![]() ![]() It was Thomas De Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, who compared the Italian's art to "the delirium of a fever," after conversations with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Escher, with the latter's more rational or even mathematical exuberance. Was it Romanticism yet? Arguably Piranesi reached that before anyone else, and one should not think of his prisons as the visionary towers of Marcel Storr or designs out of M. Downstairs at the Morgan Library as "Exploring France," fourteen oil sketches from the Thaw collection, shared between the Morgan Library and the Met, fill out a view of landscape art just entering the nineteenth century-their diligent precision caught in time between Neoclassicism and the crisp light of Rome for Camille Corot. In 1817 Sir John Soane acquired fifteen of the seventeen surviving drawings in 1817, along with two etchings as "Piranesi and the Temples of Paestum," on loan from the architect's London museum. If the etchings look clear by comparison, one can attribute the difference to the media or to a generation. He also meant the series as models for prints on the same scale, which his son, Francesco, completed after his death. He worked extensively in black chalk before adding pen, ink, wash, and sometimes red chalk. The artist still took his care, like similar fantasies in Bibiena drawings not long before. Most look just as ghostly as the temples-and just as often drowned in the towering contrasts of light and shadow. Few speak, and pigs and cattle loll contentedly, to judge by a discernible smile. A man of the cloth appears outside, but he might be a figure out of commedia dell'arte or just plain slinking off. One figure is absorbed in reading, and some might well be tourists. Who are these people anyway? The fifteen studies leave them ambiguously at work, at rest, or at play, at times quite out of scale to the architecture. One temple looms beyond another as less a relief or an alternative than a pale vision. He adopts baffling points of view, multiple perspectives, and sudden contrasts between light and shadow that bring out the crumbling incompletion of columns and triangular tympani, weeds flourishing at the top. Now he subordinates peasant life to his own unreason. ![]() For Piranesi, though, there was no escaping the fantasy or the fever. They reach upward in level after dizzying level, anticipating the steel frames of Europe's great railway stations still to come. Perhaps his prisons never did press in all that closely with their torments. Now he turned to what the period knew only as holy ground, as a basilica and as temples to Neptune and Ceres. He lives most to this day with the Carceri d'Invenzione, or "Imaginary Prisons"-prints so fiendish and intricate that they soon came to stand for a confining dream. Now he sketched the sunlight of southern Italy, so hot that herdsmen sought relief in the Greco-Roman ruins of their early Doric pillars and triangular lintels. Barely a year before his death, could he have attained at last a sense of release? Raised in the Republic of Venice, he had made his name with monumental views of Rome that belong at once to the fabric of a modern city and the past. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, then just past his mid-fifties, stopped at the three ruined temples of Paestum, near Salerno. But did Francisco Oller truly become an Impressionist? Prison break They had in common their outsider status (doubly so for Pissarro, a Jew from Saint Thomas), their skill, their love of sunlight, and an Old Testament beard. In 1858, he invited a rising star in San Juan to Paris. Had you forgotten that Camille Pissarro was born in the New World? Have you ever thought about what he left behind? Apparently he did. And then, eighty years later, a Latin American artist came to France to exhibit and to learn, only to keep his eye on home. They combine careful observation of the present with unsettling perspectives on the past. ![]() In New York City Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Francisco Oller in Europeĭoes it take a world traveler to pay attention to the skies of Europe? Does it take an artist to draw away? In 1777 Giovanni Battista Piranesi sought out Greco-Roman sites, with drawings and prints that break out of the mad prisons of his confining fantasies and into the Italian sunlight. ![]()
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