Human vs. Nature

Robin Rice on Visual Art

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On my refrigerator is a photograph of my niece kayaking in Alaska on crystalline water under an enamel blue sky. At the spiritual center of this implicit statement of values is nature, the pristine wilderness with no other human or human artifact in sight.

Two and a half centuries ago, a veduta (view) of Ancient or contemporaneous Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) had much the same function, but the message of his etchings was very different. Young people of sufficient means — especially British men — completed their education by making at least one visit to the fount of civilization: Rome. There one could sample bits of Greek and Egyptian culture and imbibe quantities of the architecture and art of the Roman Empire.

Today we fetishize nature, a feeling that was just becoming possible in 18th-century Europe. Previously, nature was feared more than loved. It was dangerous, messy, threatening, something to be beaten back and controlled.

A prototypical Romantic, Piranesi trained as an architect but ended up specializing in archaeology and etching. In the 137 large etchings at Penn Museum, Piranesi contrasts irregular elements of vegetation and landscape with the geometry of columns, arches and pyramids. The fact that, as in the Baths of Caracalla, it's often a broken, partly reconstructed geometry can be more revealing of the building itself. Piranesi is particularly effective in using dramatic perspectives to suggest scale. Nature is mightier than humans, his 1,300-plus plates hint, as they romanticize the dark charms of decay and the magnificent hubris of earlier empires.

A highlight of the relatively small exhibition is a slide projection pairing photographs with Piranesi's more lively etchings of the same subjects (a few more fully excavated now than they were). One can see how very accurate his renderings are and how profoundly his vision differs from ours. Dry but handsomely executed details of friezes and such are balanced by a few of the ominous interiors of imagined prisons (Carceri d'invenzine, 1750) for which Piranesi is best known.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Piranesi: The Grandeur of Ancient Rome

Through June 16UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology3260 South St.215-898-4000