2/17/2023 0 Comments Factum arte piranesiIt’s 12 minutes long and it’s nothing short of riveting. He took the 16 prints of the second edition and transformed them into a three-dimensional space so viewers can travel deep into Piranesi’s imagination. The Carceri etchings played a central part in the show, and graphic artist Gregoire Dupond of Factum Arte brought them to virtual life with an absolutely riveting animation. In 2010, the Sale del Convitto in Venice held an exhibition Le Arti di Piranesi: architetto, incisore, antiquario, vedutista, designer ( The Arts of Piranesi: architect, engraver, antiquarian, vedutista, designer) to coincide with the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The irrational elements like infinitely regressing passageways would later inspire the Surrealists and if Escher’s Relativity doesn’t owe Piranesi a huge debt, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. They wouldn’t be purchased as pre-photography postcards, but the prisons’ tenebrous atmosphere and emotional impact were highly influential for the Romantics of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. The prisons were expressions of visions in his mind, not of tourist bullet points. What Piranesi did with the form, however, was entirely new. These sorts of imaginary viewpoints were popular with tourists because they compressed the “must see” ruins and artworks into one painting. The prison etchings were part of an artistic tradition called the capriccio, a fantasy aggregation of structures and art works that doesn’t exist in real life. He added two new ones and fleshed out the others with even more complex architectural features, increased contrasts of shadow and light, arches, staircases and vaults that lead nowhere. Ten years later, he would return to his imaginary prisons and do a major revamp of the etchings. You can see all 14 of the original Carceri in order here. It was a collection of 14 untitled etchings drawn in a rough sketch-like style. The first edition of Carceri d’Invenzione was published in 1750. Piranesi’s invented prisons were cavernous labyrinths peppered with intimidatingly suggestive mechanisms where human figures are barely present and dwarfed by their surroundings. The imaginary part is that they bear no relation to any actual prisons of the era which were mostly cramped dungeon cells in the towers and palaces of the Church and aristocracy. In 1745, he began work on an entirely new vision, combining his artistic style and understanding of ancient monumental construction to create a unique group of etchings called Carceri d’Invenzione ( Imaginary Prisons). Piranesi didn’t limit himself to depictions of Rome and its ruins for the pilgrims and tourists. Piranesi’s etchings of ancient Roman architecture were not only captured with the meticulous understanding of the builder, but were drawn with such powerful chiaroscuro dynamism that Goethe, for one, who first came to know the city through Piranesi’s books, was actually disappointed when he saw the real thing. He learned etching in Rome and combined his artistic talent with his favorite subject matter to create views of the city that became popular among Grand Tourists. It was as an artist that he made his name. Even though he only ever got one job as an architect in his all too short life, he never lost the passion for buildings. Photogrammetry and various forms of 3D visualisation are at the heart of this work.Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the son of stonemason and nephew of an engineer, first trained under that uncle as an architect maintaining the intricate waterworks of his native Venice. The Foundation’s activities include designing recording technologies, building digital archives for preservation and study, creating and organising touring exhibitions, setting up training centres for locals to learn different recording technologies, and producing exact facsimiles as part of a new approach to conservation and restoration. The Foundation was established to demonstrate the importance of documenting, monitoring, studying, recreating and disseminating the world’s cultural heritage through the rigorous development of high-resolution recording and re-materialization techniques. Factum Arte is a multi-disciplinary workshop in Madrid dedicated to digital mediation in contemporary art and the production of facsimiles. Factum Arte and Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation will present a selection of films and animations made over the past 10 years that demonstrate the role digital recording technologies are playing in changing the relationship between image and form.
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