Therefore, restoring Piranesi, his arguments, executed works and drawings to architectural history appear as a necessity.ĭuring the seventeenth century the fascination of ruins had an irresistible impact throughout Europe thanks to the Grand Tour, the new archaeological discoveries and the tireless work of painters and engravers who, with their art, reproduced the beauty of the ancient world. However, most of these evaluations lack a stable historical base. Piranesi’s perception caused him to be described as madman or idiosyncratic. Thus Piranesi placed Romans in another aesthetical category which the eighteenth century called ‘the sublime’. Secondly, he distinguished Roman from Grecian architecture identified with ‘ingenious beauty’. 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. Piranesi, however, conceived of these two debates as one interrelated topic. He has thus been excluded from the ‘story’ of the progress of western architectural history. Both of these served the identification of Piranesi as ‘unclassifiable’. The former interpretation derived from Piranesi’s position on aesthetics, the latter from his argument concerning origins. The second is the mode of codification of architectural history. 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. But Piranesi was misinterpreted both in his day and posthumously. He is numbered foremost among the founders of modern archaeology. He posited crucial theses in the debates on the ‘origins of architecture’ and ‘aesthetics’. Here it is the act of painting that isolates the artist from reality and ultimately threatens his or her extinction – or the spinning forth of socially imposed patterns.In the architectural, historical, and archaeological context of the eighteenth century, Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) played an important role. The works of two contemporaries who have experienced their own selves as a prison are brought together in Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952) wall piece Prisoner of Yourself ( Gefangener deiner selbst) from 1998 and Arnulf Rainer’s (b. 1929) undated Selbstübermalung. Here, beyond the reach of all moral norms, the temptations and threats of Eros could be discovered, the secret life of nature explored, or the absurd conditions in a French internment camp described – as can be seen in the works of WOLS and Hans Bellmer dealing with camp life at a large brickworks in the French Camp des Milles. Uncoupled from the constraints of reality, it offered them a new, “super-real” space. In the 20th century Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) revisited Piranesi’s idea of the paradoxical interweaving of interior and exterior space to establish a higher-level “metaphysical” setting in his paintings, a place that also played an important role in Surrealist painting. The 20th Century: Indoor and Outdoor Space For Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), who had to spend time in a sanatorium because of the biting nature of his caricatures, the prison became the scene of self-deprecating resistance, whereas Odilon Redon (1840–1960) perceived the isolation from the outside world as a protective space that made free and dreamlike imagining possible in the first place. In Francisco de Goya’s (1746–1828) work, the dungeon appears as a place of solitude and existential threat. Works from the 19th century continued to deal with the subject of imprisonment. The 19th Century: Imprisonment as a Motif Gates and arches, stairways and ladders lead to nowhere or into a wall changing perspectives and proportions are a constant source of irritation interior and exterior spaces can no longer be distinguished from one another. Instead, the images deliver the viewer into a world of in-between spaces. The depictions also open the way for speculation because there is not a single enclosed space among them as might be expected in a prison. The ambiguity of Piranesi’s title – which can be understood as the imprisonment of the imagination, but also as the imagined prison – invites all sorts of interpretations. This year’s collection presentation focuses on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s (1720–1778) famous series of 16 etchings Carceri d’invezione (Prisons of the Imagination) from 1761.
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