Wikimedia Commons.Ī Battle of Nude Men is a pen and ink drawing which Piranesi made in 1744-45, possibly when he was in Venice. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), A Battle of Nude Men (1744-45), pen and dark brown ink with brown and gray-brown wash over red chalk on laid paper pasted down on the remains of the artist’s original mount, 25.8 × 18.4 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In the mid-1740s, he worked in Venice, where it’s thought he became friends with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. His first independent print-making started in 1743, when he made views of the city of Rome in conjunction with students at the French Academy in Rome. He started to learn to etch and engrave when in Rome, where he initially worked as a draughtsman. He developed an early interest in classical architecture and remains: his brother introduced him to the Latin language, his father was a stonemason, and he was indentured as an apprentice with his uncle, an architect responsible for restoring historical buildings. Piranesi was born in a town near Mestre, the city on the mainland adjacent to Venice. In this article I look at his career and work generally, and tomorrow I concentrate on his remarkable series of prints showing imaginary prisons, which has proved so influential on art. Imagination and reality collide in this exhibition, and imagination wins.Three hundred years ago tomorrow, one of the most famous and prolific print makers of Italy was born: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). I want to sit in it and read something frightening. It is – literally – straight out of Piranesi. In the Monk's Parlour, an eerie, dark corner of the spooky crypt where Soane arranged medieval fragments to create an atmosphere fit for reading the ghost stories then coming into fashion, sits a grotesque golden chair. The real-world objects that Factum Arte have generated from such images are shown alongside Piranesi's designs and subtly scattered through the house and museum. Mercifully it is not yet possible to 3D print Piranesi's prisons, but the free rein of fantasy that his Carceri exemplify also ran to ideas for Egyptian-style chimney pieces and unreal views of impossible jumbles of Roman ruins. There's a rare bound volume of the Carceri – "Prisons" – imagining a prison so vast it encompasses the entire world.Īpparently endless vaults, towering staircases and spectacular interactions of light and darkness define spaces that are at once exhilarating and terrible, anticipating the works of de Sade in their fascination with power and cruelty. The prints are at the heart of this show. This was to grow into the finest collection of the Italian visionary's graphic works in Britain, amassed by Soane and still kept in the house and museum that is his own masterpiece of bizarre dreamlike architecture and decor. They met in Rome in 1778 and Piranesi presented his young architectural fan with four prints. Soane, as this exhibition makes plain, was profoundly influenced by Piranesi. The results fit like a Gothic gauntlet into Sir John Soane's Museum where they take up natural places among this Georgian architect's collection of ruins and fragments exhibited in deep wells of shadow and mirror-enhanced vistas. Here is a truly mind-boggling use for digital technology.Īs Factum Arte's Adam Lowe explains, digitally scanning the phantasmagoric forms of Piranesi's chairs, tripods and other classical follies takes vast amounts of memory. If you thought 3D printers were only good for making guns, think again. Now they have been made real by Factum Arte in Madrid using the miracle of 3D printing. These visionary artefacts have only ever existed as flat designs on paper. In a delightful exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, Piranesi's dreamlike prints are shown next to objects that translate his extravagant notions – table legs shaped like goats' limbs with faces on them a teapot that rests on a tortoise and has a bee for a spout – into the three-dimensional world. Most of Piranesi's ideas for interior design stayed, however, on the printed pages of his ravishing books – until now. Working in Rome when it was the destination of every artist and aristocrat on the Grand Tour, he "restored" ancient remains from sites such a Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. He fabricated such fictions as a gigantic "Roman" vase, the ultimate fake antique for an English stately home, now owned by the British Museum. In fact he was a spellbinding fantasist whose exquisitely etched visions of overpowering ruins and monstrous prisons have influenced experimental culture from the first Gothic novels to the architecture of Rem Koolhaas.Īs well as creating architectural images that tease and haunt the mind, Piranesi invented objects to decorate a dreamer's home.
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