Prints and their makers: essays on engravers and etchers old and modern

by Unknown

Piranesi. St. Peter’s and the Vatican

This is perhaps the best example of Piranesi’s exaggerated perspective. It is quite justified, in this case at least, by the success with which it creates an impression of vastness and of grandeur which was certainly aimed at by the architects of St. Peter’s, but which the exterior of the actual building, quite as certainly, fails to arouse.

Size of the original etching, 18 × 27¾ inches

Every plate etched by Piranesi betrays to even a careless glance the presence of imagination in some form, while in one series this noble faculty is revealed with an amplitude almost unparalleled. If it be only the presentment of fragments of Roman epitaphs, he finds a way by some play of light or shade, or by some trick of picturesque arrangement, to throw a certain interest about them, relieving the dryness of barren facts; if it be the etching of some sepulchral vault, in itself devoid of any but antiquarian interest, he introduces some human figure or some suggestive implement to give a flash of imagination to the scene. In those very plates where he depicts the actually existing monuments of classic Rome, and in which it was his expressed intention to save these august ruins from further injury and preserve them forever in his engravings, he created what he saw anew, and voiced his own distinctive sentiment of the melancholy grandeur of ruined Rome. To-day the word impressionism has come to have a rather restricted meaning in connection with a recent school of art, but Piranesi’s work, like that of all really great artists, is in the true sense of the word impressionistic. In passing, it may be remarked that he was one of the rare artists in earlier times who worked directly from nature, a habit distinctive of our modern impressionism. Piranesi is concerned with the expression of his own peculiar impression of what he sees; for the benefit of others and for his own delight he gives form to his own particular vision of whatever he treats. He certainly was desirous of, and successful in, recording the existing forms of the buildings he loved so well; it is also true that his etchings and engravings are in many ways faithful renderings which have immense historical and antiquarian value, since they preserve an aspect of Rome none shall ever see again, but together with the actual facts, and transcending them, he offers the imaginative presentment of his own creative emotion. What he draws is based on nature, and is full of verisimilitude, but it is not realistic in the base way that a photograph would be. It contains while it surpasses reality, and is faithful to the idea of what he sees, using that word in its Platonic sense.

Taine, in what is probably the most lucid and exhaustive definition of the nature of a work of art ever given, starts from the statement that all great art is based on an exact imitation of nature; then proceeds to demonstrate how this imitation of nature must not extend to every detail, but should, instead, confine itself to the relations and mutual dependencies of the parts; and finally states, as the condition essential to creating a work of art, that the artist shall succeed, by intentional and systematic variation of these relations, in setting free, in expressing more clearly and completely than in the real object, some essential characteristic or predominating idea. This is wherein art transcends nature, and a work of art is, therefore, constituted by the fact that it expresses the essential idea of some series of subjects, freed from the accidents of individuality, in a form more harmoniously entire than that attained by any object in nature. Now this is precisely what Piranesi did. He is often taken to task for his departure from a literal statement of fact in his renderings of architectural subjects, but, in so departing, he is varying the interrelation of parts so as to disengage the characteristic essence of what he depicts, and thus create a work of art, not a historical document. If he lengthens Bernini’s colonnade in front of St. Peter’s, he is only composing with the same liberty accorded to Turner, when, in one picture of St. Germain, he introduces elements gathered from three separate parts of the river Seine; and by so doing he expresses the idea of limitless grandeur, latent in St. Peter’s, with a fullness it does not possess in the actual building. In his “Antiquities of Rome,” he disengages a sense of devastation and of desolate majesty which is the fundamental characteristic of Roman ruin, and one that could have presented itself with such directness and force only to the mind of an artist of genius. His own vision of the inner truth of what he saw, stripped of everything accidental, is what he gives to posterity, and what lifts his work out of the field of simple archæology into the proud realm of true art.

Piranesi. The Villa d’Este at Tivoli

It is interesting to note that at the time Piranesi etched this fine plate the avenue of Cypress trees, which now adds so much to the picturesqueness of the Villa d’Este, was not even planted.

Size of the original etching, 18½ × 27⅝ inches