UNTIL SUNDAY 30/1
BB.AA MUSEUM. Pius V, 9
A great asset of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts of Valencia is the set of prints by the Venetian engraver and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos acquired only ten years after the artist's death. And what a gem these engravings are, the institution displays them regularly (1994, 2011…), in this case, with the excuse of 300 anniversary of Piranesi's birth. His work was important for his exceptional technique in the mastery of etching and perspective and for his prodigious imagination., of course, but also for its influence. His sheets were exported to Europe as souvenirs del Grand Tour (a formative trip through Europe made by the scions of the British upper class, background of cultural tourism) and they had a lot of influence on palatial architecture, especially in English country houses. When Piranesi in 1740 traveled to Rome for the first time, The vastness and state of abandonment in which the remains of antiquity were found definitively marked their vocation.. He wanted to leave a graphic record of the magnificence and grandeur of those accumulations of immense masses of travertine corroded by time and vegetation before they disappeared definitively due to indifference and plunder.. This exhibition collects some of these prints that idealize monumental Roman architecture. (aqueducts, Bridges, underground chambers…) and invent enormous constructions, superhuman and shadowy, to give a pessimistic view of the decline of the present. S.M.
