'Furious and fantastick': The Cooper-Hewitt's exhibition on Piranesi—now in Haarlem-compellingly examines the way that he used his knowledge of classical art to reinvigorate modern design

Apollo, April, 2008 by David Adshead

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To Produce a distillate of G.B. Piranesi's unconventional creative for exhibition is inherently challenging. The architect Daniel Libeskind suggests that Piranesi's work 'is analogous to philosophy, literature, poetry, and political meditation far more than to mechanics, materials or physics'. The insight of the psychologist as much as the art historian is needed.

Two representations of the man provide an introduction and help us to get under his skin. For all its rich colouring and apparent vitality, Pietro Labruzzi's posthumous oil portrait of Piranesi (Fig. 2) derives from a marble bust carved, about1761, by Joseph Nollekens; stone translated into flesh, an irony that could not be more apposite for its subject matter. Piranesi's self-portrait, as a 30-year-old, engraved and etched by his friend Felice Polanzani and used as the frontispiece to his Opere Varie di Arcbitettura, prospecttive, grotteschi, antichita (1750) is less conventional--it depicts him as a living sculpture. Both its inscribed plinth, mantled with vegetation, and the figure's upper torso with its truncated arms, are portrayed as if cut from stone; but the head, with its steady, quizzical gaze and dark hair, haloed by a swirl of contradictory hachure lines, is decidedly alive. The self-image that Piranesi chose to project is not of a half-petrified figure, succumbing to some Ovidian metamorphosis, but, more strangely, a living, classical fragment able to serve as an interlocutor between past and present, between the solid, stony certainty of ancient architecture, manifest in the shattered but enduring remains of Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman civilisations, and the uncertainty, verging on feebleness as he saw it, of contemporary architectural design.

It is the part--imaginative, scholarly, polemic and idiosyncratic--that Piranesi played in this dialogue between 'then' and 'now', his promotion of a design continuum, an eternal present, that is explored in the exhibition 'Piranesi as Designer' at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, and the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, where it carries the more explicit and evocative title "De droom van Piranesi: Eeuwig modern design', or 'The Dream of Piranesi: Eternal modern design'.

Just as Piranesi's study and interpretation of precedent acted as a spur to his creative imagination and search for a contemporary, eclectic language for architecture and decoration, so subsequent generations of architects and artists have found inspiration in his work. Students at Rome's Academic de France and British architects, such as William Chambers, Robert Adam and John Soane, who had direct contact with him, were profoundly influenced by Piranesi's genius--although the self-styled architect also learnt much from their practical advice.

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By including in this exhibition a series of filmed statements from a group of key post-modernist architects--Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (tellingly all of them philosopher-designers who have taught as well as built)--the Cooper-Hewitt elegantly demonstrated just how enduring that chain of inspiration is. Piranesi urges his reader to 'treasure ... rationality' whilst respecting 'the freedom of artistic creation that sustains it'. It is this licence to experiment in an unfettered way, to challenge what is presented as canonical, that strikes such a chord with these contemporary big beasts. Through their eyes we are afforded a designer's perspective on Piranesi's message and a privileged glimpse into his mind.

This exhibition differs from previous Piranesi shows in another respect. For good reasons they largely, but not exclusively, focused on his work as a master etcher and maker of indelible images. While 'Piranesi as Designer' certainly celebrates his vast published output it ensures that less-wellknown aspects and phases of his working life and complex legacy are also highlighted.

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Piranesi's first architectural commission, although it came surprisingly late in his career, was from no less a patron than the Pope, Clement XIII, and, had the project not been abandoned, would have seen the reconstruction of a substantial part of the basilical church of S Giovanni in Laterano. Bent Sorensen's analysis of the series of richly expressive sheets of preparatory and presentation drawings shows that, for all their detail and sumptuous effect, Piranesi had left unsatisfactorily resolved fundamental issues of structure, circulation and decorative coherence. His only completed commission, the transformation of the church of the Knights of Malta, S. Maria del Priorato, Rome (1764-66), provides a feast of decorative surfaces that combine military, dynastic and Etruscan motifs, ancient and renaissance ornament, in a wholly new way.

There are enticing hints in the exhibition, in drawings made some 20 years earlier for wall decoration and furniture, of Piranesi's design work for lost palace interiors. His interest in the applied and decorative arts developed throughout his life, not least as a result of his archaeological investigations, his obsession with Etruscan culture during the 1750s and his involvement in the so-called Graeco-Roman debate. It found expression too in his design manifesto Diverse maniere d'adornare ... (1769), and in the publication just before his death of Vasi, candelabra, cippi ... (1778).