings made by Piranesi on the spot in this still remote and disease-ridden spot would have been rough working sketches – not the elaborate drawings seen at the Soane, said Kierkuc-Bielinski. These drawings would have been worked up later in the studio, with the help of assistants.
Indeed, the bucolic scenes of rural folk and their flocks seen in the foreground of many of the drawings are complete fantasy, he added, some of them comically so (a group of fishermen, for example, appear to be hauling up their nets near the steps of a temple in one of the drawings, without a wave in sight).
And in some of the drawings, the perspective is clearly altered to emphasise the sinister, louring effects of the temple colonnades. "These are dramatic drawings with distorted perspective: he creates highly ambiguous spaces," said Kierkuc-Bielinski. "There is incredible theatricality and inventiveness; he breaks rules and creates dense, rich, terrifying, disconcerting scenes."
Piranesi's Paestum drawings are at Sir John Soane's Museum, London WC2, until 18 May
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