Piranesi’s etches of Rome are inked in the mind

THE State Library of Victoria has a fine survey of the great 18th-century engraver and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

MUST CREDIT: SUPPLIED... Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Veduta interna del Panteon (View inside the Pantheon), 1765 78 impressi...

IN the first of his youthful poems known as the Eclogues, Virgil has a shepherd telling another of his visit to the city of Rome. Tityru­s used to imagine the capital, he says, as a bigger version of the market towns of their own region: sic parvis componere magna solebam — composing great things from little ones — but in reality it rises up like a great cypress towering over low hedge shrubs.

Yet Virgil himself lived in Naples, probably because it was remarkably beautiful, had a healthier seaside loca­tion and Greek, the language that inspired his own poetic creation, was spoken there.

He was far from unaware that great cities could be destroyed. In his second work, the Georgics, he associates Rome implicitly with a reference to kingdoms doomed to perish — peritura ... regna — and in the Aeneid, the epic of the foundation of Rome, he presents in Book II the most vivid and memorable account of the rape and destruction of a city in the history of literature. It is the refugees from the sack of Troy who are destined, under the leadership of Aeneas, to found a new home in Italy, and this gives the poet, in due course, the opportunity to imagine Rome before Rome.

In Book VIII, Aeneas arrives at the site of what is to become the biggest city in the world, but is only partly occupied by a small Greek colony, Pallanteum. He contemplates sites still barely touched by human hand yet which by the poet’s own day had been densely built up for many centuries, covered with already ancient and venerable structures. The most striking passage of all, to a modern reader, is when he looks at what will one day be the Forum but is still only a meadow for pasturing cattle.

The passage would already have been spine-tingling to a Roman, as it would be to a Londoner or a New Yorker imagining the primitive topography of the city whose existence they now take for granted. But it is almost breathtaking to a modern reader because a cow pasture is exactly what the Forum became once again after the fall of Rome, and it was even known as the Campo Vaccino. What had been the heart of the greatest empire the world had known was, by early modern times, a collection of spectacular ruins in which illiterate peasants watched over their beasts while the few surviving buildings had been turned into churches.

It was this poignant contrast between the vestiges of ancient grandeur and the mediocrity of modern superstition — as he in particular saw it — that was in Gibbon’s mind when he conceived the plan of his masterpiece: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

I quoted this passage two years ago in discussing In Search of the Picturesque , an evocative exhibition at Geelong Art Gallery. The same curator, Colin Holden, has now put together at the State Library of Victoria a fine survey of the great 18th-century engraver and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Piranesi was author of the most dramatic images made of Rome, including both its modern edifices and the remains of its ancient ones.

Coinciding with the State Library exhibition are two others that I have not yet had the opportunity to see: The Piranesi Effect, devoted to the influence of Piranesi on contemporary Australian artists, at the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne (until May 24); and A Traveller’s Dream, with photographs of Pira­nesi’s motifs by Graziano Panfili at the Italian Cultural Institute (until April 30).

Rome had never ceased to fascinate the modern mind throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, when it was hardly even a significant city. The first of the ancient aqueducts was repaired in the mid-15th century, and within a few decades papal patronage, urban renewal and the beginning of the new St Peter’s had made it the centre of the high Renaissance. In 1527 the sack of the city by mutinous German imperial troops brought that period to a close, but later in the century a second aqueduct was restored and a series of other ambitious urban projects allowed the city to become again the capital of the baroque period.

In the second half of the 17th century, Louis XIV’s France asserted its cultural hegemony in Europe, but after the death of the Sun King in 1715 and the rococo period that ensued, the neoclassical movement yet again returned to Rome; so Piranesi was singularly timely in taking the city as his subject just as the pendulum of taste swung back in its favour, carrying with it not only artists, writers and scholars but also a new generation of grand tourists eager to improve their minds in the heartlands of classical civilisation and to take home appropriate souvenirs of the experience.

Piranesi came from Venice, the first city to have been systematically represented in painting and printmaking, but he was more concerned with the splendour of antiquity than with the medieval and modern picturesque.

