Or Where It’s Really All About One’s Point of View
I think Dover Books must be the publisher the best represented in my library, they do have a habit of publishing all manner of wholly indispensable books on art and history that I simply cannot pass up. So, when asked if I would like to do a foreword for a re-edition of Piranesi’s Prisons, I naturally (and eagerly) agreed. (My own copy of the last Dover edition, which dated from the mid-‘60’s, had long gone the path of books lent and never returned.) Now that the book has come out, here is the preface, with the kind permission of the editors.
CARCERI
Prisons, by definition, are easier to enter than to leave. Some are impossible to escape. Famous prisons – and famous prisoners – are legion in history, literature and legend. Alcatraz , Chillon, Gormenghast, the Castle, Zenda and their grim brethren form a fraternity of incarceration and dystopia.
Of all these, the “Carceri d’invenzione” of Giovanni Battista Piranesi are unique. They are prisons of paper with walls of ink, prisons of the mind and the imagination. Once you have entered them, you can never really escape…
Born in 1720 in Mogliano Veneto, near Treviso, Giovanni Battista Piranesi spent his life in prisons: the prison of poverty, from which he never truly emerged. The prison of desires unfulfilled: Piranesi yearned to be an architect, but the closest he came was through his “veduti caprici”, his imaginary views and romantic engravings. The prison of black and white: had he also chosen to paint, as did Goya, perhaps he would have broken the final bonds that chained him: the prison of bright acclaim followed by obscurity.
Son of a Venetian master builder, Giovanni learned the art of drawing from his uncle Matteo Lucchesi, a hydraulics engineer, with studies including perspective and stage design. At the age of twenty, Piranesi moved to Rome, where he studied the art of etching during four years with Sicilian engraver Guiseppe Vasi. The Imperial city and its ruins must have seemed an incredibly inspiring vista for a young artist. At the height of its power, during the first century AD, as the fat spider in the middle of the web of Empire, the Imperial city had a population of somewhere between 500,000 and 3.5 million (a midpoint of 1.6 million being the estimate most historians prefer). By the year 273, plague had reduced the city to a half a million. When the various waves of barbarians were done sacking it repeatedly in the 5th century, its population may have declined to 50,000 and was reportedly as only 30,000 by the 10th century, despite being the seat of Papal power. By the end of the 15th century, the population had struggled back up to 50,000 again, reaching only 150,000 by Piranesi’s time. Thus, Renaissance and Baroque Rome was a vast sprawling ruin inhabited by a tiny populace. (Their number would only equal the Roman capital’s proportions in the 1940’s, 1800 years after its heyday.) Small wonder that the taste for depicting ruins was so pronounced amongst artists living there. If inspiration and flights of fancy touch today’s visitor to the Forum Romanum and the Mons Palatinus, decay and decadence on such a vast scale can’t but have provoked a deeply emotional response in Piranesi’s day.
Piranesi energetically rejected the Greek model, preferring the Roman as superior, as he loudly proclaimed in his “Della magnificenza ed architettura dei Romani” (On the Magnificence of Roman Architecture, 1761). Another major treatise, “Parere sull’architettura” (Observations on Architecture, 1765), proposed the Roman model as the cornerstone of an architectural renewal, re-interpreting Roman motifs as the basis of a new style. In his fifties, his interests in archaeology took him on expeditions to the south of Italy. Ill health finally forced him to return to Rome, where he died in 1778. His son Francesco preserved his father’s plates and successfully exploited his oeuvre, reproducing and selling great quantities of prints after his father’s death; twenty-nine folio volumes containing about 2000 prints appeared in Paris between1835 and 1837.
Piranesi’s outspoken attitude likely did little to endear him to the intelligentsia of the time. While he did have his champions, his quarrelsome intransigence and close association with a style fast going out of fashion undoubtedly contributed to his eclipse, especially in a world according to Burke, Gilpin and Ruskin, where polite society subdivided what it saw into the Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque. He certainly left little in stone, with the exception of a number of most unusual designs for chimneypieces and the famous Piranesi Vase, now in the British Museum. Only one building was ever restored according to his plans: the decidedly unremarkable church of Santa Maria del Priorato, in Rome, where he was buried after his death.
Piranesi produced nearly two thousand engravings, many of the ruins of Rome and the surrounding countryside. “Veduti caprici” were an incredibly popular art form, and a thriving business for artists and printmakers. A collection of 135 of his engravings, “Antichità Romane de’ tempo della prima Repubblica e dei primi imperatori” (Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic and the First Emperors), published in 1756, created a sensation throughout Europe. Not only did they represent geographical locations and architectural details, they are first and foremost stories. A ruined arch is not just a clever rendering of an abandoned and crumbling Roman structure, it is an episode in an epic dedicated to decadence and vainglory, stories of ruin as well as ruins, prelude to a later century’s idly Romantic musings.
But, despite his prolific oeuvre, we remember Piranesi principally for two small series of etchings: 30 in all, a first series of 14 prints, without titles or numbers, published in 1750 and then revisited in 1761, numbered I to XVI. (Plates II and V were new images.) The series feature both portrait (numbers I though X) and landscape formats (X to XVI). The original prints measure 16 by 21 inches.
These 30 prints are the First and Second States of the “Carceri d’invenzione”, which, especially as reproduced in this edition, plunge the viewer into a stereoscopic déjà vu, compounding the already striking effect of the works and permitting us to compare both states with ease. Since Piranesi reworked the same plates, the play of pentimenti and palimpsest throughout is fascinating and incredibly revealing. It is not possible to approach an artist long dead any more closely; even sheaves of sketches or spectroscopic views of paintings that allow us to see underdrawings and alterations otherwise invisible cannot bring us this close to the artist’s mind and hand at work.
