|
|
 |
| |
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), the protean, towering genius of the topographical etching, was born in Venice and trained as an architect and engineer. Blessed with technical skills of a high order and a fecund imagination, he had a profound influence on Neoclassicism, largely through his Sublime published images, but also by wide dissemination of his theoretical writings. He combined many professional activities: as archaeologist; as designer of ephemeral structures, furniture, and interiors; as restorer and dealer; as artist and engraver of stunning views of Rome; as architect of a handful of original works; and as polemicist advocating a free and eclectic employment of elements from the past to give meaning, continuity, and power to modern design, he excelled in all his chosen roles.
In the mid-1740s he settled in Rome, then the intellectual capital of Europe and the goal of everyone setting out on the Grand Tour. There, he began to produce views of Rome for the tourist trade (Varie Vedute di Roma - Various Views of Rome), but he had already set his sights much higher. He published (1743) a selection of twelve fantasy compositions which he optimistically called Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive (First Part of Architecture and Perspective): in the plates vast inventive compositions evoking Roman Antiquity were intended as exemplars to spur contemporary architects on to better things by extolling the qualities of monuments from the Imperial past. In c.1745 he brought out a series of architectural fantasies or capricci which he entitled Invenzioni...di Carceri (Inventions, or Imaginary Views, of Prisons) in which terrifyingly megalomaniac scale, Baroque illusion, the tricks of stage-design perspective, and bare surfaces combined in new ideas of architectural expression designed to suggest awe, intensity, terror, cavernous vastnesses, and oppressiveness in the aesthetic category to be classified as the Sublime by Edmund Burke (1729-97) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), among others. The Carceri images, reworked and augmented, were brought out in a new edition in 1761 as Carceri d'lnvenzione.
Piranesi’s drawings are instantly recognisable, and the engravings are greatly sought-after today. The technical mastery of his chosen medium was second to none. He developed techniques of etching using a complicated system of repetitive ‘bitings’ of the copper plates, resulting in dramatically rich textures and very bold contrasts of light and dark, which made the work of contemporaries look rather insipid in comparison. There can be no doubt that his Carceri plates constitute a climax of visionary architecture and dramatic, brooding effects: the images had a seminal impact on the world of Romanticism, especially on William Beckford (1760-1844), in whose ‘Gothic’ novel, Vathek (1786), specific mention is made of ‘chasms, and subterranean hollows, the domain of fear and torture, with chains, racks, wheels and dreadful engines in the style of Piranesi’. That they also affected Hubert Robert (1733-1808), Soane’s assistant Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843), and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is now beyond dispute.
Although the great Italian’s influence on writers such as Coleridge is understood, it is less well-known that Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-85), and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) drew on the Carceri for a considerable range of analogies involving deeply disturbing experiences in the imagination. Even in fairly recent times (1949) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) turned to the Carceri plates in
order to subject them to a psychological interpretation. This is certainly significant, for Piranesi’s prison images offer insights relevant to the processes of his architectural thought by which he strove to give expression to new syntheses of themes and motifs from the past. His intelligent use of fantasy and eclecticism demonstrated beyond all doubt the possibilities of using the Classical vocabulary and language of architecture to produce fresh architectural inventions: far from being the worn-out language Modernists have claimed (because most of them never could be bothered to learn it), Classicism offered (and still offers) a vast range of marvellous ideas that are there for the asking.
Similarly, the elements in Parere su I'Architettura and Diverse Maniere are extraordinary in their strange inventiveness, and although individual motifs may be identifiable, the manner in which Piranesi composed them in his brilliant plates demonstrates a mastery of imaginative bravura that is breathtakingly Sublime in a wholly original and deeply personal way.
James Stevens Curl
The above is an abridgement of Dr Curl’s essay published in Piranesi, Goldmark Gallery 2000.
112 pages fully illustrating Piranesi’s Fantasies, Views and Fragments,
£12.50 inc uk p&p.
Professor James Stevens Curl has established an international reputation for scholarship, lucidity of style, and thorough investigation in little-known fields of research. Among his many books may be mentioned the much-acclaimed Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (2000) and Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival as a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (1994). In 1992 his brilliant The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry (1991) won the coveted Royal Institute of British Architects Sir Banister Fletcher Award as Best Book of the Year. |
|
|
|
|
