Material and Critical Piranesi S Erasure PDF

Stoppani 1
Teresa Stoppani
Material and Critical Lines: Piranesi’s Erasures
Lines of questioning
Over two and a half centuries after their production, the graphic works of architect
and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi continue to engage the contemporary
architectural discourse, in an ongoing process of historical reframing and
disciplinary definition since the reaction to the crisis of Modernism. Piranesi’s
images raise issues that architecture has addressed in recent decades not only
within a critical discourse that has remained internal to theoretical considerations,
but also in the continuous questioning of the architectural project in relation to
society, politics and the complex forces that make the city.1 Piranesi’s works
perform a critique of the classical language of architecture and of urban space;
beyond the denunciation of the crisis of the architectural languages, they anticipate,
in drawings and etchings, the current shift in architecture from the predefinition of a
form to the ongoing workings of its materiality. His images register the dynamic
acting of time on architecture, identifying in the undoing of the classical the
possibilities already at work of an architecture of becoming – an architecture beyond
form, which works with change and matter.
Venetian, born in 1720, trained as an engraver, stage designer and architect,
Piranesi moves to Rome at the age of 20, and produces throughout his career
numerous series of etchings of views of Rome and of Roman antiquities, which offer
the most famous description and interpretation of the city and its times. Piranesi’s
documentation of monuments, ruins and details is never merely technical, visual
and graphic, but always offers a critical commentary on the given context. Rome’s
past and present coexist in his plates, the past is not presented in a state of frozen
reconstruction, but is depicted in its crumbling present state within a decaying social
context. Working on paper and copper plates, Piranesi explores the limits of
classical architecture, taking it to extremes that produce paroxysmal and impossible
spaces, defying and contradicting all established notions of type, composition,
proportion and architectural canons. The spaces that he depicts are at times
impossible; the conventions of representation are challenged; the space of
representation, detached from that of material production, becomes the space for
the production and construction of ideas. Perspectival views are fragmented and
recombined to produce impossible multiple ‘interiors’, whose incongruent multiplicity
is not only spatial but also temporal. Piranesi’s images not only represent, but also
construct, a new notion of space – open, infinite, changing, smooth, dynamic –
which has an everlasting attraction to contemporary architectural and spatial
practices.

1
For recent studies on the work of G.B. Piranesi in relation to contemporary architecture see,
for instance: Tafuri, 1976 and 1987; Allen, 1989; Bloomer, 1993; Eisenman, 2006.
Stoppani, Teresa (2013) ‘Material and Critical: Piranesi’s Erasures’, in Ivana Wingham (ed.), Mobility of the Line. Art, Architecture, Design, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp.
234-246. ISBN 978 3 0346 0824 4 <http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/203095> <http://www.aabookshop.net/?category=122&product_id=914>

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Paper architecture
Early in his career Piranesi denounced the crisis of architecture and its relationship
with clients and patronage, thus justifying the theoretical dimension of his
architectural drawings. Confined to paper and copper plate and rendered ineffectual
in the physical city, his ‘inventions’ claim for the image a role that goes well beyond
the representational, investing the etchings with the thrust of the political and
polemical message. If his architecture is limited to and by the page, it is also
daringly experimental, and has the power to speak to posterity in a way that is
potentially more lasting than the material ruins of antiquity (and certainly more
widely distributed and accessible).
In the dedication of the Prima parte di architetture e prospettive (Piranesi,
1743), his earliest Roman collection, Piranesi writes:
There is no hope that an Architect of our times can successfully execute

anything similar [to the Roman buildings of the past], be it the fault of
Architecture itself [...] [or] of those who should act as patrons of this most
noble art; […] no other option is left to me, or to any other modern Architect,
than to explain his own ideas through drawings and in this way […] to take it
away […] from the abuse of those who possess wealth, and who make us
believe that they themselves are able to control the operations of
Architecture.2
The remark may sound rancorous and defeatist, but it advocates a

