|
COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages
For readers with broader cultural interests, it was not too difficult to spot a trend in the latter part of the 1990s: the renewed vigorous interest in the person and the works of Giambattista Piranesi. In 1997, Piranesi's works were featured with those of two other Venetian artists, Tiepolo and Canaletto, in an exhibit in Padua. In the same year his etchings of imaginary prisons, Le Carceri d'Invenzione, were dramatized in a film that 'was part of the PBS series Inspired by Bach. Exhibits of his works followed during the next two years in Rome and Stuttgart, accompanied by the publication of catalogues, as had been the case with the Padua exhibit. In 2000, two publications were of interest: the English translation of Gerhard Kopf's novel Piranesi 's Dream, an imaginary autobiography of the artist, and Luigi Ficacci's catalogue raisonne of Piranesi's etchings in a trilingual edition.'
The intensity of interest in our time in an eighteenth-century engraver is surprising, because he had for so long been considered a minor artist. Older art histories directed toward a general readership, such as the excellent book by E. H. Gobrich The Story of Art, (2) do not mention Piranesi at all, while others might give a little information such as that he had been a Venetian architect who never built anything in the city of his birth, and next to nothing in Rome where he spent most of his life.
What then accounts for the interest in Piranesi, who, in his own time, had been known primarily as the manufacturer of hundreds of views of Rome, past and contemporary, as popular souvenirs for the privileged travelers of the grand tour? What Piranesi did achieve in his Antichita Romane and other such precisely measured and described engravings of classical monuments is nothing short of creating the beginnings of serious scientific archaeology. He worked, as Ficacci described, "under the banner of a radically new scientific empiricism drawing on the power of the imagination in an inseparable whole perfectly represented by the organic unity of the four volumes of Antichita Romance" (38). What Piranesi's work ultimately offers is a form of visual archaeology.
Marguerite Yourcenar links Piranesi's scientific method to the fact that he thought like an architect. He was an artist, who throughout his whole life focused on only one object, manmade structures:
Many painters of genius have been architects as well; very few have thought solely in terms of architecture in their painted, drawn or engraved work. ... Piranesi's studies as an architect taught him to reflect thoroughly and continuously in tenns of balance and weight, of blocks and mortar. His antiquarian research, furthermore accustomed him to recognize in each fragment of antiquity the singularities or specifications of kind; they were for him what the dissection of cadavers is for a painter of the nude. (3)
Yourcenar's reference to dissection reminds one of two paintings by Rembrandt on this subject: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. TuIp (1623) and the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deyman (1659). It was Rembrandt who strongly influenced Piranesi, especially in his etching technique. In the subject matter of dissection, Rembrandt in turn had been influenced by the great Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius, in whose etchings of De_Humani Corporis Fabrica flayed cadavers trailing ribbons of skin behind them walk surreally through Italian landscapes. Of note especially are the plates of the second book of De Humani, which illustrate the muscle groups. The background of one plate shows overgrown Roman ruins of the kind Piranse would evoke frequently in his Vadute. (4) But in their matter-of-fact depiction of such macabre scenes, the plates of Vesalius can be likened to the mood pervading Piranesi's Carceri.
Piranesi's meticulousness of observation and the precision ofhis representation, especially in his etchings depicting the ruins of Caesarean Rome, may justifiably be compared to the skills of a pathologist. Kopf's fictionalized Piranesi describes his method similarly: "I dissected masomy just as an anatomist dissects a corpse" (59-60).
Piranesi's scientific accuracy in...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
