This was to grow into the finest collection of the Italian visionary's graphic works in Britain, amassed by Soane and still kept in the house and museum that is his own masterpiece of bizarre dreamlike architecture and decor. They met in Rome in 1778 and Piranesi presented his young architectural fan with four prints. Soane, as this exhibition makes plain, was profoundly influenced by Piranesi. The results fit like a Gothic gauntlet into Sir John Soane's Museum where they take up natural places among this Georgian architect's collection of ruins and fragments exhibited in deep wells of shadow and mirror-enhanced vistas. Here is a truly mind-boggling use for digital technology.Īs Factum Arte's Adam Lowe explains, digitally scanning the phantasmagoric forms of Piranesi's chairs, tripods and other classical follies takes vast amounts of memory. If you thought 3D printers were only good for making guns, think again. Now they have been made real by Factum Arte in Madrid using the miracle of 3D printing. These visionary artefacts have only ever existed as flat designs on paper.
In a delightful exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, Piranesi's dreamlike prints are shown next to objects that translate his extravagant notions – table legs shaped like goats' limbs with faces on them a teapot that rests on a tortoise and has a bee for a spout – into the three-dimensional world. Most of Piranesi's ideas for interior design stayed, however, on the printed pages of his ravishing books – until now. Working in Rome when it was the destination of every artist and aristocrat on the Grand Tour, he "restored" ancient remains from sites such a Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. He fabricated such fictions as a gigantic "Roman" vase, the ultimate fake antique for an English stately home, now owned by the British Museum. In fact he was a spellbinding fantasist whose exquisitely etched visions of overpowering ruins and monstrous prisons have influenced experimental culture from the first Gothic novels to the architecture of Rem Koolhaas.Īs well as creating architectural images that tease and haunt the mind, Piranesi invented objects to decorate a dreamer's home.
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