fundamental critical and creative role for an architecture destined to remain on
paper and to become a deliberate graphic manifesto. A recent study of Piranesi’s
sketchbooks now at the Biblioteca Estense of Modena provides stunning evidence
of this (Bevilacqua, 2008).3 Produced between 1747 and 1749, the sketchbooks
offer a comprehensive insight of Piranesi at work, including sketches, copies from
old masters, text annotations of ideas and work in progress, as well as shopping
lists, expenses and travel annotations. Piranesi copies the masters, takes visual and
written notes, sketches and annotates elements from the Roman monuments of
antiquity as well as from the work of his contemporaries. It is in here that, in a quick
scribble, we find Piranesi’s prophetic annotation on the importance of printing (and,
therefore, ‘reproduction’) for architecture. ‘The ancients did not have printing, and so
the knowledge of these ancient things was lost; by means of these etchings it will be
possible to see … what will be destroyed.’ And then he concludes with no more than
a note: ‘The moderns have found things that are more important … Skeletons as
they were.’4 Etching, through its reproducibility in multiple copies, offers the ideal

2
Tafuri, 1987, 28-29. On this passage Tafuri comments that it is a statement of the
autonomous role of Utopia.
3
The sketchbooks were found and partially analysed in 1983 by Silla Zamboni in Cavicchi
and Zamboni, 1983, 212-16.
4
Mario Bevilacqua, ‘New evidence from the Modena Sketchbooks’, paper presented at the

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medium to record and divulge the knowledge of ancient and modern architecture,
and it will last, Piranesi argues, longer than the subjects of its representations. As
Mario Bevilacqua has observed, this reveals that for Piranesi the true monuments
are the images, in the prints or in the books, that is, in the reproductions that
perpetuate them and diffuse their knowledge. The skeletons represent a life that is
destroyed and then rots; monuments last but then are destroyed; what remains,
preserves ideas and speaks to us, is the printed page.
Piranesi’s works on paper therefore become a new site for exploring the
critical aspects of architecture, and the power of the image is increased by its ability
to be reproduced in numerous prints. The medium of etching and printing opens a
new space for the architectural project, a space that while it remains (apparently)
untouched by use, change and life, offers a site for theoretical experimentation and
for the diffusion of new ideas about architecture and the city.
Palimpsest city
Piranesi set out to document the Roman antiquities ‘in the field’, combining research
on ancient documentary sources with his own explorations, surveys and renditions
of actual physical Roman sites, often to disprove, correct or complement earlier
reconstructions and representations. For this reason his Rome antica and moderna
often overlap, as they are documented or interpreted, or even recreated with an
investigative spirit that combined accuracy with polemic. Piranesi’s Roman works all
but reveal the intrinsic synchronic nature of urban space, evident in Rome more
than anywhere else: the city offers a composite palimpsest of past and present that
never existed as a flat static plane, but is always becoming. Dynamic, layered,
fragmented, the city’s surface is an ambiguous space of tension, never resolved and
faithfully recorded by a dividing line such as the black figure etched on the white
ground proposed by the Nolli Plan (Nolli, 1748).
It is for its treatment of surfaces and spaces that Piranesi’s provocation
remains significantly placed as a critical voice in architecture, dangerously
suspended between the definition of an enclosed urban space and the proliferation
of the formless – not only outside the city defined by walls, but also within and inside
and underneath the visible structured order of the city. There is no past in Piranesi’s
Rome, but an incessant, complex and difficult present, and the city’s glorious
antiquities are not something to freeze with admiration, but an ever present, active
and workable material (Stoppani, 2007). Piranesi’s city is the impossible Rome
envisioned nearly two centuries later by Sigmund Freud to explain the presence of
the past in the present of the mind, a simultaneous occurrence of what was and
what is, which architectural representation cannot depict and the material city
cannot contain. The coexistence of the modern and the ancient, the present

international symposium On Piranesi (in Ghent), 9th January 2009, MSK/Museum of Fine Arts,
Ghent. Organised by the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning of Ghent University & GUST
(Ghent Urban Studies Team), in cooperation with MSK Ghent. See Stoppani, 2009b, 652.

