Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Arco di Tito.

A Collection Of Architecture Prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1748 - 1751

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" (Le Carceri d'Invenzione), was born in Veneto, the Republic of Venice in a family of stonemasons and architects. He was apprenticed of his uncle, who was a leading architect in Magistrato delle Acque, the state organization responsible for engineering and restoring historical buildings. From 1740, he worked in Rome as a draughtsman for Marco Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador. He worked with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to produce a series of vedute (views) of the city. From 1743 to 1747 he was back in Venice where he often visited Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In 1748–1774, back in Rome, he created a series of vedute of the city which established his fame. In 1761 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing facility of his own. He died in Rome in 1778, and was buried in the church he had helped restore, Santa Maria del Priorato. His tomb was designed by Giuseppi Angelini.

Printmaking in woodcut and engraving came to Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s, the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) used the technique. Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, 1460–1490. Print copying was a widely accepted practice, as well as copying of paintings viewed as images in their own right.

The Romans traced the traditions of the triumph back to their own beginnings. Rome’s legendary founder, Romulus, was the first to celebrate the rite when he defeated and killed Acron, the king of Caenina. The Roman triumph was an ancient martial tradition, a parade with symbolic culmination involved elevating the victorious general (triumphator) to divine status for a single day. The Romans marked his status by staining his face red using the mineral pigment cinnabar. The depictions on the Arch of Titus serve as a visual representation of the Roman victory over the Jewish rebellion and the subsequent devastation of Jerusalem. For many Jewish people, the arch symbolizes the loss of the Second Temple and the dispersion of the Jewish community. It stands as a historical reminder of the Roman conquest and the diaspora that followed. In the summer of 71 C.E. the Roman emperor Vespasian and Titus, his eldest son, had quelled a dangerous revolt in the Roman province of Judea and returned to Rome to celebrate this major accomplishment. Not only that, but the Flavian dynasty (Vespasian and his two sons Titus and Domitian) had succeeded in winning the throne during the year 69 C.E.—a time of bloody civil turmoil known as the “Year of the Four Emperors.” The arch was constructed in 82 CE to commemorate the military victories of the Roman Emperor Titus, particularly his conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The reliefs on the arch depict scenes from the war, including the triumphal procession with Roman soldiers carrying the looted treasures from the Temple, such as the menorah (the seven-branched candelabrum) and the silver trumpets and other spoils of war taken from Jerusalem during the First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE).