Rovine del Tempio de’ Castori nella città di Cora

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), Rovine del Tempio de’ Castori nella città di Cora (Temple of Castor at Cora). Plate II from the series Antichità de Cora, 1764. 22 × 15 inches (plate); 27 × 20 inches (sheet). Excellent early first state impression on heavy laid paper with double-ringed fleur-de-lys watermark, richly inked with strong blacks. Unframed and unmounted.

A particularly rare example of a first state etching from the Antiquities of Cora, with the fleur-de-lys watermark. A drawing in the Morgan Library, New York, dated to 1763, shows part of Piranesi’s original sketch for the Temple of Castor and Pollux.

Cora (modern Cori) lies some 45 km southeast of Rome, and was an important and somewhat independent city in the Republican period (3rd through 1st centuries BC), with a number of fine temples, including that of the Dioscuri represented here.

Piranesi was born in Venice to a family of stonemasons, architects, and engineers, and his early apprenticeships in these fields laid the foundation for his later artistic work. It was in Rome, surrounded by the remnants of the Classical past, that Piranesi found his métier, and in a series of some one thousand etchings over the course of 30+ years Piranesi became synonymous with the romanticisation of ruins and the rediscovery of the material remains of antiquity that helped fuel the Grand Tour in the second half of the 18th century. Piranesi was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in London in 1757.

Wilton-Ely 675.