The San Diego Museum of Art
The Prado, Balboa Park
Through July 7, 2013
TheSanDiegoMuseumofArt.org
619-232-7931
On view until July 7 at the San Diego Museum of Art, Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design
surveys the work of one of art’s great design fabulists, Giovanni Battista
Piranesi (1720-1778). The extensive and
beautifully installed exhibition reveals a paradoxical figure, whose single
completed building is a strange footnote, but whose numerous etchings of real
and imagined places have influenced and inspired architects, painters and poets
for two centuries. Utilizing new
computer skills and rendering methods, the show brings Piranesi into the
virtual world of The Matrix, but it seems like the 18th Century draftsman
and architect was already there.
Deftly avoiding the risk of stuffy connoisseurship that can
limit Piranesi’s appeal, the curators have taken a cue from Piranesi’s most entrepreneurial
venture – his innovative etching techniques – and gives them a new life with a
high-tech kick in the pants – a computer generated three dimensional
walk-through of his famous series of etchings, Le Carceri
d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons).
Produced by Factum Arte of Madrid, the animation takes the
static images and projects them onto 3D models and slowly turns a series of
these 2 dimensional prints – whose mysterious spatial extents have always
intrigued architects - into a
phantasmagoria equal parts “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Draughtsman’s
Contract.” Accompanied by a haunting
Bach prelude performed by Pablo Casals, the video is mesmerizing. It can be
viewed online here.
Further pushing the boundaries between art history and art
resurrection, additional videos show the elaborate and time consuming process of
creating virtual models of some of Piranesi’s un-built projects and
designs. Slathered with elaborate ram’s
heads and enigmatic faces (Sibyls? Nymphs?) a fireplace mantel jumps from an 18th
century etching onto a 21st century computer. Finally, using a stereo-lithographic printing process, the lost piece is brought into the
museum as an actual object.
Other objects
brought to life from the etchings include Brobdingnagian urns festooned with
griffins and other fantastic creatures, elaborate candelabra and lost
antiquities. Fragments of designs are
scattered on tables in the style of an 18th century wunderkammern,
testimony to Piranesi’s art but also the technicians’ skill and science
bringing these pieces to life from the black and white prints.
Bringing these
historically “un-built” items back to life through science and technology might
please Mary Shelley, as there is something monstrous and fantastic about even
the smallest Piranesian detail. His one
built project is a church for the Knights of Malta, Santa Maria del Priorato on
the Aventine Hill in Rome. Covered with
emblems and symbols for the military and naval heritage of the Knights of
Malta, they are double-coded with Classical references and allegorical
references to his patron, Cardinal
Giambattista Rezzonico. These are
objects and symbols that try to transcend time and reference both tradition and
innovation. Like his un-built work, it
is didactic and a bit creepy. Not sure
how Dan Brown missed this building as a plot device for “The Da Vinci Code”.
Rounding out
this technological assessment of Piranesi is a side-by-side comparison of
modern photographs and the etchings of the monuments and piazzas of Rome that
Piranesi popularized for his European Grand Tour patrons. Piranesi’s vision of
these monuments – with their extreme shadows, groups of brigands, overgrown
ruins and wild sense of scale, contrasts nicely with the more somber reality of
the photos.
Previous assessments of Piranesi have championed his place
as a pre-cursor of Romanticism – a purveyor of a mad worldview shared with
Blake’s visions, Fuseli ‘s beasts or the late capriccios of Goya. Championed by admirers as diverse as writers
Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, art historians Henri Focillon and Siegfried Gideon,
Piranesi was the touchstone for all things irrational during the supposed age
of reason of the neo-classical 18th century. Subsequent surveys
emphasize his place in his own time – eagerly exploring the newly discovered
wonders of the ancient world, wondering at the newly revealed variety and
diversity of the ancients, and the discovery of other, older and more
mysterious cultures outside the classical tradition.
While his more popular counterparts championed the newly
fashionable Greek influence on architecture, Piranesi stood firm in his
conviction of the genius of Roman (and Italian) design. One series of etchings was essentially an 18th
century flame war with a French theorist over the relative “genius” of Italian
or Greek architecture. Unfortunately,
France and the neo-classicists were in ascendance, and while influential with
late Rococo design and the Adams Brothers in England, the move to less, not
more, and rational, not the uncanny, was already afoot.
Like uncomfortable and disturbing dreams, architectural
fantasies haunt design theory and historically have disrupted contemporary
orthodoxy. From the allegorical and
arcane imaginings of late medieval and early Renaissance romances such as
Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to the blasted streets and crumbling dirigible like
buildings dropped into war torn Sarajevo by Lebbeus Woods, the irrational and the sublime run a deep
counterpoint to the rational and ordered precepts of Renaissance theory or
today’s neo-Modernism. The nature of
Piranesi’s un-built work is a natural for an imagined or virtual place. Now that Piranesi can be seen in an artificial way that strangely is more natural for us – in a movie, as a simulation, his influence will be felt again.
