Palaces of the Mind

By ROBERT HUGHES

No artist ever possessed a city more ravenously than Giovanni Battista Piranesi did Rome. Generations of builders, from the anonymous creators of the Forum to Michelangelo and Bernini, set down that tawny palimpsest on the Tiber. It was left to a failed 18th century architect, who built one long-ignored church on the Aventine, to give the city its definitive shape: the word Piranesian, as a synonym for phantasmagoric grandeur, has entered the language of art. This month, a splendid exhibition of Piranesi's studies and engravings opened at Columbia University in Manhattan; its centerpiece is a set of 23 wash drawings for Piranesi's intended remodeling of San Giovanni in Laterano. These rare sketches cast a fresh light on the unique junction that Piranesi maintained between Baroque and Neoclassical architectural thought. But it is still Piranesi the fantast and archivist, the obsessed historian with a burin, who holds the eye today. His testament is some 2,000 elaborate prints of antiquities, buildings, real or imaginary, sculptures and details, which he published between 1748 and his death in 1778.

Heroic Misinformation. Piranesi's graphic work may well be the most extraordinary monument to nostalgia in Western art. The ruins of Rome fascinated him when he arrived there from Venice at age 20; they were, he wrote, "the most perfect that architecture ever achieved." Their very size stunned him. It had to be met by what seemed to Piranesi a wholly truthful, if not perfectly realistic inflation of scale. "These speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings, even such as those of the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying . . ." So in his renderings, the modest stones of Hadrian's Tomb were translated into a crushing, megalithic rock pile that dwarfed the tatterdemalion beggars at its foot; such Roman monuments as the Pyramid of Cestius, which in real life is as inconspicuous as any pyramid can reasonably be, rivaled the Pyramid of Cheops in height and spread. This kind of heroic misinformation provoked some murmuring from English dilettanti who, arriving in Rome armed with nothing but their recollections of Piranesi's engravings, were disappointed by the city. But the point was made, the dream fixed. Moreover, it survived. There is a long history of architectural fantasy that runs to the grand biblical film sets of Griffith and De Mille from such preposterous imaginary views of antiquity as Piranesi's frontispiece for his book of drawings called Magnificenze di Roma. Every monument and fragment along the Appian Way, plus a few dozen that never existed, is jammed into it. The line between archaeological commitment and sheer mania was, in Piranesi, very thin.

It is said that Piranesi, at 22, caught malaria while preparing the Magnificenze; the outskirts of Rome were infested by mosquitoes, buzzing over the swamps, from which emerged, like dinosaur bones, the battered marble of ancient Rome. If this is so, it adds a facet to one's view of Piranesi's most famous suite, the Carceri d'Invenzione or "Imaginary Prisons," which he engraved in 1745. They are among the most potent dream images ever evoked. To call them precursors of Surrealism is to diminish their oneiric power, for their directness as statements about hallucination has not been equaled this century.

In these vast halls, where the galleries have no exit but only give way to more ramps, staircases and stone voids, a fearful obsession is at work -- the experience of enclosure, of invisible watchers. Space, in the rest of Piranesi's work, is (for all its exaggerations) measurable. In the Prisons it is not. No imaginative effort can deduce a real building from these scribbled and echoing crypts, with their swinging cables, their proliferating vaults and huge iron grilles: one imagines Piranesi, gripped by some mastering paranoia, trying to stabilize it and give it a "real" form. In the 18th century, opium was the usual medicine for fever, and perhaps the Carceri were inspired by it; certainly their feeling of limitless dread, of imprisonment by infinite space, pertains to opium experience. Hence Piranesi's interest for some 19th century writers who, like Coleridge and Baudelaire, were opium addicts. "With the same power of endless growth and reproduction," wrote Thomas de Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, "did my architecture proceed in dreams." Today, for an audience soaked in cheap psychedelia, Piranesi's prisons are a reminder that only complex and fastidious minds have trips that are worth recalling. They do not represent a flash of hallucination, but rather a state of mind, developed over a long span of time. Piranesi's stupendous architectural memory mutated involuntarily into dream and revealed the scope of his ambitions with a grandiosity that could not have been attained by any of the designs that he actually meant to be built, hampered as they were by materials and money.

. Robert Hughes

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