If Piranesi did not build actual buildings he certainly imagined them. His drawing was made from the centre of a circle of cypress trees which he did not include because had he done so they would have obstructed a complete view of the site. Piranesi uses artistic license to reveal the scale of the site. It has water sprays and jets spouting out from eagles, boats and animal mouths, into three canals. On the the central “vertical” axis you can see the Fountain of Gentle Dragons, and the multi-storied Fountain of the Cups and lower down, running across the garden is the misleadingly named Alley of a Hundred Fountains which links two more grand fountains. Water dominates the garden, the fountains are shown in full working order with water gushing out and cascading through the network of paths that take the visitor down the steep slope from the villa. Vast engineering and earthwork was required to pull off such a seemingly effortless play of space, Piranesi’s view focused on the garden, and looks straight down the central axis up to the villa on the summit outlined against the sky. Tivoli is the meeting place of three of the Tiber’s spring-fed tributaries and so the gardens of the Villa d’Este are dominated by water which is used to power the garden’s array of cascades and fountains and even a water organ. There is a detailed description by Tom Turner It had a double axis, grand fountain and two streams running its length from the palace to the southern entrance with a statue of Amphitrite, the wife of Poseidon the sea god, as the focal point of a series of cascades. The site was originally relatively flat but Nolli created a sunken garden to display the cardinal’s treasures. The garden extends further to the right of the print and ended with a large pavilion called the Caffeaus which had a grand semi-circular portico. This is now in the Louvre, part of the loot taken to Paris by the French in 1797, and unlike smaller works of art was considered too expensive and complicated to return after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. The view ends with the large Fontana dei Facchini, with its four Atlas figures. Piranesi doesn’t show the whole garden, and there is probably more missing than included. The garden is seen from an oblique angle, which distorts the view in much the same way as a wide angle lens might do. Piranesi left Rome after it was published, returning to Venice, before travelling to see the excavations which had begun in 1738 at Herculaneum. The collection was not a great commercial success although it was reissued in a revised form a few years later and some of the prints were recycled and appeared in other volumes. The images bear similarities to contemporary theatre set designs, notably in the use of exaggerated perspective, which he was to use to great effect in his depiction of gardens. Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive his first collection of a dozen or so prints of fanciful reconstructions of imaginary classical buildings was published in 1743. But Piranesi was clearly anxious to test his own talents. He began by studying for a short period under Giuseppe Vasi, an architect turned engraver who was already publishing vedute, and was to go on and produce several volumes of them in book form. On his arrival in Rome Piranesi lived near the French Academy in Rome which had been established by Louis XIV as a “finishing school” for aspiring French artists. Title page of the 1st edition of Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive, 1743
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