He was deeply impressed by the scale and magnificence of the ancient buildings, even if his prints, especially the later ones, are poised between archeological accuracy and theatrical licence. If he seems to exaggerate the size of certain structures, this is partly explained by the fact the Forum, for example, was buried under many metres of soil deposited by floods, so that viewers were much closer to capitals and arches than they are today, and columns appeared thicker, in proportion to their height, than they really are.

But Piranesi seemed even to contemporaries to have aggrandised many of his motifs, and this was the result of a combination of dramatic perspectival effects and in many cases an undeniable enhancement of relative scale. Piranesi also made effective use of the human figure to heighten the pathos of his subjects: not only representations of contemporary Romans but especially an artificial cast of shepherds and Gypsies and ragged beggars, grotesque figures who often recall the actors of the commedia dell’arte and who stand as tacit witnesses to the pitiful contrast between ancient magnificence and the squalor of the modern.

The relation between architecture and figures also corresponds to the combination of techniques employed by the artist. Piranesi used engraving, where the artist cuts directly into the copper plate with a burin, and etching, where acid is used to burn lines wherever the acid-proof resist has been scratched away by the etcher’s needle. Because less effort is required to work with the needle than the burin, etched lines are far more sketchy and loose than the precise, controlled ones produced by ­engraving.

Looking closely at these prints, we can often see the difference quite readily. Broadly speaking, engraved lines are more fitted to the regular outlines of architecture, while etched ones are used for the forms of the figures and their ragged dress. But in practice things are not quite so straightforward, and etched lines are used for subtler effects such as light and shade and texture. Above all, etching is particularly good for rendering the effect of ruins, where regularity breaks down, and geometric order has been fractured or eroded into amorphousness.

For Piranesi’s interest in his subject represents not only a neoclassical love of ancient grandeur but simultaneously a proto-romantic feeling for the poignancy of ruins, and the power of nature to reclaim the works of man and slowly re-assimilate them into the order of organic life. The same tension is manifest, but in more overt form, in the series of Carceri d’invenzione that Piranesi produced at the same time as the views of Rome.

The Carceri, which were evoked by Thomas De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), apparently relying on descriptions he had heard from Coleridge, are in every way the opposite of the Roman monuments: interiors rather than exteriors, confused and irrational rather than rational, highly personal and neurotic as against classical and timeless. As the title makes plain, they are conceived as prisons, places of confinement, but more particularly labyrinthine structures of arches, staircases and platforms suspended in mid-air in which De Quincey imagined the confined and lost prisoners to be self-portraits of the artist.

The Carceri series, not surprisingly, is essentially realised in etching, and with astonishing verve, freedom and spontaneity, as though improvised before our eyes. They are not intended to record objective facts but to conjure dream images, as De Quincey said — oddly disturbing visions to emerge from the Enlightenment, making one think of Goya’s print, a few decades later, ambiguously titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, where we are left uncertain whether he means that monsters arise when reason fails in its vigilance or whether they are generated by the dark side of reasonitself.

The prisons continued to evolve, too, over the years and in parallel to the views of Rome. In later editions, the interiors were reworked to be more complex, more claustrophobic, filled with sinister machinery, chains and engines of various kinds, and above all much darker, with extreme effects of chiaroscuro. Images first conceived with a certain lightness and fancy gradually lose any hint of playfulness to become increasingly sinister or perhaps melodramatic.

It is a fascinating exhibition, accompanied by Holden’s scholarly and beautifully produced publication. Unfortunately the library has included an introductory video, useful in itself, within the exhibition space, and the unrelenting recorded voice is extremely distracting. I have commented before on the unfortunate habit that museums have of including noisy didactic videos in their exhibitions, something almost unthinkable in an art gallery.

It seems rather ironic that a library, of all place­s, would fail to understand the value of silen­ce. No doubt they assume that while it is essential for reading, it is not required when looking at pictures. But words have such an intimate relation to our thoughts that it is hard to exclude them from consciousness.

A fine exhibition thus became an arduous experience, but it still left one with a powerful sense of Piranesi’s energy and imagination, encouraged by the enthusiasm of grand tourists eager to acquire works as ambitious as the six-sheet foldout print of the Column of Trajan or the even more extraordinary and largely imaginary reconstruction of the Campus Martius, vividly reminding us that from Virgil’s day to our own Rome has been the world’s greatest and most intriguing urban palimpsest.

Rome: Piranesi’s Vision

State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, until June 22