Architect for Dreams

By A.T. Baker

Piranesi's monuments on paper are built to last

"I need to produce ideas on the grand scale, and I think that if someone asked me to design a new universe, I'd be mad enough to undertake it," wrote young Giovanni Battista Piranesi to a friend. Nobody asked him. In fact, nobody asked him to design any major building at all, though he always signed himself Architetto. Instead, he became known to his contemporaries as "the Rembrandt of Ruins."

Yet in his way, Piranesi did indeed design a universe. For in his etchings of the ruins of Rome he imagined a grandeur that the city itself never achieved. Horace Walpole marveled at his "sublime dreams" and the way "he piles palaces on bridges, and temples on palaces, and scales Heaven with mountains of edifices." Piranesi's etchings sent a generation of leisured Europeans to Rome to see the real things. The richer among them went home and built readymade garden ruins of their own.

This year, the 200th anniversary of Piranesi's death, his fame as one of the master etchers of architecture has been enhanced with major exhibitions in London, Venice and the U.S. The most notable show opens this week in the spectacular new East Building of Washington's National Gallery. The largest collection of Piranesi's relatively rare drawings went on display last week at Manhattan's Morgan Library. The Morgan is also publishing a catalogue that will illustrate its entire Piranesi holdings.

The man who revived the glory of ancient Rome was born in 1720 in the village of Mogliano about ten miles inland from Venice. His father was a stonemason, his uncle an architect and civil engineer who worked on the huge sea walls that protect Venice's lagoon. It was an image of massiveness that was to inspire Piranesi. From the busy Venetian theaters, he learned the art of stage design, which in those times ran to imposing fixed backdrops where ornate buildings receded in dramatic chiaroscuro. At 20, Piranesi landed a job in Rome as a junior draftsman in the retinue of a Venetian ambassador. He yearned to do his own buildings, but as he wrote despondently, "No buildings of today display the magnificence of the old ... nor is there any prince or private man inclined to create any such."

Piranesi hence resolved to convey his ideas in pictures. He published a volume of twelve visionary buildings that dramatized his spaces by the diagonal perspectives of stage design. But his work created no stir, and he was forced to return to Venice, where the presiding geniuses at the time were Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi. The influence of Tiepolo freed Piranesi's line from cramped meticulousness favored by architectural engravers of the day. The result can be clearly seen in the Morgan show, where sketches for decorative panels and figure studies echo Tiepolo's and Guardi's free draftsmanship.

But his heart was in Rome, wandering its ruins. In 1745 he managed to get back there for good as agent for a Venetian printmaker. He married the daughter of Prince Corsini's gardener, who brought him a small dowry that proved enough to let him start his major work on Roman antiquities. In it he looked on Rome's neglected ruins with the eye of a romantic and the knowledge of an engineer.

In his zeal, Piranesi turned archaeologist. He measured, calculated, chipped off encrustations and mold from fallen columns. He sketched indefatigably, on occasion even having himself suspended in a rope sling to get the vantage point he wanted. In his etchings, Piranesi embellished and sometimes even reconstructed the ancient structures. He gave the ruins themselves infusions of light, spared no climbing vine or sprouting bush. He often filled his foregrounds with bustling groups of peddlers, fish wives and beggars, whose vitality contrasts with the crumbling architecture.

Roman Antiquities, published in 1756, took Europe by storm. During most of the 19th century, with its taste for Greek classicism and Gothic gloom, Piranesi's reputation receded, even though his prints were continuously reproduced. One series, drawn when he was about 25, still grips the modern imagination. These are the Carceri d'Invenzione, or Imaginary Prisons, which are the centerpieces of the National Gallery's show. Overpowering machines loom darkly. Ropes dangle ominously from huge beams. Towering arches soar, balconies thrust across them, stairways lead upward to rooms that are not really rooms but more spaces.

No one will probably ever know just what inspired this remarkable group of etchings. Certainly the vast vaults derive from his study of Roman baths, the massive masonry perhaps from his childhood memories of Venice's sea walls. But down through time the Carceri have fascinated men as various as De Quincey, Coleridge, Victor Hugo and Aldous Huxley.

In drawing what he could not build. Piranesi was perhaps subconsciously ex pressing a spirit caged by infinite space. In an age when reason and the romance of individual freedom were replacing old certitudes, Piranesi's labyrinthine galleries, infinitely receding arches and end less stairs must have been as profoundly unsettling to his contemporaries as the edge of a flat earth was to the ancients or black holes in space are to modern man. --A.T. Baker

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