The Arts of Giambattista Piranesi. Architect, etcher, antiquarian, vedutista, designer (Venice, 8/28/10-11/21/10)

"The exhibition [...] is an all-round exploration of the protean activities of Giambattista Piranesi (Venice 1720 - Rome 1778), one of the most fascinating, complex and multifaceted artists in 18th-century Europe.
Thirty years after the two exhibitions held by the Institute of Art History to mark the bicentennial of the artist’s death, the Giorgio Cini Foundation has organised another striking show to celebrate his inventiveness and imagination.

In addition to around 300 prints selected from the complete works held in the Cini Foundation graphic collections, the exhibition also features a series of ad hoc creations embodying Piranesi’s language, style and natural fl air for “crossing over” – in some cases in an almost frenzied way – ancient and modern formal repertories in ingenious combinations. Visitors will thus be able to enter Piranesi’s “dark mind” after Marguerite Yourcenar’s description and explore his feverish imagination, at times verging on paranoia, by going into a tower with a 3D projection of the Carceri d’Invenzione (“Imaginary Prisons”): mental and visionary architecture stripped of any possible real building capacity, somewhere between Baroque stage designs and fanciful caprices. On show there will also be “re-workings” constructed ad hoc and exclusively for the exhibition by Adam Lowe and Factum Arte. They will enable visitors to comprehend the artist’s original ideas and decorative language close up in three-dimensional renderings made of rare materials of some of Piranesi’s inventions in the series Diverse Maniere di adornare i Cammini (“Various Ways of Adorning Fireplaces”). These works will give the public an idea of Piranesi’s prolific forge-workshop as an architect and designer, caught between Venetian caprice and Roman imperial splendour. The “recreations” of some pieces from his collection of antiques, which he gathered to be sold on the antiquarian market, on the other hand, reveal the iconographic background to his role as a forerunner of a new taste for the antique and the consequent attraction his style exercised over a whole generation of artists, architects and decorators in the age of Neoclassicism. The last section of the exhibition is devoted to the celebrated series of views of Rome. This is an exhibition within the exhibition featuring a section of Piranesi prints accompanied by the same number of photographs by Gabriele Basilico, a fine art and documentary photographer. Inspired by the celebrated pages that the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar dedicated to Giambattista Piranesi in the early 1970s, Basilico photographed the places featured in Piranesi’s views."