Archaeology of Dreams: Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Prints 22/07/2025 – 23/11/2025

The Italian architect and graphic artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s (1720–1778) creative heritage has fascinated viewers for over 200 years. Numerous writers and philosophers, romantics and thinkers of several generations have been captured by the charm of his work, which has inspired the birth of poems, novels and essays, and become mythical.

The heritage of Piranesi as a graphic artist is wide-ranging and voluminous, made up of over 1000 works, but he practised architecture and restored architectural objects as well. To some extent, he may also be called a scientist, whose sets, perpetuating classical antiquities, played an important role in the newborn field of art theory.

He did not work as an architect for long, but his studies of architecture had a major influence on his later works. As a professional, he perceived buildings differently form ordinary people. Without neglecting details, he managed to generalise the structure and emotional message of Baroque churches, dilapidated temples and town squares. Due to his preparation as a stage scenery designer, he directed the viewer’s glance diagonally to the depth (of the stage), turning his compositions into especially dramatic and powerful decorations of the theatre of life.

It is difficult to classify the heritage of Piranesi according to the strict system of artistic styles. His masterly engraving technique is refined and elegant rococo. He chose etching as his means of self-expression, which let him practice a light, free and unforced play of lines that seemed more subjective and emotional than solid copper cutting. His devotion to the investigation of antique art and the accentuation of the eternal beauty and monumentality of Roman antiquities was peculiar to early Classicism. As a representative of the Enlightenment he boldly underlined the independence and subjectivity of his individualistic world perception. His pieces contain hidden dramatic and fantastic elements and perspective points of view that emphasise the viewer’s admiration and astonishment and make Piranesi a successor of the 17^th century Baroque artists, and a predecessor and inspiration for the Romantics of the first half of the 19^th century.

All of these attributes blend together and form a unique whole, sometimes characterised by the portrayal of the tiniest details of buildings, and sometimes by the conveying of the emotional core, making some of his images of buildings almost portrait-like. There are even pieces characterised by nearly scientific precision (e.g. the trophies of Octavian Augustus), and pieces where nature overshadows landmarks of human creativity, e.g. moss on stones. With natural elegance, he combined the past and the present. Being totally aware that the latter emerges from the former, he never contrasted the landmarks of the long-lost glory of the Roman Empire with the matter-of-fact present day. The powerful Baroque buildings depicted in his antiquity sets do not look alien, because they are part of the majesty of the metropolis! Nor does the laundry drying on the sanctuary, being only part of life itself.

The Rome of Piranesi rose and fell, was built and torn down, was constantly changing and remained the same forever. Everything was possible there: a temple turned into a church, a forum into a dwelling house and an ancient Egyptian obelisk rose out of a modern piazza.

It is the Eternal City both poetically and literally, the centre of the world for our ancestors, for present and future Catholics and for all cultured people.

This display is a partial repetition of the first exhibition of the Kadriorg Art Museum in 2001–2002. The texts are by the curator Anu Allikvee (1960–2024).