![]() ![]() And let’s not mention Piranesi’s threats on the life of the doctor attending his son Francesco, or his 1752 marriage to Angela Pasquini, whom he’d met five days earlier, while drawing amongst the ruins of the Forum, and whose dowry he immediately spent on copper etching plates.) (Had Piranesi succeeded, we would be without one of the signal achievements of 18 th century etching – Vasi’s monumental view of Rome – Prospetto di Alma Citta di Roma dal Monte Gianicolo – etched across a dozen separate sheets, reaching a length of almost nine feet (fig. It is recorded that Vasi also informed his hot-headed charge, “You are too much a painter, my friend, to be an etcher.” – an apogee in the annals of failed Art world prognostication! What trespass incited Piranesi’s homicidal rage? Vasi thought his combustible student had withheld certain secrets of the use of acid in the etching process. Yet, when we think of Piranesi, do we think of murder? This was what he unsuccessfully attempted with one of his teachers, Guiseppe Vasi (1710-1782). Piranesi’s are pictures of the ways those ruined places feel. 1), if ruins’ realities are less dramatic than this artist has them appear, there is, in his views, an unerring emotional accuracy. Why are Piranesi’s etchings so powerful? If the ruins are not quite so immense as he portrays them, nor the people quite so tiny, poignantly approaching insignificance (fig. When we think of 18 th century Italian architectural graphic art, we think of the surpassing images of ruined Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 – 1778). The lives of many 18 th century Italian architectural artists on paper – those working often in black and white – are, if anything, more colorful (though darker-hued) than their painterly cousins. Other vedutistas were well, even royally born, enjoyed the company and patronage of kings, Popes, and assorted aristocrats, while plying a profession they conceived as gentlemanly. Fellow Naples resident Gennaro Greco, whose disfiguring burns brought him the none-too-gentle nickname Il Mascacotta – he of the cooked face – enjoyed three beautiful wives, (simultaneously!) before falling to his death from a high scaffold while, naturalmante, painting. Leonardo Coccorante, painter of moonlit, ruined, sinister scenes populated by bandits and their prey, learned his shadowy art from a condemned Sicilian burglar, while a jailer’s assistant in a Neapolitan prison. This title is only published in A4 hardback format.įor more information on University of Chester Press books please visit: the varied appeals of 17 th and 18 th century Italian capricci and vedute are the robust, vividly polychromatic lives of the artists who painted them. ![]() Peter Boughton and Ian Dunn, George Cuitt (1779–1854) – 'England's Piranesi': His Life and Work and a Catalogue Raisonné of His Etchings, 2022, ISBN 978-1-91, £35.00 (plus postage). This collective evidence contributes significantly towards re-establishing Cuitt’s reputation as ‘one of the finest, in his chosen line the very finest, of our native Etchers’. As well as a biography of Cuitt, incorporating much recently discovered material, topics covered include Cuitt’s art, the role of the drawing master in Regency England, the process of etching, and the economics of print production and distribution. Here, for the first time, all Cuitt’s known etchings – both published and unpublished – are illustrated and described, enabling a detailed assessment of his unique ability to combine an atmospheric, romantic and poetic vision with accurate architectural and landscape depictions of Chester, North Wales, Cumbria, Warwickshire and Yorkshire. Newly-researched essays are added to this definitive Catalogue. The profits from teaching and sale of his publications enabled him to gain ‘a handsome independence’ and to return to Masham in North Yorkshire in 1821, where he built an elegant house, pursued his passions for gardening and fishing, and produced his celebrated series of etchings of Yorkshire abbeys, considered by many to be his finest works. Although an accomplished sketcher and painter of landscapes and architecture, he was inspired by the prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi to adopt etching as the medium for his published work. His etchings produced between 18 were more recently described as having ‘no equal in Britain and no superior in the similar school of any nation’.īorn in Richmond, Yorkshire, Cuitt trained as an artist under his father’s tuition and commenced a parallel career as a drawing master, moving to Chester in 1804 where he was to produce and publish over half of his total output. George Cuitt (1779–1854), who lived and worked in Chester and North Yorkshire, was described during his lifetime as ‘not only undoubtedly the first etcher, but also one of the most original artists this country has ever produced’. ![]()
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