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| The Structure Beneath |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2007
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Originally published
in The Guardian
29 December 2007
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The Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York is home
to the National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Like the Frick, it is a surviving example of an old New York
mansion in the grandest style. There are not many of these gilded-age
palaces left, partly because the ground they were built on was
always immensely valuable, and therefore tempting for redevelopment,
but partly also because the style in which they were designed
and decorated went out of fashion and came to seem ridiculous
to the families who lived in them.
The Cooper-Hewitt is in the old mansion of
Andrew Carnegie, and it has a very elaborate and expensive Renaissance-revival
interior decor. This makes it both worth visiting in itself
and, I've sometimes thought, less than ideal as a display case
for modern design. The museum has a remarkable collection of
drawings, largely to do with design, and it was here not long
ago that Sir Timothy Clifford came across an unidentified Michelangelo,
a design sketch for a salt-cellar.
The current Piranesi show (it is open until
January 20, and then transfers to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem)
suits the museum's purposes admirably. Most people associate
Piranesi either with his series of etched views of Rome, or
with his fantastic visions of imaginary prisons. In this latter
kind of etching, what is valued is the sense of the artist's
vision being elaborated directly on to the plate: we are seeing
the way he thinks and feels, or the way he gropes towards a
vision.
These prisons seem to have no precedent and
no rival: they are unique and immediately recognisable, like
the visions of Goya. In fact, though, they do have at least
a context: they come from the world of Venetian capricci, caprices,
and from the language of theatrical scenery design. Piranesi
(1720-1778) was born in the Veneto, the son of a master builder.
He was an architect and designer who promulgated his ideas through
his printed works. He went to Rome, was bowled over by what
he found, and began to celebrate the glories of its ancient
monuments.
In due course he found that there was a movement
afoot to give credit to Greece for the glories of Rome. Piranesi,
we are told, took this as a personal insult, and redoubled his
efforts to promote the glories of his adopted city. What makes
his work so recognisable is the powerful sense of stonework
that he conveys through his etchings. He is always interested
in the issues that his father would have been interested in:
how did they build that wall, how did they shape that stone
and lift it into place, how were the roads constructed, what
is the structure beneath that pealing stuccoed vault?
And then, just as with the prison etchings,
there is the overall darkness of his vision. Marguerite Yourcenar's
title essay in her collection, The Dark Brain of Piranesi, takes
its cue from this quality. The darkness derives from the strength
of the etched line, and from the heavily reworked plate. The
otherwise surprising comparison with Rembrandt is all to do
with darkness and the meaning of darkness.
One thinks of him as a visionary, and it is
rather a shock to come across Piranesi in the correspondence
of Robert Adam, where he seems like a pesky nuisance. Probably
he could be that too. He was a key figure on the grand tour:
people knew Rome in advance through his prints, which they went
on to buy as souvenirs. As well as an architect and etcher,
he was a dealer, a restorer of sculpture, a designer.
He was an eclectic: he understood that, if
Rome's heritage was to be defended, it would not do to mount
a defence on the grounds of purity. What he saw, both above
ground and in the monuments that were being unearthed at the
time, was an immensely rich vocabulary of decorative elements.
He was exactly like Robert Adam in the zeal with which he set
about getting to know this vocabulary, but he went further than
Adam. He seemed mad in his eagerness to mix things up.
He designed the interior of a famous café,
the Caffe degli inglesi, the English café near the Spanish
steps. (It is evoked in the conservatory at the Cooper-Hewitt.)
This was the first interior to be conceived in the Egyptian
revival style. It has bulls and obelisks and winged scarabs
and views of pyramids, but it is - unsurprisingly, not much
was yet known about Egyptian art - rather far from its original.
On the evidence of two visitors (the painters
James Barry and Thomas Jones) it is said not to have been a
success with its original audience. But the café itself
seems to have been rather squalid, and, anyway, whatever contemporary
reaction may have been is more than counterbalanced by its success
with posterity: just as the Adam style lives on, in countless
interiors, so Piranesi's Egyptian fantasy has never gone away.
Only two pieces of wooden furniture designed
by Piranesi are known to survive, but the influence of his work
on silverware, on vases and chimneypieces and candelabra, spread
throughout Europe, disseminated through his publications. Two
stone candelabra now in the Ashmolean in Oxford were celebrated
in their day, and the Doncaster Race Cup of 1828 demonstrates
an enduring influence on English silver. (It is on loan from
the Leeds Art Galleries.)
The English chimneypiece of the 19th and 20th
century, with its swags and egg-and-dart mouldings, was very
much the invention of Adam. A Piranesi fireplace has much more
going on: human faces and nude figures, satyr masks, lions,
eagles, griffins, snakes, boars' heads, sphinxes - everything
crammed together, none of the Adam restraint. Piranesi thought
architecture would just die if the architect was not free to
invent and combine as he wished. He was against rationalism,
against adherence to the rules, against functionalism. He thought
innovation was essential. He thought that the architect's profession
would simply die out - people would prefer to employ stone-masons
like his father - if it did not always assert its freedom to
invent.
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