Piranesi, while he blurs the frontier between artist and architect, architect and archaeologist, does not seek to revolutionize perspective. (The medieval artillery masters were far closer to cubism in their treatises on the art of war and siege than any artist between the Renaissance and Braque.) Perspective is a tool he requires well honed, not blunted or bent, that it best serve.
Already he shifts the focus of his Carceri upwards from the horizon line. The viewer must crane his neck, albeit figuratively, in a position he cannot comfortably hold for long. Once again, this does not appear in any way innovative, many artists employ soaring perspectives. The eye travels up, enjoys the illusion of looming cornices and overhanging entablatures, and returns to the horizon, to earth. With Piranesi, once the gaze has been directed upward, it does not easily descend again, but remains lost in the fragmented vista that is perhaps Piranesi’s greatest revolution. Were we to strip away the walls of his prisons layer by layer, from the foreground back, until the farthest planes are uncovered, we would discover a vista geometrically whole, but sequentially fragmented. Each portion perceived is indeed a part of a logical geometry, but as a narrative, it is isolated and self-contained. Try as we may, we cannot link them to each other. The effect is a multiplying of potentials, of lines of flight, a world of visual parings and splinters that cannot be rearranged into a whole, becoming a subconscious multiplying of the worlds glimpsed beyond the walls of his prisons, and thus a multiplying of freedoms denied. The efficacy of this distortion of expectation is founded on a solid respect of conventional means of suggesting space; to bend the rules would be to diminish the effect.
Piranesi’s Carceri are like nothing else of the time, like nothing done before. Gigantic, monolithic, they seem as though built by giants, but house only puny humans, dwarfed by the excessive scale of an infinitude of vaults and ceilings. They are not so much prisons in a world we might recognize, but views of a world that is itself a prison. Chillingly, it is not even Hell, convention that would offer some comfort, since we would know where to situate it, but Piranesi chooses not to allow us to remove these prisons from our own sphere. Even in those engravings where a sky is visible, it holds no promise of freedom (and what was once a hint of open sky in the First State is often occluded by more arches and walls in the Second). To crawl to the top, to scale the highest wall would afford no view of the outside, only of a vaster prison. His visions do not promise a world beyond to which one might flee, only more of the same. No escape.
Piranesi’s exquisite obsession with scale and his transcendentalising of architecture as drama has never been equaled, or even attempted, except perhaps by the cinema. It is tempting, if wholly irreverent, to imagine Piranesi working in film concept design – all in all, a world not so far removed from the stages of theatre and opera, which he knew well and which clearly influenced his work. “Giovanni, don’t hold back.” The direttore says, clapping him on the shoulder. “If you can draw it, we can build it. Make it gigantic, I want a prison that goes on forever. The spectator needs to feel like he can’t ever escape.”
The curious audacity and roughness of technique seems to be largely limited to the Carceri, Piranesi’s more traditional veduti relying on more conventional technique. What state of mind this translates is of course anyone’s guess, but it hints at a mind working faster than the hand can follow, of visions and jostling for space in a mind’s eye crowded with them, the hand slow to liberate them to the copper plate. There is an almost incidental, feverish sketch-like quality to the first state of the Carceri, as if the idea was more important that the execution, a subordination of technique to ideal that contrasts singularly with the artistic standards of the time. That depictions of prisons should so energetically shake the shackles of conventional engraving is a worthy metaphor in itself. What the reactions of Piranesi’s patrons were to the oeuvre can only be surmised. Were they enthused or dubious, did they purchase them with the haste of the amateur who recognizes something unique or did they shake their heads and prefer a picturesque view of the Colosseum or Trajan’s Column?
I would be tempted to see Piranesi’s work as resolutely postmodernist. Quaint as it may occasionally seem, with his abridged Baroque humans (so akin to the work of Monsù Desiderio) and all the cumbersome and ornate paraphernalia of the confirmed Romanophile, it is intensely, strikingly, disquietingly modern. He does not cater to the genteel delicateness of Romanticism – engraving, especially the rough technique employed, which does not stoop to any mannerist sophistication of line, cannot offer the distracting palette of sinking suns or rising mists, only the starker contrasts and unerring perspectives that place us in the middle of each image without affording us the luxury of being the focus of the composition. His Carceri prefigure the societies and states of totalitarian durance, real or allegorical, so dear to modern writers, as well as those prisons of money, social mobility and consumerism we have often so eagerly embraced after throwing off the prison of class. Now that we are free, Piranesi’s Carceri have perhaps finally thrown open their doors, inviting us to enter and inviting us to consider the world we have made for ourselves.
I entered the prisons of Piranesi’s making in my teens, when I purchased the 1963 Dover edition in a used bookshop in the early 70’s. With only a vague notion as to what an engraving actually was, and an even vaguer notion of Piranesi’s Italy of the 18th century, the fascination was immediate. Around the same time, I also purchased a book on the collected work of Gustave Doré; the fascination was equally immediate, and has never paled. The two artists made upon me a profound impression of awe, delight and despair, from the idealistic madness and delusional sadness of most excellent hidalgo to the daunting disproportion of scale of Piranesi’s chthonian infinity of walls and stone. They have come to symbolize the profession I practice: the unachievable task of putting thoughts and dreams down as images, and the impossibility of considering ever doing anything else. A quixotic prison of one’s own making. A prison from which, happily enough, escape is not desirable.
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The Prisons / Le Carceri
Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Dover Publications; Bilingual edition (May 20, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0486475514
ISBN-13: 978-0486475516
