At the origins of the modern, beyond the modern: the idea of the ancient

The work of Paolo Gabriele Barozzi retains its relevance also due to the artist's ability to reinterpret the relationship with the idea of the ancient and, in particular, with the lesson of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, capturing the spirit of the time and projecting it beyond the boundaries of historiographical categories.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Mogliano Veneto, October 4, 1720 – Rome, November 9, 1778), a famous engraver, architect, and Venetian archaeologist of the 18th century, was an important precursor of the modern; his works, characterized by a powerfully visionary charge, an attention to memory, to history, qualified by an innovative approach to the representation of space and time, made this Venetian master a fundamental forerunner of modern thought and aesthetics.

The famous views of Rome, the Piranesian representation, grand and phantasmagorical, of architecture, particularly that of ancient ruins, profoundly influenced the aesthetic sensibility of the 18th century and beyond, anticipating, so to speak, themes and cultural perspectives that would later become completely central in Romanticism and Modernism; I think of the idea of ruin as nostalgia, of dreamlike and fantastic visions, of τέχνη (téchne), the art of knowing how to do, of the scientific method, and of the relationship with archaeology.

The dreamlike and fantastic visions of Giovanni Battista, his engravings, often characterized by daring perspectives, plays of light and shadow, unreal atmospheres, have referred and continue to refer to a dreamlike and fantastic dimension that is manifest in countless works of 20th-century art.