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Traveling into the Light
John Haberin New York City
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Does it take a world traveler to pay attention to the skies of Europe? Does it take an artist to draw away?
Just past his mid-fifties, Giovanni Battista Piranesi sought out Greco-Roman sites, with drawings and prints that break out of the mad prisons of his confining fantasies and into the Italian sunlight. They combine careful observation of the present with unsettling perspectives on the past. They also bring serious scholarship to what he held in his imagination and right before his eyes. Could he distinguish what he saw from what he imagined and what he knew? It must have seemed to him a foolish question. Rome, ancient and modern, was not about to reconstruct itself. 
So where would Piranesi have been without his prisons? In Rome, of course, but could he ever find release from the prison house of his imagination? Not ten years ago, the Morgan displayed a handful of his drawings, and now it is back on familiar ground, but with barely a prison in sight. Instead, it has public piazzas and towering, wide-open architecture. He also has his pen, which can hardly stop adding hasty shading, figures in motion, and ornamental detail. He may seem like a whole other artist, a self-styled architect, designer, and student of antiquity—unless, that is, he was still making it all up.
But was he ever all that different, and what drew him to Rome in 1740, at just twenty, in the first place? This time, the Morgan goes to Piranesi himself for an answer: he had his ambitions, and Venice was just not going to appreciate his sublimity. Already he was speaking the language of Romanticism and the sublime, but not only that. He had left a watery city for firmer foundations, in architecture and antiquities, and he was not alone. A scholar like Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Germany and the artists from whom Piranesi learned in Italy were just starting to fill in the gaps when he topped them all.
Prison break
Giovanni Battista Piranesi stopped in 1777 at the three ruined temples of Paestum, near Salerno. Barely a year before his death, could he have attained at last a sense of release? Raised in the Republic of Venice and brought to Rome as draftsman to the Venetian ambassador, he had made his name with monumental views of Rome that belong at once to the fabric of a modern city and the past. Now he sketched the sunlight of southern Italy, so hot that herdsmen sought relief in the Greco-Roman ruins of their early Doric pillars and triangular lintels. He lives most to this day with the Carceri d'Invenzione, or "Imaginary Prisons"—prints so fiendish and intricate that they soon came to stand for a confining dream. Now he turned to what the period knew only as holy ground, as a basilica and as temples to Neptune and Ceres.
Perhaps his prisons never did press in all that closely with their torments. They reach upward in level after dizzying level, anticipating the steel frames of Europe's great railway stations still to come. For Piranesi, though, there was no escaping the fantasy or the fever. Now he subordinates peasant life to his own unreason. He adopts baffling points of view, multiple perspectives, and sudden contrasts between light and shadow that bring out the crumbling incompletion of columns and triangular tympani, weeds flourishing at the top. One temple looms beyond another as less a relief or an alternative than a pale vision.
Who are these people anyway? Fifteen studies leave them ambiguously at work, at rest, or at play, at times quite out of scale to the architecture. One figure is absorbed in reading, and some might well be tourists. A man of the cloth appears outside, but he might be a figure out of commedia dell'arte or just plain slinking off. Few speak, and pigs and cattle loll contentedly, to judge by a discernible smile. Most look just as ghostly as the temples—and just as often drowned in the towering contrasts of light and shadow.
The artist still took his care, like similar fantasies in Bibiena drawings not long before. He worked extensively in black chalk before adding pen, ink, wash, and sometimes red chalk. He also meant the series as models for prints on the same scale, which his son, Francesco, completed after his death. If the etchings look clear by comparison, one can attribute the difference to the media or to a generation. In 1817 Sir John Soane acquired fifteen of the seventeen surviving drawings in 1817, along with two etchings as "Piranesi and the Temples of Paestum," on loan from the architect's London museum. Downstairs at the Morgan Library as "Exploring France," fourteen oil sketches from the Thaw collection, shared between the Morgan Library and the Met, fill out a view of landscape art just entering the nineteenth century—their diligent precision caught in time between Neoclassicism and the crisp light of Rome for Camille Corot.
