I have never loved Piranesi, though, to tell the truth, be is one of those artists who has most aroused my curiosity. He irritates me and intrigues me. He draws me into his work for reasons that I have always relegated to an extraneous place inhabited by those beings about whom one knows, and desires to know, nothing. And even today, as I leaf tbriough the catalogue of the exhibition in San Giorgio Maggiore, I wonder if be really existed or if be is the double of someone whom I met somewhere, but about whom I remember only a suspect attitude: the flaunted presence of himself. Hence the absurd question: who was be, in reality? This question of mine is really substanceless, since I still do not know whether, to reconstruct the image of the artist, I must evoke the expression of his face or the sequence of his monstrous ruins.

But, as is well known, the wrinkles on a face or on a landscape marked by the remains of ancient civilizations are manifestations of the soul.. that of man, and that of the land. In this case, the two are one and the same.

Therefore the secret attraction I feel for this artist who has within him the "desire to be someone else" works inside me like a blind mole. I observe his plates with a divergent curiosity; on the one band, I follow after the "architect" who dreams of structures to replace something that does not and cannot exist; on the other, I see the mark of an "etcher" who speaks of "inventions and caprices", but who then lets himself be chosen bar things with ala the servitude to them that is typical of the "antiquarian. " I therefore flounder in this quest with the awareness of one who knows that, in order to grasp the artist in his internal contradiction, be must undo the stylistic-existential knot caused in him by that reality of things called destiny. But since, in order to do this, I will have to take my entire experience as my measure of things, I shall be forced to view his work from a sectarian and exclusive point of view, which cannot even remotely resemble that of a professional critic. For the critic, if he has sometimes painted, sculpted or etched, has done so only in his dreams.

And it is only on this basis that I can say something about Piranesi.

I know that be was the son of an Istrian stonecutter who had the job of supervising the construction of important monuments in the Venetian hinterland. His father, a stonecutter, entrusting his unfulfilled dreams to his son, started him early on the study of architecture, of perspective and of etching techniques. So, at the age of 20 - and this is the first sign of his destiny - Giovanbattista, in the capacity as "designer". left for Rome in the train of the new Venetian ambassador. In the great "metropo1is", to make his living he etched Il views for Roman publishers, and then, for bimself -fascinated by the majestic ruins - the first "invented perspectives. " Yet, in signing his work (and this, for my way of investigating, is an extremely meaningful fact) he left these words etched on theplate: "Gio. Batta. Piranesi architetto veneziano" ("Venetían architect"). The question that arises is this.- is this, signature a tribute to his father? or is he afraid of losíng his identity in a Rome that is certainly hostile Io him? The two wordsplaced next to each other (architect - Venetian) are, in effect, two clues, which Beata bis Io investigate the complex personality of an artist who narrates himself and, in narrating himself with the air of being pleased with himself defends himself.

In Venice, Tiepolo is the great, astonishing master. On returning from Rome, Piranesi meets him accende his school and in the end apparently receives from him a small decoration job. Quite surely the young architect was not satisfied. In fact, he returned Io Rome, and a few months later (wishing, perbaps, to take revenge on someone) he furiously etched the fourteen etched caprices of prisons ". These works, leaving aside any possible formal allusion, are surely the outcome of his encounter with the great Venetian painter. Tis may have been also Piranesi's way of measuring himsef against him and, without knowing it, answering him

The fact is that arder so many reliefs, plans and frontispieces, for the fírst time a phantasmatic and transgressive vision of things emerges in him, and with great impetus.

But the terror of losing his identity prevails; and be entrusts the prisons (an unknowable place of the soul) with the task of keeping his secret. Therefore, on the surface everything flows as smoothly as before; indeed, Piranesi gets even more satisfaction out of presenting himself on the stage of life as a one-in-three being "etcher - anliquarian - Venetian architect. "

As his public recognition increases, the i views of Rome follow one another in precious editions that foreigners buy and pay for with ready cash. Piranesi gets married, he has a daughter, and in 1757 he is elected an honourary member of the Antiquarian Society of London, a city that he gas Io a as his ieal fatherland.

But in 1760, fifteen years later, the flame springs out from the buried embers in the ashes. Piranesi resumes work on the plates of the "imaginary prisons", and renders them gloomier and more violent with the most unimagined techniques; and thus for the fírst time he has the concrete possibility of being anotber person: not a Venetian architect, and not even a fashionable "etcher but a painter on the same level as the great Venetian artists of his time.

In short, he discovers that "by dirtying one finds. "

But, significantly, these words are not engraved as an epigraph for some archeological find he reproduced with a graving tool, but on the edges of a painter's easel with the brushes still smelling of resin. What is more, the letters that make up the four words are arranged in continuation of the lumps of colour as if they were the verbal expression of their essence, and hence of the function given to them by the creative artist.

