Piranesi : the eternal modernity of ruins

Abstract

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was probably one of the greatest artists in the history of etching and the Vedute genre. But he was more than that. A visionary architect with colossal ambitions who hardly built any buildings, a tireless polemicist (erroneously) in favour of the supremacy of ancient Rome over that of Winkelmann’s Greece, he indelibly influenced the twin streams of neo-classicism (as evidenced in Sir John Soane’s Bank of England and Robert Adam’s furniture) and the romanticism of Coleridge and De Quincey, the first to map out for us the dark cartography of an agoraphobic imagination, a hallucinatory cineaste whose visions were projected in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the passionate genius of ruins, and the first to transform culture into nature and back again.