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ruination that exposes the ‘still present past’ in the complex layering of Rome, are
for Freud the closest physical approximation to the presence of the past in the mind.
And the fact that demolitions and replacements are never complete and total in
Rome allows for this condition, where, as in mental life, the past ‘may be preserved
and is not necessarily destroyed’ (Freud, 1991, 259).
Piranesi’s graphic work goes beyond the documentation of the city past and
present, beyond the invention of architectural typologies and the recombination of
styles, to produce the visual manifesto of a critical position in architecture, which
challenges also the young relationship between architecture and archaeology. His
lines – meticulously drawn, precisely incised, lightly traced, nervously moving,
smudged or erased – transform the copper plate of the etchings into a dynamic
critical space that reproduces not only views and fragments of the city in time, but
also the changing nature of a never neutral surface. In this process the practice of
erasure plays an important role in altering the image and repeatedly modifying its
message, as it combines removal with addition, scraping with deposit, to suggest
(and indeed construct, in ink) a mutable and ideologically invested materiality in
which the architectural project is redefined as a process of both making and
undoing.
Two digressions on erasure
The practice of erasure in an image very rarely consists of physical removal of

material. Erasure often practises obliteration by adding and effacing – literally
changing connotations, or a ‘face’. It is in itself a project, and as such never
separable from a determination, a decision, an interruption. It is also never neutrally
restricted to the sole presence (or absence, or excess) of a trace or a support. As it
represents, connotes or refers to a line, a mark, it is always also more than its trace:
it refers back to its object, or the absence of it, or to the deliberate removal of it –
and to the wider context of its deliberation. Venetian, Piranesi knew this well. High
up on the cornice of the Salone del Maggior Consiglio (the Parliament’s assembly
hall) in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, are arrayed the portraits of the first 76 Doges of
the Venetian Republic: all but Marin Faliero (1285-1355) the 55th Doge, who in 1355
with a coup d’état attempted to turn the republic into a principate. In lieu of the
portrait is instead a painted black drape bearing the gilded inscription ‘Here is the
place of Marino Faliero, beheaded for his crimes’.5 For having betrayed the
Republic, Faliero was beheaded and mutilated, and condemned to damnatio
memoriae, the erasure-negation of his image. It is not his name that is erased from
the historical records, but it is his image (the representation of the person) that is
obliterated from the official portraiture. What is depicted here instead, by inscribing
the verdict on the black drape, is the enactment of the condemnation. While the
name is repeated again and again in the reading of the sentence, the image is
condemned to never being re-membered: literally, it cannot be re-composed.

