Piranesi Antiques - New Orleans [European, Terre e Provence, Neo-classic, 18c, Louis XIV]

The Grand Tour

The Piranesi Collection

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi

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Classic Design

Classic design and ornamentation will always be a part of any stylistic period or trend because it was first.

Classic motifs, designs, proportions as we have come to know them originated at the beginning of Western culture.

The first known cultures from recorded Western civilization, the Egyptians, Greeks and various sub-cultures influenced by them, had a lasting, permanent influence on decorative and architectural style, proportion and design.

Trends, Baroques, fads and mannerisms will continue to punctuate the regularly revived original classic, however, design and decorative motifs that incorporate and reference the classic are constant and timeless.

By the 1780’s the new Enlightenment ideals in France and elsewhere had found a congenial stylistic vehicle in the revival of classicism that became known as Neo-Classicism. Neoclassic artists as well as writers looked to Rome as the great repository of classicism.

To understand the origins of Neo-Classicism it is necessary to look at the institution of the Grand Tour, which made Rome the artistic capital of the Western world of the 18 th century.

The Art of the Grand Tour

From the late 1600’s until well into the nineteenth century, the education of a young Northern European, English or American gentleman and, increasingly, gentlewoman, was completed on the Grand Tour, a prolonged visit to the major cultural sites of southern Europe, especially, Italy.

The tour would begin in Paris, then move on to a number of well-preserved Roman buildings and monuments in Southern France.

The focus of the Grand Tour was Italy, repository of the classical and Renaissance pasts. In Italy the principal points of interest were Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome and the recently excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In the first decades of the seventeenth century these tourists, especially the British, spent their money on “vedoute” (Italian for “views”), city views that they collected, primarily as memoirs of their Grand Tour experience.

One of the most famous artists depicting ancient Italian views was Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Venetian born, trained as an architect, Piranesi went to Rome in 1740 and began producing portfolios of prints of ancient architectural ruins and artifacts of Rome and the recently discovered ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The extraordinary archeological finds recorded and published by Piranesi excited great interest in classical art and artifacts. This furor over the Neo-Classical had a broad influence on the evolving style of architecture, art, decorative arts and furniture. This Neo-Classical movement was also known as Empire in France and America and as late-Georgian and Regency in Great Britain.

Piranesi Antiques’ collection of decorative arts, furniture and prints recall the antiquarian, classical design and ornamentation of the unique treasures purchased by the 18 th century adventurer and scholar on the European Grand Tour.