Horrible imaginings or observation?
Charles Saumarez Smith
PIRANESI AS ARCHITECT AND DESIGNER by John Wilton-Ely The Pierpont Morgan Library and Yale University Press, £30, pp. 186 For writers and artists Piranesi has always been the prince of the dark and sepulchral imagination, the author, above all, of the sinister Carceri, which were described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as representing
vast Gothic halls: on the floors of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults &c., &c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overcome.
Architectural historians, on the other hand, with their desire to define and cir- cumscribe the powers of expressive inven- tion, have for a long time tried to normalise his artistic practice, by relating it to the context of Venetian stage design, to the archaeological interests of mid-18th- century Rome, and to Piranesi's friendship and association with other contemporary architects, artists and designers, such as Jean-Laurent Lege ay, Charles-Louis Clerisseau and Robert Adam.
An extreme version of this tendency to reduce Piranesi from the lone explorer of the recesses of his own mind to an artisan struggling to describe and classify the hydraulic system of Roman aqueducts appears in John Wilton-Ely's new book on Piranesi 'as an architect and designer'. The book is based on lectures which he gave at the Pierpont Morgan Library as long ago as 1980 and, entirely appropriately, it concen- trates not on the whole of Piranesi's oeuvre, but on that part of it which can be studied most effectively in New York — notably, the great collection of design drawings owned by the Morgan Library itself and the set of 23 drawings for S Giovanni in Later- ano, which were acquired by the Avery Architectural Library in 1971.
Design for high altar, S. Maria del Priorato, 1765-66 The book has some excellent qualities. I always like texts which are based on lec- tures because they retain some of the rhetorical undertone of public delivery and they necessarily abstract the more arcane aspects of academic scholarship. It is clear that Wilton-Ely has worked on different aspects of Piranesi for at least the last two decades and so he is able to write with the authority of experience. More especially, the Morgan Library has done him proud in terms of production. It is rare nowadays to have a new book so beautifully laid out on the finest grade of art paper and with impeccably clear, black-and-white illustra- tions; and it immeasurably contributes to the pleasure of reading the book when every illustration is exactly where it should be and invariably of the highest quality.
At the same time, there are other aspects of the book which are less attractively anti- quated. Because of the long delay in pub- lishing the lectures, a number of the people whose assistance Wilton-Ely acknowledges are now dead. His use of language is occa- sionally mildly tired, as if it has suffered from a surfeit of public lecturing. More- over, there is not a glimmer of any influ- ence from any of the new methodologies of art historical interpretation, although Piranesi would appear to be exceptionally well suited to a deep investigation of his use of iconographic symbolism, of the extent to which he was responding to the demands of his clients, or, for example, of the ways in which his work reflects a desire to escape from the increasingly voracious aesthetic appetites of British tourists into an exaggerated and ever more fantastic version of Roman archaeology.
Useful as it is to have a close reading of the sources for Piranesi's architectural work (in particular, his remodelling of the church of S. Maria del Priorato on the Aventine) and of the extent to which his work influenced the chimneypieces of the British nobility, Wilton-Ely's book made me want to read more about the ways in which contemporaries responded to the peculiarities of Piranesi's depiction of antique ruins. One of the more evocative comments recorded in the book is the view of the Welsh topographical artist, Thomas Jones, who thought that Piranesi's Caffe degli Inglesi was
a filthy vaulted room the walls of which were painted with sphinxes, obelisks and pyramids from capricious designs of Piranesi, and fitter to adorn the inside of an Egyptian sepulchre, than a room of social conversation.
This suggests that Piranesi may have been regarded by some of his contempo- raries, not so much as a source of appropri- ate inspiration for candelabra, but as an idiosyncratic and mildly disgusting eccen- tric, someone to be avoided if possible, in case his images contaminated a purer vision of the remains of ancient Rome.
Charles Saumarez Smith is Director of the National Portrait Gallery.
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