Piranesi – Vision and Veracity

Piranesi – Vision and Veracity
4 November 2021 – 27 February 2022
Floating bridges and magnificent temples: New exhibition presents the seductive world of Piranesi

In November, SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark) presents a new exhibition featuring one of the most fascinating artists of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi. With his richly detailed works, this Italian artist and architect pushes back the borders between reality and fantasy. Winding corridors, floating bridges and dark dungeons. Magnificent temples, imposing palaces and grand halls. These images could be scenes taken from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings but were in fact created back in the eighteenth century by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).

One of the most significant artists of his time, Piranesi has since been a major source of inspiration for architects, artists, filmmakers and game developers. A trained architect, he is now best known for his extensive production of prints that unfold impressive visual worlds and invite the viewer to enter realms that are simultaneously familiar and alien.

In SMK’s new exhibition Piranesi – Vision and Veracity, visitors can explore more than 120 of the artist’s prints, on display here for the first time in over forty years. Highlights include Piranesi’s most famous series, Imaginary Prisons, offering an exquisite demonstration of his uniquely creative approach to space and structures.

"Piranesi creates impressive worlds from the past, and he shows his own present from fantastic angles and perspectives. His blend of sober, accurate observation and wild exaggeration makes all his works compellingly believable despite their phantasms. In his images, visions become truth, Piranesi’s truth – and truth becomes visions. He pulls no punches as he manipulates his audience, and the works’ persuasive presence makes us believe him", says Hanne Kolind Poulsen, who is curator and senior researcher at The Royal Collection of Graphic Art, SMK.

Manipulating the sights of Rome
Piranesi’s main interest was antiquity, its art and architecture, and he wanted to highlight ancient Rome as a pinnacle of civilisation, creativity and innovation. Accordingly, much of his subject matter is from the Italian capital, including landmarks such as the Colosseum, the Pyramid of Cestius and St. Peter’s Basilica.

Piranesi was not necessarily content with simply reproducing the reality he saw. He would often add dramatic, striking elements and effects and manipulate the perspectives to emphasise the greatness of Rome. For example, Piranesi’s version of the Pyramid of Cestius makes the structure appear far larger than it is in real life, making the people at its foot look minuscule.

In the 1760s, Piranesi also began to restore, exhibit and sell archaeological finds from excavations in Rome. He reproduced these finds in his prints; examples are on display at the SMK exhibition. In these labours, too, Piranesi was poised between truth and imagination. He would put together various ancient fragments with complete disregard for their original context, and sometimes he even added entirely new elements. To Piranesi’s mind, there was nothing fake about these ‘restorations’ – he regarded them as creative re-creations of antiquity.

An infinite mirrored corridor
In addition to works by Piranesi, the upcoming exhibition includes an artistic intervention by the Danish artist duo AVPD (Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing), who work in the field where art and architecture intersect. They have long been inspired by Piranesi and, like him, are keenly interested in how we perceive and understand space.

AVPD’s contribution to the exhibition is Stalker X – a structure that creates a spatial paradox for those who enter it. The installation consists of four identical corridors that join up to form a square procession of corridors. At the points where these corridors meet, a mirror is mounted at a 45-degree angle, creating a visually infinite corridor. So what you see and navigate is a straight path, while the route you take is square.

"Piranesi is a fantastic artist. He was among the very first to challenge our perception of reality by creating images of spaces that look right at first glance, but which on closer inspection turn out to be impossible structures", says Aslak Vibæk, and Peter Døssing adds: "Like Piranesi, we work with spatial structures and three-dimensional spaces, and our contribution can be seen as a realisation of architecture with an impossible perspective. With our intervention, we let visitors enter an expanded version of the real world."