‘HIC EST LOCUS MARINI FALETRO DECAPITATI PRO CRIMINIBUS’.
5

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Doubly removed, by the gap in the sequence of portraits, and by the black drape, in
fact the image of the Doge never existed.6 Erasure here is in fact the original act,
performed by spacing (between paintings) and adding (paint), and the resulting non-
image preserves indeed the memory of the event, not of the person or his life.7 This
form of erasure records the political condemnation of a past event, and it also acts,
more significantly, as a powerful warning for the future: erasure as obliteration and
as pre-emption – a painterly erasure that is essentially a political project.
Architecture can perform erasure also while remaining within the specific of
the discipline. As erasure of a building’s function, or as erasure of architecture’s
history that reinvents a building’s memory, the operation of erasing becomes a
critical tool for architectural design whose innovative potential resides, paradoxically,
in its partial failure. (Fig.23.1)
In 2004 the Belgian architect Lieven De Boeck produced a critical reading of
architectural typology by selectively erasing the entries on ‘Museums’ in Ernst
Neufert’s Practical Encyclopaedia of Design and Building (Neufert, 1936) (known in
English as Architect’s Data (Neufert et al., 2000). Neufert conveniently sandwiches
‘Museums’ between ‘Churches’ and ‘Cemeteries’, thus offering an involuntary but
nonetheless powerful Foucauldian reading of the institution ‘museum’, editorially
and typographically placed between two other heterotopias. The museum is
identified as a container, and reduced to a functional diagram for the optimisation of
shelter, storage, accumulation, cataloguing, display and lighting of its contents. In
the manual, functions and systems of relations are defined, but the architecture,
reduced to a building typology, finds no form. It is here that De Boeck performs a
critique of typology through erasure, veiling names, uses and predefined functions
with white correction fluid. De Boeck’s erasure is a drawing that cuts through
architectural typologies and conventions, removing functions and returning forms to
the possibility of the project. Adding new liquid lines, the correction fluid creates new
content by removing past details; whiting off (rather than scraping away) adds
doubts (produces questions) onto the certainties of the given; it obliterates functions
and keeps spaces, but only to reoccupy them and modify them with the possibility of
the vague. Deconstructed but also reaffirmed, the emptied forms and rules are thus
made available to be liberated and redefined by new occupations of space. Erasure
allows the architect to reinvent architecture not from scratch but from a designed
partial amnesia.
Drawing architecture, erasing the patron
The complex vicissitudes that accompany the making and the publication of
Piranesi’s four volumes of the Antichità Romane (Piranesi, 1756-57) reveal the

6
The present portraits of the first 76 Doges were commissioned in 1577 after the originals
were destroyed by a fire, and executed by Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto. This means that the
‘erasure’ of Faliero’s portrait must have been painted twice.
7
‘But for those who have betrayed the Republic not even the memory of the image must be
preserved.’ (Toso Fei, 2004, 63. Author’s translation.)

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power of the etched and printed line to incorporate and publish (literally, ‘make
public’) an architectural content that goes well beyond visual documentation and
archaeological reconstruction, to become an open professional polemic.
Commissioned by James Caulfield, Earl of Charlemont, to produce the Antichità
Romane plates, in the early 1750s Piranesi set out to survey, draw and etch the
antiquities of Rome, but while his work grew in scope and ambition (and time, and
cost), the client became more and more elusive and his agent in Rome more and
more combative and tight-pursed. Initially dedicated to and supposedly sponsored
by Charlemont, the Antichità became Piranesi’s personal project: a mammoth work
of archaeological documentation combined with interpretation and reinvention – a
true masterpiece. (Fig. 23.2)
In the end Piranesi published the work at his own expense, accompanying
the revised 1757 edition with three polemical letters in which he denounced the
disengagement of the patron.8 The letters offer a fascinating insight into the
professional status of the architect-engraver and into the artist-patron relations in
mid-18th century Europe, combining ideals, ambitions and great visions with
adulation, technical details, bookkeeping and resentful indignation. While in the first
letter Piranesi attempted to offer an objective and dignified account of the facts, in
the second and third letters he exploded into accusations and recriminations, and
yet these were turned into a lucid project to discredit the former patron for his
broken promises (and unpaid bills), performed through a series of premeditated
erasure.
Printed as a pamphlet and then added to the first revised edition of the
Antichità Romane, the three letters are illustrated with plates that systematically
document the alteration of the dedications in their four frontispieces. The
‘suppression of the dedications’, as Piranesi repeatedly refers to it in the letters, is a
true project of effacement of Charlemont as a person, as a representative of an
aristocratic family, and as a patron of the arts. Elaborately composed with fragments
of ancient Roman architectures real or imagined, the first versions of the dedication
plates include celebratory inscriptions and heraldic references to the patron. Once
the financial support and the patronage were withdrawn, Piranesi reworked his
plates to perform a systematic erasure of the patron. His letters to Charlemont
illustrate the different versions of the four frontispieces (before and after the
withdrawal of the patronage), as well as a visual catalogue of the perpetrated
erasures – the fragments of antiquity from which the name and insignia of Lord
Charlemont have been removed. (Fig. 23.3)
As with the black drape replacing Marin Faliero’s portrait in the Doge’s
Palace in Venice, here the substitute image becomes a memento and an accusation
of a bad deed. In a perverse reversal performed by the etching, the image
celebrates the erasure by preserving its trace. In its reworked version the first
volume of the Antichità is dedicated to ‘the common good’, and the inscription that

8
The letters are reproduced in facsimile, accompanied by the variously altered versions of
the frontispieces of the Antichità Romane in Piranesi, 1972.