This dissimulated aphorism, which reminds me (I know not why) of Picasso's words when, reversing the old adage, be said that he 'found" without seeking, sums up Piranesi's great modernity. It is, I would say, an unexpected fight in the dark labyrinth intuited by Borges. It is a datum of knowledge that, in an architect-archeologist, proves to be completely paradoxical or even doubly transgressive, since it is well known that only by cleaning an object or a fragment of it with care can one bring it to fight recognize it, and ultimately 'find" it. This can certainly not be done by dirtying it. Piranesi's dictum is therefore a real "Witz" (joke) which in mocking formal logic, takes on a meaning only at the level of the creative act which is not always recognizable).

"To destroy in order to create".. this would seem to be the right way to decipher it.

Such a way of speaking, conducted, moreover, in the contracted and ambiguous form of the Freudian joke, must have been incomprehensible and even monstrous at that time, beyond any norm and hence completely extraneous to the poetics of Neo-Classicism. One might speak of Baroque art, perhaps, but in a sense that escapes many moderns When in the early morning light, a painter comes into his studio and realizes that the paint spread on the canvas the day before has just congealed on the surface, the first tool that he takes in band is a knife; and, bolding in his eyes an image that is not there, because it is as yet uncreated in its "physícal glory". he furiously scrapes away everything. His is both a self-destructive and a creative action, because first of all it is subjection to the existent that he destroys - and this is a lesson that the post-Hiroshima artist learns from the one and only Reality.

Piranesi had certainly intuited all this in 1761. And he remained dazzIed by it as the plates of the Carceri, and in particular their second edition, bear witness. For example, plate IX, with a sort of sepulchre in the foreground and something that whirls in the sky, seems verily to be the raving deformation, expressionistic in the original sense of the term, of a ribbed cei ling painted by Tiepolo; the perspective is the same, and it is placed at the eye-level of those human larvae who are there for the sole, estranging purpose of establishing the monstruosity of the unreachable structure. This is Piranesi's only plate in which the Roman round arch is upside down. By invading the sky like a monstruous sickle, it holds itself up as a solar engine; but, once the dream is deciphered, it could be also the drum of an immense cupola conceived of and painted by an architect who has in him the "will" to be a painter.

Piranesi's Carceri (and even the title is a clot of meaning offered up for analysis by a still non- existent Freud, who could in no case help the patient) bear witness (and this is the only case I know of in the history of ail) to three expressive drives that have in common only the will to be form.

For example, in Piranesi, etching, which in the eighteenth century was just beginning to free itself from its association with the art of printing, and which still conserved a mainly communicative function, shows all its free expressive potential. The artist, howevet; felt this but dim1y, and this is quite disconcerting; in fact, only in the fourteen plates of the Carceri, and in two quite distinct stages of his carrer in cognitive and expressive terms, did he feel within himself the libertarian drives unconnected with the presence of a client, What is more, in support of what I have been saying, the must also consider that the two plates added by Piranesi in 1761 the second and the fifth) only serve the reassuring function of exbibiting a stylistic continuity between the old production and the new. This action, while it attenuates the explosion of meaning of the "second prisons ", aims at warding off the feared loss of identity which I stress.

Thus, too, his passion for antiquarianism.

It, too, desires to be knowledge, i.e. to decipher a past that is expressed at a very high technical-constructive level, to end up being presented in its pure formal aspect. Yet in the end it proves to be a fashionable passion, and is transformed into a hedonistic activity not devoid of mercenary aims.

Finally, Piranesi's desire to be an architect can be explained merely by his filial need to sublimate by his example the frustrating activity of his fatber.

We have thus come to his wanting to be at all costs a "Venetian. "

This origin, so irrationally displayed, reveals the agitation of a young artist who does not know how to decide, because he does not have the courage to look within himself, and hence he experiences the constant terror of primitive man: the fear of not being recognized. The adjective "Venetian" is the mask that covers the face of one who speaks (with his eyebrows drawn up) to say he is what he is not, or what he would only like to be.

It is well-known that Piranesi's speech was obscure and almost raving, yet not without its shrewd points, flashes of insight and disconcerting allusiveness. It is therefore logical to deduce that that strange way of speaking was nothing but the verbal representation of an unresolved inner conflict between an ontic being and a consciously programmed "wanting to be. "

In any case, the story of the Venetian architect is well known and, in a certain sense, exemplary. It is a story that only the very modern digital means for handling images (which are also programmed, but only to avoid causing frustrations and tremors in the soul) can today (yet only in part) resolve.

The young architect in the age of dreams - when the die had not yet been cast because life is full of the future - imagines his architectures as being forms to define with the painter's brushstrokes. And sometimes he continues to dream, because, in the beginning, his structures are always free of every practical context. Only later on, gradually, in a translinguistic quest that is always deceptive, the figurative phantasm is almost dissolved in a structure that has within it "the will to be something else. " In this undefinable process the poetry is consumed and burned. It later reappears, of course, but only in those cases in which, having crossed the swamp of a thousand compromises, the realization of the idea is again creative.

Piranesi experienced this twofold tragedy: that of being an architect who wore himself out reproducing architectures not his own, and that of being a visionary painter who in only fourteen little branches -prisons of the soul - created - out of insufferance of imposed schemes, rage, delirium or boundless self-love - microcosms of future works.