Exhibition: Piranesi’s Paestum: Master Drawings Uncovered

Amongst the most  significant examples of European graphic art are the fifteen highly resolved preparatory drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and held in Sir John Soane's Museum.

Produced for Piranesi's last great graphic project his Différentes vues de Pesto…, published posthumously 1778, they show views of the three great Doric temples in the former Greek colony of Paestum, located dramatically on a plateau of  not far from the coast of the Gulf of Salerno.

Piranesi visited the site in 1777 and produced the fifteen drawings that are in the Soane and two further drawings – one in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and one in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (it is likely that twenty-one drawings were originally produced to match the twenty-one plates in Différentes vues de Pesto…).

The drawings are very close to the finished prints and are particularly accomplished examples of Piranesi’s topographical observation.

For the first time these powerful drawings are to be shown together in a focused exhibition which will look at them as great works of art in their own right as well as examing how they revolutionised architects' and artists' understanding of early Greek Classical architecture.