"Piranesi and Piranesianism" at the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg

In the Rumyantsev mansion, a branch of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, an exhibition “Piranesi and Piranesianism” has been opened, showing that Giovanni Battista Piranesi found faithful followers in the person of St. Petersburg and Leningrad classicist architects, and which explains a lot about the character of the city. ANNA TOLSTOVA reports.

The collections of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg almost entirely contain the etching suite “Views of Rome, drawn and engraved by Giambattista Piranesi, a Venetian architect,” and the first hall of the exhibition is entirely built on these gloomy visions of the ruins of the Colosseum, the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Forum of Nerva, Campo Vaccino, the Mausoleum of Aelius Hadrian and the Golden House of Nero, where time struggles with the Eternal City, but still cannot defeat it. However, further the famous etchings serve only as a counterpoint to the graphics of St. Petersburg architects of the 18th-20th centuries, since the exhibition is not so much about Piranesi as about his influence on the city of St. Peter, which felt like the fourth Rome. And this influence, it turns out, was so strong that, by analogy with English Palladianism, we can talk about St. Petersburg Piranesianism. But if practical Englishmen worshiped the great practical architect, then St. Petersburg dreamers chose as their idol a phantom, a ghost architect, a dreamer, a romantic literary hero from Vladimir Odoevsky’s “Russian Nights.” And this explains a lot, if not in the character of St. Petersburg architecture itself, then in the character of the St. Petersburg genius of the place.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, St. Petersburg was no different from the rest of the world in its love for Piranesi. The poetry of ruins, which has become fashionable, forces a whole horde of masters and amateurs to go to Rome in the footsteps of the “Venetian architect”, armed with charcoal, pen or watercolor, Giacomo Quarenghi and Auguste Montferrand begin to draw pseudo-ruins for the parks of country imperial residences, and the Egyptomania that has swept Europe with a light hand Piranesi even before Napoleon's Egyptian campaign is expressed in the belated caprices of Dmitry Efimov. But, oddly enough, the 20th century provides the most interesting examples of Piranesianism.

It begins with the flourishing of architectural etching, a Piranesian genre in which the head of the St. Petersburg neoclassicists, Ivan Fomin, had no equal. Its façade of Polovtsev's house and the complex of public buildings on Tuchkov Buyan seem to compete in Roman grandeur with Piranesi's "St. Peter's Cathedral" and "Palazzo Odescalchi". And the “New Petersburg” project seems to promise that Piranesi’s fantasies are about to come true. Which is what happened, but not at all in the form in which Ivan Fomin expected.

St. Petersburg architectural graphics after 1917 are imbued with a truly Piranesian poetry of dying. Of course, a fatal illness and premonitions of an inevitable end are included in the gentlemanly set of commonplaces of St. Petersburg mythology, only in this case it is not a poetic figure, but a picture copied from life, which is why Joseph Brodsky, with his Roman elegies about life in the midst of ruins, unexpectedly appears as a realist poet. At first, the post-revolutionary devastation, and then the blockade, are perceived as invasions of barbarians, which swept through Petrograd-Leningrad in two waves. The majestic ruins of the city, left behind by the new vandals, are depicted in Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s autolithographs “Petersburg in 1921” and in Pavel Shillingovsky’s woodcuts “Petersburg. Ruins and Revival”, released a couple of years later. In the 1920s, Boris Tsvetkov and Elizaveta Kruglikova painted houses, including the Lithuanian Castle, destroyed as relics of the past; in 1944, Armen Barutchev, who returned from evacuation, rushed to sketch the devastated Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo.

However, Piranesianism in Leningrad took on another form. A form of paper architecture, which can easily be classified as the local classicizing constructivists, who designed schools, palaces of culture, department stores and stadiums with Roman scale and Piranesian gigantomania without any hope of the real embodiment of their fantastic plans. The first violin of this orchestra was, of course, Noah Trotsky: the luxurious arches on the square near the House of Soviets from his original project, in one-to-one proportions, repeat the span of the “Magnificent Bridge with Loggia and Arches” from Piranesi’s early inventions. Joseph Langbard's baths on Wadden Island are inspired by the villas at Tivoli, Alexander Hegello's crematorium rises with a formidable rotunda like the tomb of Caecilia Metella. It is amazing that this Piranesian tradition survived until the Brezhnev stagnation, and back in 1977 Vadim Rokhlin entangled his “Lake Dolgogo Region” with Colosseum arcades.

Here you understand that the Piranesi complex became a characteristic feature of the St. Petersburg architectural school, which never tired of mourning the death of the old classics and designing a new one to replace its classics, realizing how good its ruins would be over time. This classic tradition of cultivating the dying of St. Petersburg has now ended - there is not a single work of our time in the exhibition. Because next to the graphics of Fomin and Trotsky it is impossible to hang the opuses of modern figures of the St. Petersburg construction complex, trumpeting their love for the classics on all corners and confirming it in practice with poorly drawn columns and plastic sandpapers on wretched facades. Because these facades fit into classical ensembles, pushing aside the buildings of Carlo Rossi with their elbows, and take the place of demolished buildings in the historical center. And that means this time St. Petersburg is dying in earnest.

Death in Northern Venice