Superhuman architecture
Alastair Best
Piranesj (Hayward Gallery) Piranesi is a paradox. Throughout his life he liked to be known as a Venetian architect Yet he spent most of his productive years in Rome and built very little. In many ways it is fortunate for us that Piranesi reached Rome when he did, for in 1740 the city was coming to the end of a building boom, Jobs were hard to come by and architects or would be architects were turning their attentions to the Grand Tourist trade. There was money to be made from the painted or engraved souvenir view for Northern travellers.
We have grown so used to recording our cities as snapshots or coloured slides that it is almost impossible to look at Piranesi's famous series of etchings, the Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna without mentally framing them in the lens of a camera. Indeed, Piranesi's approach to his subject-matter seems remarkably like that of a photographer. The breathtaking wideangles, the zooming close-ups, the rich tonal contrasts of light and shade, the swirling cloudscapes make one wonder what Piranesi might have achieved with a Nikon and a quiverful of lenses and filters at his disposal.
The answer is: nothing that he could not do far better and more memorably with an engraving tool and a copper plate. One reason why his famous views can withstand almost unlimited circulation is because of the freshness and directness of the techni que. Piranesi cut his impressions straight onto the metal. He made few preparatory studies. 'If my drawing were finished my plate would be nothing more than a copy,' he once said. His approach was in marked contrast to the prevailing style. Guiseppe Vasi, in whose studio Piranesi worked in the 1740s — and the Raphael Tuck of his day — once told his assistant that he was `too much the painter to be an engraver.'
I have at home a good example of what the ordinary vedutista would have held to be orthodox engraving. It is by Alessandro Specchi, the designer of the Spanish Steps, and it depicts the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore as a full-frontal architect's ele vation. The printed lines stand out hard and sharp —as on a bank note. Piranesi's version of the same building is utterly different.
Instead of portraying the church as an architect might set it out on his drawing board, he shows the facade, with its sharply receding perspectives, in dramatic close-up. The neatly incised lines have been replaced by reckless, painterly smudges of black ink.
The human figures in the foreground no longer stand and chat in placid groups, as in the Specchi. They become part of a great drama, dwarfed by the apparently superhuman scale of the architecture and swept this way and that, as if propelled by some turbulent, off-stage wind-machine.
Piranesi's Rome, in fact, is a series of stage sets, in which the flats and back-drops consist either of brand new construction or mouldering ruins or a mixture of the two. In his views of antiquity, domes and arches stand open to the sky. Everything is on the point of collapse. Weathered columns are bewhiskered with vegetation, like rocks at low tide. We are on a bomb site, and the human survivors, bent double with fatigue or despair, cower in the shadows.
Far more sinister and dramatic still is the famous Carceri series, which first appeared in 1745, and then, dramatically darkened, in the early 1760s. Operatic stage sets frequently included a prison scene, and Piranesi's spatial language of broad stairs and arcaded halls owed much to baroque designers of the Bibiena school. But the Carceri are more intense, more personal, more romantic. The space is apparently infinite, yet suffocatingly contained. The eye wanders up giant flights of stairs or , along rickety flying galleries only to collide
with an iron grille or a wall of Cyclopean masonry. Ropes dangle, smoke rises and the foreground is littered with instruments of torture — gallows, cables and chains, These feverish fantasies were precisely the opiate that the nineteenth century craved, and they stamped themselves on the imagi' nations of writers as diverse as de QuinceY, Baudelaire and Victor Hugo. There 15 plenty of fodder for twentieth century nibil' ists, too. 'The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons,' wrote Aid' ous Huxley in 1950, 'is the perfect point' lessness which reigns throughout. Their architecture is colossal and magnificent One is made to feel that the genius of great artists and the labour of innumerable slaves have gone into the creation of these mono' ments, every detail of which is without a purpose . . . Engaged in no recognisable activity, paying no attention to one another, a few small faceless figures haunt the shadows. Their significant presence mere!): emphasises the fact that nobody is at home, But Piranesi was much more than an engraver of souvenir scenes and macabre fantasies, The great merit of John Wilton' Ely's magnificent exhibition (at the Har ward Gallery until 11 June) is that it pre' sents every facet of Piranesi's genius. For he was, by turns and sometimes siMni' taneously, archaeologist, polemicist, Or niture designer, restorer, dealer. Polon; zani's famous portrait, depicting him as hall man, half antique fragment, appealed re Piranesi because it neatly illustrated his sPtil loyalties. Part of his energies were direcre° towards the past. With his great architec. tural imagination and stone-mason's train" ing he developed a system of illustrating tbef building and engineering achievements 0 the ancient Romans based on fragment revealed by the spades of the archaeolog' ists. But this was no dry antiquarian e)ter' cise. Piranesi was anxious to demonstrate that the Etruscans and the ancient Rornall developed a style of building which oWev little to the Greeks. Yet, at the same time° immersing himself in Graeco-Roman On. troversies Piranesi was also attempting te develop a new and richer visual vocabuil for practising designers. In his architectur i studies and in designs for furniture al fireplaces, he is the committed enerllY f)„ 'less is more', overloading his drawings Wit', so much inventive and scholarly ornanlene that they threaten to go critical. In 011, imaginary composition a row of squat Ion': columns staggers under the weight of ; massive, multi-decker entablature, Wit, thin layers of decoration oozing out be`' ween meaty layers of stone; in anothel.' colonnades, triumphal arches, sarcophaga lions' heads, reclining deities and billowin°5 smoke are combined into a stupend°110 soufflé of a Roman harbour. Piranesi till, to pull out all the stops. This is espeei3,1 )e true of his fireplace designs. Here th"e surround is treated as though it were proscenium arch framing a great drains fe
pyrotechnics. The contrast between ephemeral nature of the fire and the °vet
Powering ornamentation of the fireplace alust have impressed and awed Piranesi's contemporaries. And his influence as a furniture designer survives, albeit in much %ore restrained form in the interiors of his Sketching companion, Robert Adam and in ,the work of the Regency man of taste, Ihnm as Hope. Piranesi, in fact, powerfully impressed a Avihnle generation of British architects and 'esigners. He was proud to have been elected an honorary fellow of our Society of A, ntiquaries, and often said that, outside LtalY, England was where he would have een most at home. It is tempting to think „met the Piranesian influence lingers on. The couth Bank cultural ghetto might possibly ,.,have been run up by the author of the rceri on an off day; and a visit to this el.centennial exhibition compels one to view Denys Lasdun's National Theatre Interior with new eyes, and, it has to be admitted, fresh respect.
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