Editors’ note: Owing to the closure of museums due to the COVID-19 outbreak, exhibition dates and traveling schedules may change.
“Piranesi Drawings: Visions of Antiquity”
The British Museum, London.
February 20–August 9, 2020
It is tormenting that the show of Piranesi drawings at the British Museum should have closed, along with all London’s museums and galleries, soon after it opened, due to coronavirus restrictions. But it is not wholly inappropriate. There is an excellent catalogue, so his great topographical studies can still transport us, as did the engravings that he sold to milordi on the Grand Tour, to Rome. And since Piranesi was an artist of fantasy, it’s a treat to spend an evening of lockdown flying with him on the wings of invention, above the Rome of the emperors and into the dizzying perspectives of endlessly gloomy prisons that never existed. Besides, eighteenth-century Rome, as well as being a destination for connoisseurs (and misbehaving young aristocrats), was notorious for its mal’aria, or bad air, the source of what was called Roman fever (Yale University Press published a book about this a few years ago). Our covid-19 anxieties provide a bond of human sympathy. We can be Romans too.
Which is only right because Piranesi is a fundamental part of the modern imagination. There may be no direct causal connection but, according to the curator Sarah Vowles, his works are so culturally embedded that the visual worlds of Blade Runnerand even some