Exhibitions
Auckland
WALTER AUBURN
PIRANESI AT THE AUCKLAND CITY ART GALLERY
The recent exhibition of sixty-five large etchings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the Auckland City Art Gallery showed a good cross-section of this artist's work, from his early beginnings (Prima Parte di Architettura) to his mature works (Vedute di Roma and Antichita di Cora). The prints were assembled from New Zealand public and private collections.
Piranesi, whose father was a master mason, worked his way up from modest beginnings in a small village near Venice to become the leading discoverer and recorder of the remains of ancient Rome in the eighteenth century. As a young man from the provinces he fell in love with the ruins of ancient Roman buildings: from 'the Colosseum and Emperor Hadrian's tomb to the smallest garden statues, chimney-pieces and mosaics which he patiently unearthed in the gardens, vineyards and fields in and around Rome. He etched the images of his discoveries on to copper plates, many of which still exist.
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G.B. PIRINESI Temple of Bacchus, 1758 etching, 406 x 619 mm. (collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery) |
Piranisi was fortunate in finding a number of wealthy patrons - at first among the Roman clergy, and later among British visitors to Rome - to whom he communicated his enthusiasm and who became avid collectors of his works. This association has led to the finest and most complete collections of his etchings being held today in the British Museum, in Oxford and in Cambridge. Piranesi also inspired visiting British artists and architects who were to become leaders of the Neo-classical school in Britain - people such as the architect Robert Adam and the artist Gavin Hamilton.
Piranesi's lasting fame is assured to him through his series of monumental etchings: in particular the Carceri d'lnvenzione, a set of sixteen large prints showing the interiors of vast prisons of his imagination - replete with flights of staircases, suspension bridges and ladders - all leading nowhere. Other products of the artist's imagination are the Grotteschi, a set of compositions which combine the most discordant elements: human skulls and skeletons, odd fragments of Roman statuary and masonry, huge crown wheels with water cascading from them into a desolate mountainous landscape.
All these are testimonies to the creative energy of a young genius who was yet to find his ultimate goal in life - the meticulous and sometimes exaggerated pictorial record of the glory of ancient Rome, laid down in four large volumes under the title, Antichità Romane.
Two of the most characteristic plates from this, Piranesi's largest and most ambitious production, were shown in the exhibition: the foundations of the Castel S. Angelo and the Theatre of Marcellus. In these prints he reveals his mastery of the etching needle combined with his understanding of masonry and construction. He shows aspects of famous buildings looking upwards from an imaginary vantage point below piled-up masses of buttresses pointing towards the sky. These powerful etchings represent to me, more than most of his other works, the true artistic genius of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 6 June/July 1977