John Marciari

This elegant publication presents for the first time the Eveillard Gift of drawings to the Morgan Library& Museum. It accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan and includes a catalogue of the works with entries by drawings experts. The Morgan celebrates the 100th year of its founding with a series of exhibitions devoted to promised gifts to the museum, including 28 drawings from the holdings of New Yorkbased collectors Jean-Marie and Elizabeth Eveillard, which will be on view during the summer of 2024\. The selection comprises drawings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and includes a rare compositional study for Rembrandt’s first painting, Greuze’s virtuoso depiction of a young cook made for his friend Georges Wille, Delacroix’s intimate portrait of his confidante and caretaker Jenny Le Guillou, and a spectacular nude by Bonnard. Also in the gift are significant sheets—many rarely seen—by major artists including Rubens, Guercino, Watteau, Constable, Seurat, Cezanne, and Vuillard, among others. In fully illustrated entries, drawing specialists explore the creation and context for each sheet, considering the artist’s choices and the ways in which drawing liberated the imagination in these exploratory studies.

This beautiful publication accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). It is the most important study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation. In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patrons there willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas.” He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings. The Morgan Library& Museum holds what is arguably the largest and most important collection of these works, more than 100 drawings that include early architectural caprices, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These works form the core of the book, which will be published on the occasion of the Morgan’s Spring 2023 exhibition of Piranesi drawings. More than merely an exhibition catalogue or a study of the Morgan’s Piranesi holdings, however, this publication is a monograph that offers a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. It includes discussion of Piranesi’s drawings in public and private collections worldwide, with particular attention paid to the large surviving groups of drawings in New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and London; it also puts the large newly discovered cache of Piranesi material in Karlsruhe in context. The most comprehensive study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation, the book includes more than 200 illustrations, and while focused on the drawings it offers insights on Piranesi’s print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer. In sum, the present work offers a new account of Piranesi’s life and work, based on the evidence of his drawings.

John Marciari tells the story of the monuments, artists and patrons of Renaissance Rome in this compelling book. In no other city is the ancient world so palpably present, and nowhere else is the mission of the church so evident. At the same time as the humanists sought to preserve and recreate the ancient city, giving it a new lease of life, the popes dispensed patronage much as any other contemporary Italian ruler. Rome was also the most international of the Renaissance cities with artists and architects generally training elsewhere before arriving in the city and introducing new trends. By adopting a chronological structure, covering the period c.1300-1600, Marciari is able to explore the nature of Roman patronage as it differed from papacy to papacy. He examines the city's extraordinary works of art in the context of the working practices, competition and rivalries that made Renaissance Rome so magnificent.