This spring, Sir John Soane’s Museum is staging the second of two exhibitions looking at the relationship between Sir John Soane and the great Italian printmaker, antiquarian and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78).

The exhibition will display large-scale 3D prints, directly producing some of the extraordinary designs that Piranesi visualised in these publications, but never actually realised.

Working with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and the renowned design studio Factum Arte, Madrid, the exhibition will showcase a collection of ‘sculptures’, realised using state-of-the-art 3D modelling and printing technologies to turn Piranesi’s work into physical forms.

The bronze tripods, ‘porphyry’ altars, gilt chairs, shell-shaped silver coffee pots and extravagant candelabra are all stunning examples of Piranesi’s interpretation of classical antiquity. These will be installed within the historic interiors of Sir John Soane’s Museum, where the display will resonate with Soane’s own ‘Piranesian’ arrangements of objects. In addition, the Soane Gallery will display seldom seen drawings from the Soane Office, which illustrate how Soane looked to Piranesi for inspiration, along with volumes of Piranesi prints from Soane’s Library (and from other collections), which illustrate the designs upon which Factum Arte have based their creations.

The Gallery will also contain an evocation of the arrangements which were once seen in Piranesi’s atelier in the Palazzo Tomati, his residence in Rome. Instead of the antiquities, which decorated Piranesi’s ‘museum’ housed in the Palazzo, Factum Arte will install fragments of 3-D prints that explore form and material in an imaginative manner.

The Soane holds a significant number of drawings by Piranesi, a comprehensive set of his prints and a number of antiquities that were restored in Piranesi’s workshop in Rome. It is arguably one of the UK’s most important holdings of works either by, or associated with, his name. More importantly, Piranesi was a great influence on Soane as an architect. Having met Piranesi in 1778, when he was a young scholar undertaking an educational Grand Tour of Italy, Soane utilised Piranesi’s boundless architectural and archaeological imagination in his own work. Importantly, Piranesi also influenced the architecture of No.

13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields and how Soane arranged of objects within his house/ museum. It is this concept of ‘Piranesian’ fantasy and excess that forms the inspiration behind the exhibition.