Factum arte piranesi8/4/2023 ![]() His 1756 topographical print of how he thought ancient Rome to have been (systematic archeology had not yet got to work) is surrounded by fragments of the groundplans of its major ancient buildings, like the plaster of a damaged wall painting. Even with something so unromantic as a Roman sluice to let water out of Lake Albano, he shows every part of the engineering on a separate curling scroll, superimposed on a bird’s eye view of the lake itself as though pinned on an architect’s drawing board. He has also designed the solid, elegant, wooden desk cases that considerately allow you to lean on them while looking at the prints inside.Īnd what prints they are: Piranesi is never boring. ![]() ![]() Michele De Lucchi, the curator, is himself a practising architect, and to judge by the way he has paced and hung the exhibition, a man of taste. ![]() For example, the two sketchbooks in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria at Modena, showing Piranesi’s working drawings and sketches of classical remains he had accumulated in his famous museum-workshop in Palazzo Tomati, can be turned like the pages of an iBook, and the first and last versions of the Carceri can be seen dissolving from one into another. This has prompted the organisers to make full use of the digital technology available. We are encouraged now to respond to art aesthetically, to mix it up with the art of today, to take liberties with it in the interest of seeing the works anew. This exhibition is also the first major one of Piranesi since post-modernism made art history less austere. Today, these lessons in art history have been digested, almost taken for granted, and the aim has been instead to interact with Piranesi’s oeuvre-the etchings come from the Cini’s own collection-in various different ways so as to surprise and engage us. Those were concerned with questions of dating, of influences, of comparisons with contemporaries such as Canaletto, Guardi and Tiepolo. The deliberate seduction of the visitor is the difference between the aims of the current exhibition and the clutch of shows held in 1978 to coincide with the bicentenary of Giambattista Piranesi’s death. You come to them after the film and feel that you are revisiting a place you once saw fleetingly in a dream, and you linger over every detail, looking for a way around these irrational, emotional spaces. Dupond’s film also helps you to see the prints better. It required not just aesthetic judgement on his part, but also the digital creation of the “other sides” of Piranesi’s structures to provide the third dimension. There is no doubt that the author of this film, Grégoire Dupond of Factum Arte, has himself contributed a work of art to the mix of this fascinating exhibition. They are why, despite having only one actual building to his name, Giambattista Piranesi has attracted literary figures such as Horace Walpole, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley and Marguerite Yourcenar, and there is probably more written about him than any other 18th-century architect. The reverberating sound of a solo cello, Bach’s Cello Suite No 2 played by Pablo Casals, accompanies the dense, nervous texturing of these famous prints whose artistic intention, beyond showing the sublimity of horror, remains a fascinating mystery. Then you zoom back, pressing up close against a wall to see the fish-hook etching marks, Piranesi’s own hand at work sweep under an arch into more ruinous, arched spaces with Cyclopian stone walls, vast chains, broken beams you cross bridges, climb stairs towards roofless spaces and moving clouds, pass wraiths and go down again into the darkness. You penetrate the title page and float through a barred window into a vast space, where faceless figures gesticulate desperately on a high platform with giant Roman heads in relief, while below a man is tortured on the rack. It is a film that takes you into the terrible but noble prisons, the architectural fantasy etchings that Piranesi produced in 1745 and republished in the early 1760s, this time reworked so that they were darker, more oppressive, with yet more exit-less galleries and staircases. What he saw held him transfixed, trying to work out how it had been done. In Venice for the September opening of the Architecture Biennale, Frank Gehry went to the Piranesi exhibition (prolonged until 9 January 2011) at the Fondazione Cini on the island of San Giorgio.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |