Francesco, Piranesi’s rebellious son. In a book the many lives of a failed heir – Corriere.it

Long live France!
Our “eminent benefactress”, rushed “to offer you her right hand to relieve you of the harsh slavery, which kept you oppressed, and of the feral yoke, which weighed barbarously on your neck”. And so “may that innate love of freedom awaken in your hearts at this sight which priestly oppression could well keep hidden for so many centuries; but he could not erase entirely».

On the morning of March 10, 1798 in which those bellicose incitements to support the Napoleonic troops were published in the «Monitore di Roma», «the only sure means of preventing the perfidy of the aristocrats, who go on hand preparing new chains and deafly manufacturing a most barbarous slavery,” the friends themselves gasped. The author of the incendiary appeal to the Romans “descendants of the Bruti, de’ Cincinnati and de’ Gracchi” was Francesco Piranesi. The son of the Venetian Giovan Battista Piranesi who right at the court of the Popes (above all under the Venetian pope Clement XIII, his munificent protector, of the most serene lineage of the Rezzonicos) he had managed to establish himself as an engraver, archaeologist, architect but even more fundamental protagonist of the recovery and relaunch of the legendary Roman antiquities gradually increasing the myth of the Grand Tour.

What was he, the heir of that immense father, doing among the rebels of the Roman Republic 1798-1799? He explains it, between spy intrigues and irresistible detailsthe book In the name of the father. The Many Lives of Francesco Piranesi published by the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, and written by Pierluigi Panza, art historian, university professor, journalist for the «Corriere» and curator of three exhibitions on the great Piranesi on the occasion of the tercentenary of his birth. Where it is told how the scion, initially destined for an ecclesiastical career, ended up among the most avid Bonapartist priest-eaters and even before that among the spies of Gustav III of Sweden until…

But it’s best to start from the beginning. And that is from that genius of his father, Giovan Battista Piranesi who, born in 1720 on the shores of the lagoon, he abandoned Venice at the age of twenty, where he would return only twice despite having eleven brothers and sisters there, for «cathar fortuna» in the city of the Popes. And he really made a fortune, Panza recounts, «becoming with his Views and with the Roman antiquities one of the best-known engravers, then architect, knight, antiquarian and old-fashioned sculptor to satisfy the taste of travellers». The Urbe was then a city «of thirteen square kilometers surrounded by the Aurelian walls. Most of the houses were medieval, narrow and long, of two or three floors, in travertine from Tivoli or peperino», fewer people lived there than in Naples and little more than in Venice, the population consisted above all of clerics, priests, pilgrims , servants and lodgers, there were “240 male monasteries against 73 female monasteries” and in short, little remained of the imperial metropolis which fifteen centuries earlier seems to have exceeded one and a half million inhabitants. The remains of Ancient Rome, however, were majestic. AND to the foreigners imbued with the myth no one was able to tell them with their charm of ivy and mosses like Giovan Battista and his boys: «This whole family excels in the fine arts and all the children, male and female, are so rich in talent», wrote the Dutch baron De Hochepied in 1775, «who successfully follow in his father’s footsteps”.

An art workshop with feverish rhythms: this was the Piranesi family in their Palazzo Tomati, in Trinità dei Monti. To the point of churning out for customers, ever more numerous, richer and more demanding, matrix after matrix, views after views, copies after copies of statues and candelabras and pieces of all kinds found in the excavations and reproduced in such quantities as to be 263 scattered at 43 different sites. An assembly line, wrote the famous restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi: «A beautiful Imperial Head that has not been restored other than the tip of the nose, the tip of the lips, and some other small thing, if the restoration is well done, is usually valued at fifty Zecchini. If then the same were at all intact it could be estimated at double». Imagine «made by Piranesi»! «Since many statues were found headless, their new heads added these characteristics. Generally these new heads were integrated into a different bust through a marble joint, sawn straight in order to facilitate their stability», smiles Pierluigi Panza. Fakes. But art fakes.

The fact is that when he died, in November 1778, after a tiring journey to Paestum which had inspired him «18 tables on the temples, which he believed were Etruscans», he left his wife Angelica, his two daughters and three sons, a patrimony such as to guarantee ( so he hoped) a “comfortable subsistence”. The eldest, namely Francesco who had collaborated with his father on the last etchings (adding three of his own), the architect Giannantonio Selva would note days later, «has talent and may be capable of treading in his father’s footsteps. However, he will always have remorse for having once again been a cause for concern for said Parent because one day he went so far as to revolt against him with a knife in his hand. It is true that the Father tyrannized him too much and was the cause that not being able to get some paulo asking him, he set about stealing some».

In reality, writes Panza, Francesco “immediately appeared incapable of following the quality of his father”. Worse: as soon as he realized that he couldn’t handle the match, he began to look after himself even more. To the point of pushing Angelica to sue him for the inheritance. And the documents must have been on his side because “the judge decided that Francesco and his younger brother Pietro would provide for their mother’s livelihood with a monthly allowance, plus clothes and jewels”. After that, having established «that the value of Giovanni Battista’s inheritance amounted to 43,000 scudi» he ordered that Francesco «could not alienate “assets” or “stables” accumulated by his father, or “furniture and merchandise, i.e. prints, branches, statues, stones, marbles and more”. A verdict that Francesco disregarded by immediately starting to sell his father’s museum.

Do you gamble? Insatiable lovers? Unmentionable vices? Mystery. Of course, read In the name of the father, the talented but not enough son of the great Piranesi wasted all the good he had trying to ingratiate himself with the monarchs and powerful of half of Europe with nagging and unctuous proposals that one or the other buy him all the treasure or gradually what was left (of course : selling apart from a few pieces, perhaps on the sly) inherited. First the King of Poland Stanislaus, then the King of Sweden Gustav III, then Joseph Bonaparte placed by his brother Napoleon first as King of Naples then as King of Spain… A whole life in the service, for profit (a fabulous sum, a pension, an annuity…) of this or that crown. With an eye to the Swede to whom he sent via Civitavecchia (there were those who turned a blind eye …) 90 pieces of the collection, until receiving the proposal to spy on the “friend” General Gustaf Armfelt who fell into disgrace in Stockholm and took refuge in Naples to escape the death penalty. A request that he, who grew up in papal Rome and used to distributing “tips to those who procured the new dungeons”, could not refuse. When he died in exile in Paris in 1810, he probably had a thousand regrets left. Including the refusal of the request to become a citizen of Venice. Even his, of course, in the name of his father.