Beyond Piranesi: Urban Representations in Contemporary Printmaking

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) codified a modern style of representing the city by inaugurating dramatic perspectives, bird's-eye views, forced diagonals, and futuristic visions. For example, in his prints of Rome’s Campo Marzio and the Via Appia, Piranesi focuses on the sublime exaltation of ruin and antiquity, while revealing, as well, a discourse on architecture and the contemporary city. Piranesi’s style of printed images determined an aesthetic of later representations of modern architecture and urban spaces (Paris, London, Wien,...). Nineteenth-century romantics and twentieth-century avant-garde multimedia artists, such as Sergei Eisenstein, marked the next generation of engravers who represented the contemporary city. After Piranesi, printed depictions of the modern city pull together nostalgia, nightmare, history, the exaltation of progress, and ruins—marking the past with ideas, as well, of a future.

This panel highlights print media’s role in the representation of urban and architectural transformations in large cities. We invite papers that bring forth the work of printmakers, and also institutional or personal projects, that analyze aspects related to the artistic change that engaged with the representation of the city, new perspectives in the representation of urban morphology, documentary or propagandistic intentions, and also questions around media and the issues that allow print scholars to establish a broad intercontinental conversation of urban representation in modern and contemporary culture.