How Piranesi paved the way to Hogwarts
Three centuries since the Venetian artist’s birth, his mind-boggling visions are more influential than ever, says Jonathan Glancey
‘Ibelieve that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it,” said Giovanni Battista Piranesi, born 300 years ago near Treviso in the Republic of Venice. He received no such commission. Keen though he was to be an architect, his only known building is the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome, a place of worship he renovated with imaginative flourishes in the mid-1760s for the Knights of Malta.
In his sketchbooks, though, Piranesi drew buildings and their interiors in ways that have provoked the imaginations of designers, artists, writers and architects from his own time to ours. His art was a baroque investigation into the world of ancient Rome on the one hand and, on the other, into the depths and recesses of his own imagination. So a drawing of a Roman street became, in Piranesi’s hand, a sketch of what was there in front of him and, at the same time, a haunting fiction.
Horace Walpole, credited with writing the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), implored readers “to study the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour… he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realise”.
Which is why, ever since Otranto, fictional Gothic castles have possessed Piranesian interiors: “The halls, towers, the rooms of Gormenghast Castle”, we learn in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novels published between 1946-59, “were of another planet”. In Lady Fuschia Groan’s improbable and inexhaustible Piranesian attics, we find: “Space, such as the condors have shrill inklings of, and the cock-eagle glimpses through his blood.”
Piranesi is there, too, in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). Production designer Stuart Craig brought the moving staircases of JK Rowling’s Hogwarts school to life so that they turn within a vertiginous hall, all doorways, further stairs and endless rooms above, below and beyond.
Each new generation encounters Piranesi with fresh and eager eyes. Why? Because this fecund artist takes us on mind-boggling journeys into places and spaces that appear to exist in some parallel yet distorted universe. Small wonder, as Sarah Vowles, curator of the new Piranesi exhibition at the British Museum, says, “computer game designers love him. Piranesi drew labyrinthine buildings with unexpected vistas and complex overlapping spaces that give the illusion they might open up forever.”
Syd Mead’s sets for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) reveal Los Angeles in 2019. With their intermeshing, 700-storey corporate headquarters, rough-and-tumble markets stalls, floating video adverts, industrial flames, acid rain and flying police cars, these are Piranesian streets for science fiction aficionados. The set designs of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), meanwhile, evoking dystopian and utopian future worlds below and above ground, are Piranesi drawings reimagined on celluloid. And MC Escher’s endlessly reprinted lithograph Relativity (1953) depicts a mind-bending sequence of interlocking stairs and rooms, and gardens beyond them, defying natural laws of perspective and gravity. Piranesi for Einstein, if you like.
Escher at his hallucinatory best can be traced back to Piranesi’s most famous drawings, Le Carceri d’invenzione – prisons of the imagination – a series he first made in the mid-1740s. These sketches portray overarching chiaroscuro interiors with sudden changes of scale, improbable intersecting vistas, monumental stairs ascending and descending this way, that way and, especially, nowhere in particular, infernal and unfathomable machines and bizarre people performing ineffable tasks.
If he was a frustrated architect, Piranesi was not the tortured artist writers of the Romantic era who had never met him imagined him to be. In Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey recalled, “Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome,
Mr Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist … which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever…”
Copies of Le Carceri d’invenzione could be found in the time of Coleridge and De Quincey in libraries of cool and collected Palladian country houses. Young British milords on their Grand Tour of Italy gathered in Rome’s Caffè degli Inglesi, its interior painted by Piranesi, whose workshop on Via del Corso was close by. Recognised by his peers, Piranesi was elected to both the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and the Society of Antiquaries of London. He made serious money.
The son of a stonemason, Piranesi trained, mostly in the restoration of old buildings, in Venice. Here he was entranced by the inventive baroque stage sets of the Venice opera with their daring plays of perspectives and – a fashionable trope – dark prison scenes. The terror evoked in the hearts of Venetians by the city’s ominous prison, connected since 1600 by the Bridge of Sighs to interrogation rooms and instruments of torture within the Doge’s Palace, was quite real.
In Rome, Piranesi studied the city’s ruins scrupulously and yet the popular drawings he made featured grotesque people seemingly overwhelmed and brought to despair by the faded grandeur around them. Year by year, these drawings became darker and more expressive, their vibrant lines scored with a thick reed pen.
John Soane, the inventive English architect was entranced. Piranesi gave him four of these drawings when they met in Rome in 1778, the year the artist died. In Rome again in 1817, Soane bought 14 of the 17 drawings Piranesi made of the ancient Greek temples at Paestum. In Soane’s museum house in London and in the sublime interiors – long destroyed – that he designed for the Bank of England, the architect and
It remains hard to know whether he was lost in dark reveries as he drew, or happily at play
his draughtsman Joseph Gandy turned Piranesi’s vision of architecture into vaulting brick and stone.
Piranesi believed architects should be completely free to find inspiration from the past to fuel their creative imaginations. As he liked to say, “Col sporcar si trova” (by messing about, one discovers). His work was creative play of the highest order. Whether, though, this hugely influential architect-artist was lost in dark reveries as he drew or happily at play it remains hard to know. At the British Museum we have a fresh opportunity, as Sarah Vowles says, “to look over Piranesi’s shoulder”, to see the universe he saw.
Piranesi Drawings: Visions of Antiquity is at the British Museum, London WC1 (britishmuseum.org) until Aug 9