Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of Pre-scientific Archaeology

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s interest in the role of images in constructing historical knowledge underlay the artist’s choice of a mode of representation known as the capriccio, or pastiche of ancient artefacts, to illustrate his archaeological publications of the late 1750s and early 1760s. Piranesi in part derived his attitude towards the capricci from Francesco Bianchini, author and illustrator of L’istoria universale provata coi monumenti, published first in 1697 and reissued in 1747. The significance of the connection between Piranesi and Bianchini is that it demonstrates that the artist upheld that the object or image could address historians’ epistemological concerns, and that the artistic imagination was a viable tool of historical research; these were attitudes typical of archaeology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an addendum, the article suggests that in 1747 or 1748 Piranesi created four capricious compositions known as the Grotteschi with Bianchini’s work in mind, and possibly to earn an artistic commission related to the publication of Bianchini’s texts.