Nearly 300 years ago, one Veneto-born architect radically transformed interpretation of ruins, melancholia and architecture. Today, Giovanni Battista Piranesi continues to influence architectural work — and may even play a crucial role in reckoning with modern changes in architectural understanding. 

“Learning from Piranesi: Architectural Representation and Tectonics: An Exhibition Celebrating the 300th Birth Anniversary of Giovanni Battista Piranesi,” an exhibit opening at the Ewing Gallery at UTK on Jan. 20, aims to teach architecture students about innovative architectural drawing through the work of Piranesi, an 18th century Italian architect, artist and theorist whose work redefining perspective forever solidified him in architectural fame.

Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor of Architecture George Dodds, who has been teaching at UTK since 2000, curated the exhibit, and all but one of the Piranesi works featured hail from Dodds’ personal collection.

Piranesi, who lived from 1720 to 1778, owned a print shop below his home, where he engraved incredibly detailed drawings on copper plates, a medium which does not easily lend itself to the intricacy that Piranesi mastered. A prolific creator, he produced more than 1,028 copper plates in his short lifetime, as well as sold prints, either as singular copies or bound in books.

“He was quite unique,” Dodds said. “He was a little crazy — some would say a lot crazy, and he was a genius, and he created a world unto himself. … There was certainly a lot of wreckage. Like any genius who creates a world unto themselves, there’s a lot of wreckage from that. I suspect his home life was less than lovely.” 

The artist lived in the age of melancholia, where ruins were romanticized and often the subject of artistic works, as Roman artists set out to prove that Rome was the artistic center of the world, rather than Greece. 

“It was the picturesque movement and sublimity, the experience of melancholy, which ruins were a part of … creating that kind of sublime moment,” Dodds said. “We think of melancholy today as something that needs to be corrected through pharmaceuticals and talk therapy, but back in the 18th century it was something that people actually sought out, that idea of melancholia.”

Piranesi was particularly focused on preserving damaged artifacts and monuments through recreating such entities in his artistic work, and he often built small cork models of subjects in order to draw them with an aerial perspective.

He was intent on redefining the norms of perspective, and his unique interpretation and warping of such perspective distinguished him from other artists, while simultaneously extending the experience of melancholia that often defined the 18th century. 

“He exaggerated the scale of things because he was trying to create the experience of the sublime, which was very much a part of the picturesque, which he was living in at the time,” Dodds said.

After Piranesi, other architects attempted to copy his unique style but did a poor job mimicking the work of the “genius,” Dodds said.

“He transformed the way people thought about these things before that,” Dodds said. “Artistically, he changed things. He changed the way people thought about documenting these objects, these monuments. He used wholly new techniques, so he developed new techniques that were never imagined before, largely because he felt limited by the techniques that existed.”

Collections manager Sarah McFalls has worked at Ewing Gallery for a decade and spent the last semester preparing the Piranesi exhibition, alongside Dodds, gallery director and curator Sam Yates, registrar Eric Cagley and architect and exhibition designer Louis Gauci. Throughout the last two months, she was primarily focused on framing works for the show and explained that the size differences between the exhibit’s various pieces is particularly fascinating.

“We have some very, very small etchings and prints in the show and then these larger prints that show entire buildings or interiors or insides of churches … and if you see them just digitally, if you’re in an art history class and you see these things just thrown up as part of a presentation or a lecture, you have no idea how big they are, and you get confused, but to be able to see them at their intended size is something I always enjoy about seeing anything in person,” McFalls said.

The exhibit also features work from more than a dozen Fellows or Affiliated Fellows of the American Academy in Rome, as well as student work. During a workshop last spring, architecture students created abstractions from Piranesi drawings, with the goal of examining the way that Piranesi continues to influence architectural work today. The planned 3D printing of the drawings had to be delayed due to COVID-19, but the drawings will be displayed on digital screens, alongside Piranesi’s work, at the Ewing Gallery.

Dodds explained that the exhibit comes at a crucial point in architectural teaching.

“We’re at a kind of a crossroads in architectural practice and teaching, that the students are no longer being taught the same kind of skill set that they were even just 10 years ago,” Dodds said. “It’s changed that rapidly, and so they’ve lost the art of drawing basic planned sections, elevations. They don’t draw the same way, and they’re not seeing the same way, and they don’t necessarily understand construction materials and methods the same way. They don’t understand inhabitable space the same way.”

The exhibit was curated as a pedagogical learning experience for architecture students, with the goal of exposing students to different types of architectural drawing through Piranesi’s unique approach, Dodds said.

“For some, this (change in practice) is not a problem,” Dodds said. “For others, it is. I tend to be more toward, it’s something to be concerned about, and so that was yet another impetus for the exhibition, was to demonstrate how architectural drawing is a way to understand architecture and in fact what architecture literally is.”

“Learning from Piranesi” will be on display in the Ewing Gallery in the Art and Architecture Building through Feb. 17. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and masks and social distancing are required. Admission is free, and students, faculty and staff are encouraged to visit the show. The gallery currently has a 25-person capacity, so it is possible for professors to bring classes to the exhibit, although the gallery encourages professors to call ahead and and notify gallery staff.

This story originally appeared in The Daily Beacon on January 20, 2021.
It was written by Daily Beacon Editor-in-Chief Alexandra DeMarco.