2025.05.12
 
451 Rhawn Gallery . . . remembering a special Philadelphia Saturday afternoon, almost a quarter century ago.
 
451 Rhawn Gallery . . . with just one of the deacquisition gifts received today from the Medical Mission Sisters.
2020.05.12
Mary Boone's 180 hours of community service hours 73 74 75 76 77 78
2002.05.12
Re: 'game over" design
I got a copy of Homo Ludens a few years ago, and so far I have really only read the introduction. Nonetheless, I still got much from the book so far. For example, I collected many passages that I feel relate to how Piranesi designed/'played with' his reenactment of ancient Rome via the Ichnographia Campus Martius--indeed, reenactment itself is very much a "re-play", literally a playing / acting [even designing?] again.
1778.05.12 Tuesday
Piranesi's study for his own tomb is in the Charles J.M. Eaton Collection, the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art, BMA R. 11826.114. Inscribed: 'di 12 maggio 1778/ Disegno fatto dal Cav. Piranesi per darvi l'idea del suo Deposito'. In a later hand is added Rome 1843'.
Among the antiquities illustrated in Vasi, candelabri, cippi he included the candelabrum which, as he explained in the descriptive text, he intended to have erected over his tomb. In May 1778 he [Piranesi] sent a letter to a friend enclosing a sketch of some idiosyncratic ideas for his own funeral monument, a relief of himself stretched at uncharacteristic ease against a background that resembles one of his fireplaces. His worries were not so much about his own death but the survival of his business while his children were young. Would Francesco be able to cope when he was gone?28
28. Legrand says that 'he was always afraid that the youth of his son would prevent the continuity of the order established in his workshops in which many draughtsmen and engravers worked under his immediate direction, each one carrying out the task he has been given, but Piranesi always kept the difficult parts himself and maintained the overall control'.
Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy Editions, 1975), pp. 250-1 and 318.
On his return to Rome he appeared to have sent a letter to a friend on 12 May 1778 enclosing a rapid sketch of ideas for his tomb which tantalizingly throws no light on the role of the candelabrum. This shows the artist in the guise of one of his gesticulating figures from the later plates of the Veduti di Roma, seated on a stone parapet in front of a classical wall with two orders of pilasters. It is possible that by now Piranesi was sadly aware that his tomb would be housed not in the Angeli but in the more restricted space of his local parish church, San Andrea dela Fratte, where he was interred after his death 9 November 1778.
John Wilton-Ely, "The Ultimate Act of Fantasia: Piranesi's Funerary Candelabrum" in Apollo: The International Magazine for Collectors (September 2007), 45.
On 12 May 1778 Piranesi signed and dated a drawing "made by cav. Piranesi to give you the idea of his remains": still a thought of death, even if dropped into a mocking reality this time, reworking a previous sheet with the study for a fireplace, to which the rapid sketch of a self-portrait in elegant, superficial, melancholy pose. In recent months in his diary Giannantonio Selva, who arrived in Rome in April, remembers Piranesi fully immersed in the artistic and social life of the city: "On June 22nd, H.E. Ambassador Zuliani an amiable knight and a great lover of Fine Arts; he welcomed me very kindly, and very often wanted me to have lunch with him. He had an artists' lunch every Sunday and Volpato, Angelini, Piranesi, Lodovico, sometimes Battoni, the director of the French Academy, Cades, intervened, and when he arrived in Rome, the Mr. Novelli, and various other artists." Again, on 11 October Piranesi participates in a meeting of the Academy of S. Luca.
Mario Bevilacqua, "Piranesi 1778. Ricerche interrotte, opere perdute" in V. Cazzato, S. Roberto, M. Bevilacqua (a cura di), Il teatro delle arti. Saggi in onore di Marcello Fagiolo per 50 anni di studi, II, Roma, Gangemi 2014, p. 792.
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