STAGING PAST & PRESENT: Piranesi’s Rome with Mary Kisler

A Venetian who spent most of his working life in Rome, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) developed a passion for Roman architecture.

Archaeological ruins and sculptural fragments were constantly being uncovered, and he delighted in ‘re-constructing’ these, not only imagining how they would have looked when first built, but also creating fantastical structures of colossal proportions.

Connoisseurs and critics applauded his architectural prints, but it was his poetic flights of fancy that had a major impact on the European visual imagination.

Mary Kisler is Mackelvie Curator International Art at Auckland Art Gallery and is an art historian with a particular interest in Renaissance and Baroque art.