Was it Romanticism yet? Arguably Piranesi reached that before anyone else, and one should not think of his prisons as the visionary towers of Marcel Storr or designs out of M. C. Escher, with the latter's more rational or even mathematical exuberance. It was Thomas De Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, who compared the Italian's art to "the delirium of a fever," after conversations with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It may seem strange that Soane took to them as well, but the English architect, known for his rationality and institutional restraint, had met Piranesi in Rome. Besides, in sorting out the corner and side views for the Différents Vues de Pesto, wall labels make clear each building's classicism and symmetry. Maybe you knew all along—and what one cannot quite see still helps account for a drawing's impact.
Italy had just stumbled on the ruins as well, south of Pompeii and at Herculaneum, in the process of attaining modernity. The rediscovery coincided with road building. If it misunderstood what were originally temples to Hera and Athena, ancient Rome had already renamed the site in toppling a greater Greece. Piranesi was always observing and always the antiquarian, even when he was making things up—not just architecture, but also the rot and struggle of everyday life. A shepherd leaning on a hoe could come right out of Jean-François Millet decades later in France. Choose your own prison.
Released from prison
Rome had the appeal of its ruins, and what could be more Romantic than that? Still, more and more people were asking to see them whole, just as the Renaissance had promised a rebirth centuries before, and that meant an act of reconstruction. Yet it also meant a constant back and forth between the seen and the unseen, and the two do not line up the way you might think. The ruins themselves supplied the lay of the land, for Piranesi to render in proper perspective. Then he had to populate it and to break up its outsize scale, with people and ornament, all'antica of course. But then Rome was a modern city as well.
Which stage comprised his Invenzioni Caprici, as Piranesi titled prints of his prisons? The Morgan thinks of his earliest work in Rome as "theoretical architecture," but he was always in search at once of the truth and the sublime. When he calls one drawing Architectural Fantasy with a Colossal Façade and another Fantasy of a Magnificent Forum, he insists on that duality between actual scale and unbridled fantasy. When he heads to the river Tiber for Rome's largest sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, he was taking Rome's filthy humanity to the max. When he heads for the countryside, to the waterfalls at Tivoli, the craggy rockface takes much the same shape as the architecture he knew.
The Morgan knows it has a crowd pleaser with a second and larger show, of works from the collection curated by John Marciari. It does have the frontispiece to the book of prisons and one of its best prints, with stairs rising every which way and none. Still, it mostly looks elsewhere. It thinks in terms of works in series, because so did Piranesi, although his drawings do not so easily match up to finished work. Both in their way spilled out from his feverish imagination. Often, too, he might rely on his assistants or his son for raw sketches for his art—or, leave them to execute a print after his drawing.
His finishing details are looser than the architecture, but he needed that roughness to bring ancient and contemporary Rome alive. He never did study human humanity, and people are mere spills of ink. They are also commoners, both merchants and workmen. Another wash, across the foreground of a drawing, comes as a final touch. In each case, the additions also add to architecture's sublimity and scale. St. Peter's Basilica itself looks larger than life, and the Baroque column in front by Gian Lorenzo Bernini leaves its piazza all the emptier.
Piranesi's books were meant to sell, and so were his designs for a gondola, a sedan chair, a candelabra, and mantelpieces. Yet they, too, exist between past and present, the real and the imagined. Studies of bearded heads could pass for portraits, but they evoke the gravity and fashion of ancient Rome. It is easy enough to know the appeal of his fallen columns and grotteschi, including satyrs and skeletons. Yet the gargoyles had their place in custom moldings as well. It is only a step from a grand domed and columned interior to the underground arches and thick supporting pillars of his prisons.
He never left his home town altogether behind, including a trip back in the mid-1740s, and his busy figure studies have a debt to Tiepolo's Venice. The scene of an assassination might be ascending to the skies. The son of a stonemaker, he also never left behind his ambitions as an architect, although he had little to show for it. He designed a choir as an extension to an overcrowded church and a church founded by the Knights of Malta. Fittingly, it was a reconstruction. He had drawn Hadrian's tomb before designing his own, where his imagination could finally come to rest.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi ran at The Morgan Library through May 17, 2015, and June 4, 2023. "Exploring France" ran through October 4, 2014.