PIRANESI ARCHITECTURE DECAY CODE
PIRANESI ARCHITECTURE DECAY SERIES

The century also gave rise to the notion of the Panoptikon (or Inspection House). Crimes that were punishable by execution included stealing anything worth more than five shillings, stealing horses or sheep, right through to arson, treason and murder. By the early nineteenth century there were more than 200 offences carrying the death penalty.

PIRANESI ARCHITECTURE DECAY CODE

In England, the Bloody Code referred to a system of laws and punishments that was in use from 1400 to 1850. During the eighteenth century penal institutions such as London’s Newgate Prison and the Bastille in Paris were imposing structures that developed into powerful symbols of oppression.

Piranesi captured an imaginary cityscape based on real architectural elements assembled in fantastical ways.Įighteenth-century European writers and philosophers routinely compared the social order to a prison. His collection of Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) features 135 perspectives on the ruins of the Eternal City in all its decayed glory.

PIRANESI ARCHITECTURE DECAY SERIES

First there is the series of etchings of imaginary prisons, and secondly there are his famous views of Rome. He created about 2,000 plates in his lifetime and there are two distinct aspects to his work. He studied with leading printmakers of the day and settled permanently in Rome in 1745. Trained in Venice as an architect, his work occupies an intriguing place in the development of the cityscape. Piranesi’s work is relevant in this context for a different reason. Saturn grips his child in his fists and with his mouth tears him limb from limb. Mouths guzzle ferociously, living flesh as well as dead. The mouth plays a prominent role in Goya’s art. Goya’s version shows a bleeding remnant of a body, one of its stumps entering the giant’s gaping mouth. In the depiction of this scene by Rubens (which Goya would have seen in Madrid), Saturn bends his head over the body, sinks his teeth in the flesh and sucks the spurting blood of his screaming child. One of those paintings is ‘Saturn Devouring his Son’, depicting the myth of Saturn who, fearing that his children would supplant him, ate each one upon their birth. These are the most hellish visions he ever created, images of a world consumed by hate.

In a further response to his narrow escape from death, Goya decorated the walls of his villa in the outskirts of Madrid, named the ‘Quinta del Sordo’ (House of the Deaf Man), with fourteen ‘black’ paintings. The inscription of thanks at the bottom of the painting gives the canvas the look of an ex-voto (a votive offering to a saint or divinity), a type of religious painting which expresses gratitude for deliverance from a calamity. On recovering, the artist presented him with a painting entitled ‘Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta’, the last of many self-portraits which shows the physician ministering to his patient. His doctor Eugenio García Arrieta nursed him back to health. In 1819, at the age of seventy-three, he had fallen seriously ill. As court painter to both Charles III and Charles IV of Spain, Goya achieved considerable fame as a portraitist. Their images of human brutality still resonate in our violent day and age.

Francisco Goya and Giovanni Battista Piranesi were the outstanding printmakers of their time. Terror as subject-matter is common in both art and literature and has a long history.

Piranesi architecture decay