“Piranesi’s Displeasure of Ruins,” Apollo, September, 2007, 47-53 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aspects of Piranesi, 2018
A Visual History of Architecture One of the major developments in recent Piranesi studies is to consider his work as an integral part of the aesthetic and historical debates sparked off after the 1750 rediscovery of Pompei, Herculaneum and Paestum, and the resulting publications by Winckelmann and Julien-David Le Roy. Rudolf Wittkower was one of the first to break both with the tradition that considered Piranesi mainly as a vedutisto, a brilliant and highly original producer of evocative views of Rome, and with the Romantic tradition that saw him as the inventor of irrational space and of prophetic visions of the modern predicament. Instead, in one of the first articles he wrote after his arrival at the Warburg Institute in London, he drew attention to Piranesi's importance as an architectural theorist and historian. In his wake John Wilton-Ely and Manfredo Tafuri have developed a reading of his work as a precursor of modernism, favoring, like his fellow Venetian Lodoli, the simple expression of a building's function, and rejecting the traditional Vitruvian view of Greece as the cradle of classical architecture. In the past decade Lola Kantor, Fabio Barry, Mario Bevilacqua and Francesco Nevola have situated his writings in the context of Venetian debate on the relationship between architectural forms and function, exchanges between representatives of the new disciplines of art history and archaeology and the humanist antiquarian study of Roman ruins. The Graeco-Roman debate on the origins of classical architecture between, on one hand, Julien-David Le Roy and, on the other, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Piranesi, has thus become the point of departure for recent studies of Piranesi's activities as an architectural historian. Yet common to all these new approaches, however valuable and innovative, is that they favor the content, the arguments, of Piranesi to the neglect of the actual visual form of his historical work. They concentrate on his position in the Graeco-Roman debate and in the controversies of the 1750s and 1760s between archaeologists, art historians and antiquarians on the origins of architecture, the nature and the legitimization of ornament. They barely address the actual form of his publications on ancient Rome, in that his representations of Rome's past are not in the form of a continous narrative discourse, chronologically ordered, or even of a chronicle of facts, dates and material remains (of which Le Roy's chronological diagram of church ground plans is a rudimentary example), but a visual history. In this essay I want to consider more closely the nature of this visual history and its implications. If one leaves aside Piranesi's writings, often polemical, on the correct use of ornament or the origins of classical architecture, which form a minor part of his oeuvre, and whose authorship is still sometimes contested, the large majority of his output consists of a series of etchings showing the ruins of Rome and its environs, with some reconstructions, as, for instance, that of the Campus Martius. In his early works, the Prima Parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), or the Antichità Romane de'tempi della Repubblica e de'primi Imperatori (1748), he presents a combination of etchings showing the ruins at the moment he saw them, subject to the ravages of time, together with hybrid images that assemble an abrupt montage of their present state with elements that had disappeared by the eighteenth century, and additions imagined by the artist, as in the scenes from the Via Appia. The Magnificenze (1762) and Le Antichità Romane (1762) offer the most complete vision of the Roman and Etruscan origins of classical architecture. In such later monographic publications as the Rovine del Castello dell'Acqua Giulia (1761) and the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma (1762), culminating in the studies of the Villa Hadriana and Paestum, unfinished at the time of his death and published by his son Francesco, the form and content is always visual. A simple comparison between the way in which, for instance, Piranesi visually stages the Pantheon and the manner preserved by more traditional vedutisti or architectural historians shows how much the importance of suggesting that the building is actually present for the beholder, with the spectator actually inside it, replaced the documentary tradition that started with the Speculum Magnificentiae Romae at the end of the sixteenth century. Whereas there, or in the collections of Roman antiquities by Palladio and Serlio, the Pantheon is shown frontally, in orthogonal projection, and with an absolute adherence to its exact state at the time, Piranesi's version as presented in the Magnificenze uses a complex perspectival system with two vanishing points located so as not to imply a conventional or self-evident view, and removes several columns from the
The Archaeological Sublime: History and Architecture in Piranesi’s Drawings, 2006
In the architectural, historical, and archaeological context of the eighteenth century, Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) played an important role. He posited crucial theses in the debates on the ‘origins of architecture’ and ‘aesthetics’. He is numbered foremost among the founders of modern archaeology. But Piranesi was misinterpreted both in his day and posthumously. The vectors of approach yielding misinterpretation of Piranesi derived from two phenomena: one is the early nineteenth-century Romanticist reception of Piranesi’s character and work. The second is the mode of codification of architectural history. The former interpretation derived from Piranesi’s position on aesthetics, the latter from his argument concerning origins. Both of these served the identification of Piranesi as ‘unclassifiable’. He has thus been excluded from the ‘story’ of the progress of western architectural history. Piranesi, however, conceived of these two debates as one interrelated topic. Concerning origins, he developed a history of architecture not based on the East/West division, and supported this by the argument that Roman architecture depended on Etruscans which was rooted in Egypt. Secondly, he distinguished Roman from Grecian architecture identified with ‘ingenious beauty’. Thus Piranesi placed Romans in another aesthetical category which the eighteenth century called ‘the sublime’. Piranesi’s perception caused him to be described as madman or idiosyncratic. However, most of these evaluations lack a stable historical base. Therefore, restoring Piranesi, his arguments, executed works and drawings to architectural history appear as a necessity.