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was to celebrate the virtues of Charlemont as utilitati publicae nato becomes a more
general and generous dedication utilitati publicae, that is, to the city and to the
citizens of Rome. (Fig. 23.4)
Much more than a plain removal, the ‘suppression of the dedication’
articulates erasure as a project of clearly sequenced acts: the removal of the
lettering from the inscriptions that celebrate Charlemont; the tracing of lines on the
copper plates to simulate the levelling of stone in ancient Roman inscriptions; the
reinscription of the revised dedication; the writing of the letters of justification,
defence and accusation; the reproduction of Piranesi’s own letters (now printed in
typographic characters), illustrated with reproductions of the documents received
from Charlemont and with the different versions of the frontispieces of the Antichità;
the addition of a plate cataloguing all the erasures performed across the four
frontispieces. In the second letter Piranesi illustrates the original model of this
practice of erasure as ‘suppression’: an inscription from the arch of Septimius
Severus, where the name of Geta carved in stone was chiselled away in horizontal
lines (grooves), and overwritten with the application of metal letters onto the stone.9
Piranesi bequests his protest to posterity, but he attaches it to a work that will last
longer than the stone ruins, because ‘It is etched in copper; and since this metal can
resist the ravages of time, this Work will equally resist them’.10 Guilty of having
withdrawn his support to the arts and to archaeological research, Charlemont’s
infamy receives a negative celebration through the removal of the image (text and
effigies, in this case). With the project of erasure then, what is left to posterity is not
only a masterpiece of archaeological research, topographical documentation and
visual interpretation and celebration of the magnificence of the Roman ruins, but
also a polemical graphic statement on the condition of the architectural profession in
Piranesi’s time: erasure as professional and political manifesto.
Erasing identity, smoothing space
Erasure is never a simple process of removal in Piranesi’s work. His most famous
and controversial etchings, the architectural fantasies of the Carceri (Piranesi, 1749-
50; Piranesi, 1761) developed in two stages before and after the Antichità Romane,
pursue a personal project of critical reinterpretation of the city. Freed from
symmetry, orders, decorum and typology by the use defined by their title, the
‘prisons’ offer Piranesi the possibility to explore the underbelly of the city. Far from
gloomy, dark and enclosed, these vast and permeable underground spaces are
connected to the monumental city above. With them Piranesi suggests that the true

9
‘In order to not spoil my plates, I will imitate what can be seen in the line on the arch of
Septimius Severus, where the name of Geta was removed by order of his brother Caracalla, and I
will replace [the line of my dedication] with an homage to the Public, who will be at once both judge
and witness of the past events that led to this dedication.’ Piranesi, ‘Seconda Lettera’, February 1757
(Piranesi, 1757, xvi; facsimile in Piranesi, 1972). Author’s translation.
10
Piranesi, ‘Lettera Terza’, 31/05/1757 (Piranesi 1757, xxviii n. 3; Piranesi 1972). Author’s
translation.

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‘magnificence’ of the Roman edifice resided in the structural and infrastructural

