![]() ![]() ![]() At the root of this eclecticism, writes his biographer John Wilton-Ely, lay “Piranesi's belief in the prerogative of the designer's imagination.”Ī new exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York will shed light on this neglected aspect of Piranesi's legacy. In his designs for side tables and chimneypieces, candelabra and church altars, fantastic capricci emerge from mingled Roman, Greek, Etruscan, and Egyptian motifs. As early as his formative years in Venice, Piranesi was starting to develop an idiosyncratic, profusely Baroque style as a rebuke to the current fashion for ornamental restraint. Less well known, however, than Piranesi's work as a graphic artist is his work as a designer of architecture, interiors, and furnishings. Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”), 16 surreal depictions of cavernous interiors with bizarre machinery and endlessly repeating staircases and arches, hold a strong appeal today for viewers schooled in science fiction and M.C. These etchings, which exaggerate the grand scale and crumbling decay of Rome's ancient monuments, helped establish the Romantic image of the city that persisted in Europe through the 19th century (Lord Byron, for instance, evoked a Piranesian Rome-a dark, overgrown “chaos of ruins”-in his wildly popular poem “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage”). Piranesi gained fame with the 135 vedute he printed from the 1740s through the 1770s. Inspired by the “speaking ruins” all around him-eloquent, tantalizing fragments of the classical past-Piranesi took up chalk and pen and began to compose dramatic architectural scenes of Rome, infused with his knowledge of archaeology and ancient history (Piranesi was an accomplished antiquarian), but more important, by his rich, almost febrile, imagination. One way the young architect could support himself through the downturn was by producing vedute, or views, of the city as tourist souvenirs. Born near Venice and trained in the building arts by his uncle, a master architect and engineer, the ambitious Giambattista headed to Rome at the age of 20-just as a major construction boom was tapering off. But if that's supposed to be an insult, consider the extraordinary, paper-based career of Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Piranesi (1720–1778). "Invenzioni capric di carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)," Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 153.ġ7Marchesano, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” 151.It is a common sneer against avant-garde architects that most of their work exists only on paper. 17ġ4Lucchi, Lowe, Pavanello, The arts of Piranesi, 125.ġ5Marchesano, Louis. The prisons of I Carceri stand out as one of his major achievements. For example, in Italy, a popular representation of the sublime involved depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting, a terrific and devastating event. ![]() The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. ![]() I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice. ![]()
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