The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2013
is a distinguished architectural historian who has worked extensively on the dialogue between Roman architecture and the arts in Western Europe from the Renaissance onwards.1 It is therefore with high expectations that the reader interested in this matter opens the newest monograph on one of the most fascinating artists moving between the realms of antiquity and modernity, Giambattista Piranesi (Venice 1720-Rome 1778). Although rather poorly known as a person, this is a figure whose masterly art of engraving rapidly gained success in Rome. His artistic basis was rococo Venice, and his appreciation for its love for ornament and façade architecture never left him. Pinto's book does not analyze Piranesi's progress from an architecte manqué toward becoming a free artist of drawing and etching and a pioneer in documenting and reconstructing antiquity. For Pinto, all Piranesi's activities start in Rome through his contact with Filippo Juvarra and other local architects and draughtsmen.2
Save the Heritage Benefit Corporation (ed.). Life within ruins Essays on architecture restoration theory, 2022
George Simmel, in his famous essay Ruins written in 1911, observes that a ruin is an artifact that, on the one side, evokes the memory of how it had been used by men and that, on the other side, collapses under the force of Nature. The sprout of Nature inside a building - that was originally excluded from its original functional program - is a manifestation of new aesthetic concepts. In 2005, Giorgio Agamben claims that today what was once sacred cannot be profaned anymore because it allows only uses that are coherent with its actual state. For example, the ruins of an ancient building allow only its consumption for touristic uses. The Italian philosopher then advances the hypothesis that such a mechanism can be profaned only with an act of nonchalance typical of art. This paper aims to investigate practices of profanation of the monument apparatus. The profanation of ruins is thus understood as a process of invading the perimeter that separates the inside from the outside. This investigation will be conducted presenting some collage works that challenge the meaning of preservation and envision some radical ways to re-use and re-signify a ruin.
Architectural Ruins: A Geoheritage Essay on the Anatomy of Buildings
Ruins are a statement on the building materials used and the construction method employed. Malta is the smallest European Union Member State with a significantly high density of cultural heritage. Casa Ippolito, which is now in ruins, is a typical representative of seventeenth-century aristocratic country residences on this Central Mediterranean island. This paper scrutinises these ruins as a primary source in the reconstruction of the architecture of the building. It considers the building elements and materials as the essential tissue of architecture. Such ruins are not just geocultural remains of historical built fabric. They are open wounds in the built structure; they underpin the anatomy of the building and support insights into its dynamics when it was in operation. Ruins are an essay in the geoheritage of material culture and building physics. By reconstructing the mechanics of the building one can strive to comprehend how it functioned in terms of serviceability and well-be...
A Recurring Image in Francesco Patrizi of Cherso: the Ruins
Esercizi Filosofici, 17, 1, 2022
In this article, I start by examining the myth of the «great ruin» contained in Francesco Patrizi's Dialoghi della retorica (Venice, 1562), highlighting one particular aspect of this story: the theme of «vestiges», that is, of what remains after the destructive occurrence of a catastrophe. I then explore the different meanings of that story by using Patrizi's previously published Dialoghi della historia (Venice, 1560) and I point out how the theme of the erosion, recovery and restoration of cultural traditions constitutes a leitmotif that runs through Patrizi's whole oeuvre. In the last part of the article, finally, I focus on the specific interplay of nature and history, as this clarifies the equivalence between history and memory advocated by Patrizi as well as his conception of the relationship between the past and the future.
Architectural ruins: geoculture of the anatomy of buildings as illustrated by Casa Ippolito, Malta
Heritage Science, 2021
Ruins are a statement on the building materials used and the construction method employed. Casa Ippolito, now in ruins, is typical of 17th-century Maltese aristocratic country residences. It represents an illustration of secondary or anthropogenic geodiversity. This paper scrutinises these ruins as a primary source in reconstructing the building's architecture. The methodology involved on-site geographical surveying, including visual inspection and non-invasive tests, a geological survey of the local lithostratigraphy, and examination of notarial deeds and secondary sources to support findings about the building's history as read from its ruins. An unmanned aerial vehicle was used to digitally record the parlous state of the architectural structure and karsten tubes were used to quantify the surface porosity of the limestone. The results are expressed from four perspectives. The anatomy of Casa Ippolito, as revealed in its ruins, provides a cross-section of its building history and shows two distinct phases in its construction. The tissue of Casa Ippolito-the building elements and materials-speaks of the knowledge of raw materials and their properties among the builders who worked on both phases. The architectural history of Casa Ippolito reveals how it supported its inhabitants' wellbeing in terms of shelter, water and food. Finally, the ruins in their present state bring to the fore the site's potential for cultural tourism. This case study aims to show that such ruins are not just geocultural remains of historical built fabric. They are open wounds in the built structure; they underpin the anatomy of the building and support insights into its former dynamics. Ruins offer an essay in material culture and building physics. Architectural ruins of masonry structures are anthropogenic discourse rendered in stone which facilitate not only the reconstruction of spaces but also places for human users; they are a statement on the wellbeing of humanity throughout history.