Roman Visionary

Many of the people who swarmed through Turin's Civic Gallery of Modern Art last week brought magnifying glasses with them, for every detail in every etching and drawing in the show demanded the closest scrutiny. To the rest of the world, the works of Engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi are a familiar staple; his Views of Rome sometimes show up on the walls of U.S. dentists' waiting rooms. But to Italians he has always been an "artist for export"--an attitude that Professor Ferdinando Salamon, who helped put the Turin show together, blames on "a southern country's lack of interest in the contemplative arts, such as the study of old books, drawings and prints." Now, in the biggest exhibition ever devoted to him, Piranesi is finally getting his due from his countrymen.

Even in his lifetime (1720-78), Piranesi printed his copper engravings so frequently that he often had to re-etch them to restore clarity. Now many of the plates--durably steel-coated at a heavy cost in faithfulness--belong to the Italian government, which occasionally runs off a new edition to the profit of the treasury. The prints produced in this "Piranesi industry" sell for around $15 each, but "the result is about as true to the original as a picture postcard would be," says Salamon. The merit of the Turin exhibit is to let viewers see prints from Piranesi's own time, distinguished by the lightness of line of the newly etched plate (and valued in the thousands).

An Opera-Set World. It has been said that if the missing "bundle of many pages" that formed Piranesi's autobiography ever came to light, it would rival Cellini's great book in raciness. But only the bare facts of his life are known. The son of a stonemason, he was born in a small village not far from Venice. His uncle was a successful engineer and architect, and Piranesi started out to be an architect too. He read Palladio, studied the majestic stage designs that were the triumph of the Venetian theater. Even so, Venice seemed a stifling place, Piranesi went to Rome, the city of august memories and ancient glory.

Had the times been more prosperous, the 18th century might have gained a fair architect, but it would have lost a unique engraver. Neither the church nor the nobility were in the mood to spend on new buildings, and so Piranesi turned to drawing and engraving what he could not build. No laws of structure could restrain him now; he could let his fancy race across each plate and create an opera-set world that could never have been built in stone. He did his famous prisons while on a visit to Venice--great caverns filled with festoons of clanking chains, soaring arches and lacy bridges that piled space upon space as far as the eye could penetrate. Back in Rome, he saw "how most of the remains of ancient buildings lay scattered through gardens and plowed fields where they dwindled day by day." Piranesi was determined to preserve them "by means of engravings."

A Biography of Rome. He worked with such devouring diligence that sometimes his wife and children would go without supper rather than disturb him. Day after day for 25 years, he would hunt down ruins, and, as his biographer, A. Hyatt Mayor, has written, he would go at them "like an anatomist at a cadaver--stripping, sectioning, sawing until he had established the structure in all its layers and functions." His Roman Antiquities made him famous; his Views of Rome is the greatest pictorial biography ever done of Rome. He worked tirelessly on, defying to the last the new champions of ancient Athens. Even while abed with the cancer that killed him, he called for his tools and copper plates. "Rest is unworthy of a Roman citizen," he said.

His embellished buildings, his shadowy ruins and his ornate details introduced a style of lavish grandeur that found its way to the noble homes of England and to the chateaux of imperial France. Modern critics like to point out that the sliced-up spaces of his prisons are akin to cubist abstraction, but this seems a cold sort of evaluation for a man like Piranesi. He conceived visions of Rome, Horace Walpole said, "beyond what Rome boasted even in the meridian of its splendor. Savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michelangelo and exuberant as Rubens, he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realize. He piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales Heaven with mountains of edifices. Yet what taste in his boldness! What labor and thought both in his rashness and details!"

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