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#Piranesi artwork professional
It’s handsome, professional and comes with a particularly encouraging little catalogue. They organized the exhibition under the guidance of professor Eunice Howe.
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It’s an exercise for students graduating from the Museum Studies Program. The exhibition is based on a complete collection of Piranesi prints owned by USC and fleshed out with loans. Like Goya’s later prints, they combine a vision of an evil world that makes us want to reject it with a surpassing felicity of execution that makes us want to embrace its beauty. These prisons are as much today’s corporate monoliths as they are ancient ruins. They are about whole peoples held in the thrall of collective paranoia by the force of massive society. They are not about the oppression of a wretched individual in a tiny cell. Comparative prints hung side-by-side show that he added the tombs, skeletons, spikes and instruments of torture that qualified the suites title, “Prisons.”įar from addressing the glory and civilizing influence exercised by Rome at it’s best, they speak of its arrogance and oppressive giantism. Rather than cutting his losses by backing off, Piranesi had the courage to further dramatize his point. He etched images of great, cavernous, labyrinthine spaces spanned with arches, bridges and endless staircases crisscrossed with senseless threatening shadows.Ĭlearly a product of the subconscious, these haunted scenes evidently did not initially sell very well.
#Piranesi artwork series
It was a series of experimental imaginary views of architectural interiors. It wasn’t his topographical views that attracted later Romantics, Surrealists, Beatniks and disillusioned yuppies. It does take a fairly well-developed sense of paradox to appreciate the fact that the work that gained him the fame he so desired amounted to the most scathing criticism of the spirit of Rome on visual record. It doesn’t take a genius to see that he was at least as interested in guarding his turf as in defending aesthetic principle. Piranesi fought back, ferociously issuing broadsides and bad-mouthing his opponents to influential friends. But fashion rolled over on him in the form of a Neo-Classical revival that preferred the grace of Greece to the muscularity of Rome. His combined sense of theater and calculation was fueled by an artistic ego determined to leave its mark. Since his clientele was largely foreign, he catered to them, establishing a workshop in Paris. Piranesi calculated the potential profit of an edition of prints down to the last scudi. In the period of the Enlightenment, nobody had a problem with the idea that the soul of an artist and the mind of an accountant could coexist in one body. It leaves no doubt that Piranesi was an early Romantic. An especially pyrotechnic night piece shows Castel Sant’ Angelo lit by exploding fireworks. One depicting Trajan’s Column folds out to nearly 10 feet high. He innovated within the folio format of his prints. He employed bird’s-eye views, stretched perspectives and dramatic contrasts of light and dark. He studied Baroque theatrical design and used all its panache and hyperbole. Born in Venice, he brought to Rome his hometown taste for making exotic imaginings real. He certainly contributed to a British fashion for planned ruins and architectural follies. Architects as noted as Robert Adam were influenced by Piranesi’s energetic and fantastical renditions of the Coliseum and Forum. It was the heyday of the Grand Tour, and patrician travelers loved buying into his grandiose vision. He made his fame with engravings of the eternal city’s ancient monuments. It was certainly disappointing to him that he never received more than one architectural commission, but it was lucky for posterity. The most renowned printmaker of his day, Piranesi actually wanted to be an architect. Now he’s back again in a handsomely installed exhibition at USC’s Fisher Gallery titled, “The Art of Exaggeration: Piranesi’s Perspectives on Rome.” It’s impossible to avoid a sense that the show is somehow linked to a wave of neo-conformity presently sweeping the land.
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Back in the conformist ‘50s when some Americans felt oppressed, there was a backlash fashion for the art of the 18th-Century Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi.