First approximation

“Piranesi and Piranesianism” in St. Petersburg

This year marks the 290th anniversary of the birth of the mysterious architectural genius Giovanni Battista Piranesi. To him, who for the first time legitimized in his work the genre of architectural hallucination, living according to laws beyond the control of human understanding, Thomas de Quincey, Vladimir Odoevsky, Sergei Eisenstein dedicated their opuses... In his famous suite of engravings “Carceri” (“Prison”), Piranesi used a stunning expositional technique: his space is revealed in self-creation, in a movement similar to the principle of installation in autonomous valve-corridors. This is why a breathtaking film-performance, captivating romantics and filmmakers, arises, in which Her Majesty Architecture becomes the main gesturing, speaking actor.

It would be tempting to dedicate an exhibition to Piranesi. The artist left a colossal archive of engravings, the main of which, in addition to “Carceri”, are “Views of Rome” and “Roman Antiquities”. The Eternal City, in the interpretation of virtuoso Piranesi, becomes a catalog of archetypes of world architecture, seen in all their gigantic power and unconquered grandeur.

On the eve of the anniversary year, the legacy of Piranesi was shown by the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg (GMI St. Petersburg), charming with its unbanal image. This museum is probably the longest in the city space. It includes eight parts, from the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Rumyantsev mansion on the English Embankment to the house of the Russian avant-garde guru Mikhail Matyushin and the Oreshek fortress in the city of Shlisselburg, Leningrad region. The richest collection of architectural graphics of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg began to take shape in 1907, when it was founded on the initiative of patrons, artists and collectors (A. Benois, P. Weiner, V. Pokrovsky, N. Wrangel, N. Lanceray, V. Kurbatov, V. Argutinsky-Dolgorukov and others) The Museum of Old Petersburg began to receive archives from private art and architectural collections. Architectural projects of the 20th century are a special pride of the museum. The Peter and Paul Fortress regularly hosts exhibitions dedicated to the masters of the St. Petersburg avant-garde and neoclassicism. Now, for example, in the Ioannovsky Ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress there is an exhibition of graphics by the leading figure of pre- and post-war Leningrad architecture, Evgeniy Levinson.

Apparently, the desire to present museum funds explains as much as possible that the organizers of the exhibition, which is taking place until the end of February in the Rumyantsev mansion at the St. Petersburg State Historical Museum, did not limit themselves to Piranesi alone. They called the project “Piranesi and Piranesianism” and combined a collection of engravings by the great Italian with graphics by architects and artists of the 18th-20th centuries, allegedly inspired by the works of Piranesi. To be honest, the individual works are impressive, but not the overall design. St. Petersburg museums are traditionally not used to trusting concepts and complex intellectual designs of exhibitions. They probably see something heretical in this. The focus is on a powerful presentation of the funds in which the museums of the city on the Neva are very rich.

In the case of Piranesi, collecting and hanging on the walls everything that even remotely rhymes with All' antica of Piranesi's engravings from the "Views of Rome" series is clearly not enough. Comments are required, possible with a clear ideological composition of the material. Why, for example, are the destroyed buildings of St. Petersburg during the civil war and blockade included in the theme of ancient ruins? Formal intimacy? Or a conscious appeal to the method of Piranesian representation? By what principle does the theatrical, scenographic fantasy with Egyptian themes of the author of St. Isaac's Cathedral, Auguste Montferrand, conduct a dialogue with Piranesian capriccios? According to the direct contact scheme? Or do they have a common genetic memory, the code of which is within the culture of the baroque theater? The most winning section of the exhibition is the comparison of Piranesi's sheets with the megalomania of Soviet architecture of the 20s and 40s. The designs of labor palaces, baths, and crematoriums truly inherit the Italian’s Cyclopean images, even at the level of style morphology. Fantastic kilometer-long colonnades and loggias, giant arches and vaults in the sheets of Noah Trotsky, Lev Tversky, Joseph Langbard, David Buryshkin, Alexander Gegello, Modest Shepilevsky, Nikolai Nazarin plunge into another hallucinatory euphoria about the utopias of the empire of the Land of the Soviets. The correlation of the two empires seen in the graphics of Piranesi and his Soviet heirs could become an interesting independent exhibition topic. However, despite the successful formal connections, the meanings within this section of the exhibition are also not complexly constructed. Therefore, the entire exhibition can be considered a statement for the future. Moreover, the theme “Piranesi and Soviet Architecture” has long been developed as a large-scale exhibition project by art historian Nikolai Molok and the new rector of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts Semyon Mikhailovsky.

Sergey KHACHATUROV, St. Petersburg