Cleveland Museum of Art

The Tomb of Nero

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Date

1747–48

Medium

etching with engraving and drypoint

Culture

Italy, 18th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

An ancient tomb, teeming with slithering snakes and overgrown vegetation, conjures the ruins of a strange and distant past in this print. The more lightly etched background appears faint against the jumble of darker lines in the foreground, as if the whole scene is slowly fading into the mist of time. Although the composition might seem to be one of pure imagination, the tomb it depicts was based on a real monument the artist had observed near Rome. Fascinated by classical antiquity, Giovanni Battista Piranesi evoked his own experience of seeing ruins, which he felt could not be conveyed by a more realistic portrayal. Popularly associated with the Emperor Nero in the 1700s, the monument the artist depicted has since been identified as the tomb of P. Vibius Maranus.

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