works that supported the architecture of the city above. And yet, in order to
emphatically present his message, he needs to free their representations from a
series of conventions: space is dilated by breaking and repeating perspectival
views; an impossible spatial continuity is produced with the introduction of
architectural elements and details that operate as graphic sutures between the
otherwise disconnected parts of the image; stairs that lead ‘nowhere’ are repeated
everywhere, to suggest a vertical movement and produce the illusion of a
continuous ascension. (Fig. 23.5)
To emphasise the vastness and the continuity of theses spaces, Piranesi
populates them with a multitude of faceless inhabitants/viewers, who further multiply
the points of view and the direction of movement. What is erased here is not only
the identity of the characters – by literal (graphic) effacement of their physiognomy
as well as by their repetition and multiplication – but also, and in a similar way, that
of the spaces – which similarly lose definition and boundaries. Faceless,
unidentifiable, merely suggested as diaphanous presences by the nervously etched
lines, repeated everywhere, the inhabitants of these spaces are incapable of
measuring, configuring and understanding them, and can only experience them
through movement (Stoppani, 2006; Stoppani, 2009). (Fig. 23.6)
It is only the movement of the inhabitants/viewers that, combining physical
bodily ascension and visual redirection of the gaze, can reconstruct a spatial
continuum from the fractured perspectives and the broken objects. It is the loss of
identity of the visitors that enables their repetition in a shared experience. Faceless
and evanescent, these bodies become in some of the images pure movement, lines
of trajectories of transparent bodies that have lost their materiality and whose gaze
has been interiorised by the image. These are spaces that can only be inhabited
and understood by a non-figural line, which is absorbed by the materiality of the
image and its making (the fast moving burin tracing lines on the copper plate), and
acts as the marker of a vector of movement. The bodies that this line traces are
both dissolved and vectorised – ‘becoming-movement’ – and incorporated in the
materiality of the image – ‘becoming-object’. (Fig. 23.7)
Piranesi’s erasure is always a complex project. Erasure always selects,
removes and adds. The sort of inclusion-absorption of the Carceri occurs also in the
plates of the Campo Marzio (Piranesi, 1762) performed this time in the city and
through architectural bodies: the bodies that are interpenetrated, incorporated and
blended with the materiality of their background are in this case the ancient
architectures of Rome, real or imagined. Far from delirious, this invention is carefully
calculated: the introductory maps and views of the Campo Marzio11 selectively
remove the medieval surroundings of the Roman ruins, creating a graphic non-
neutral ground zero for the project. . (Fig. 23.8)

11
Plates: Topographia Campi Martii (385 x 275 mm); Scenographia Campii Martii (490 x 730
mm); Topographia vestigiorum veteris urbis et Campi Martii (445 x 285 mm); and the untitled plate
combining figures I, II, III (three maps of the Campus Martius) (445 x 290 mm).

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Rome is thus returned to an original bare topography of invention, occupied

only by its landmark buildings; it is then gradually but unstoppably filled to saturation
with fragments of architectures, both real and fantastic. Here the ‘like’ (similar to)
and the ‘likely’ (plausible) swallow the existing in a proliferation of partial,
interpenetrating and superimposed forms that gradually erase the given topography,
reducing it to the surface of the marble slab on which the plan is fictionally carved
(the ichnographia of the Campo Marzio is presented as a fragment of a larger
marble plan of Rome). While the ground is literally and graphically dissolved –
cleared first, then reoccupied with a flood of fragments – the line is applied instead
with great precision and clarity. The chaotic congestion that erases urban order is
practised here with the precision of the details: it does not attack, as in the Carceri,
the language of visual representation or the grammar of architectural orders, but
leaps to the scale of the city, to urban hierarchies and the syntactical articulations of
architecture in it. (Fig. 23.9)
Erasure by saturation
The erasure of the urban space by saturation performed in the Campo Marzio finds
its full theorisation and graphic realisation in the plates that accompany Piranesi’s
Opinions on Architecture (Parere su l’architettura, 1775), published together with his
polemical Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette (Piranesi, 1765; Piranesi,
2002) in defence of the originality and magnificence of Roman architecture. In
Opinions Piranesi constructs a fictional dialogue and a series of cryptic images, to
discuss issues of originality, creativity, language and freedom in architecture.12
Through the words of the dialogue and the provocative etchings of intentionally
overloaded architectural proposals, Piranesi discusses the role of ornament in
architecture and the problem of imitation as a creative act. Didascalo, Piranesi’s
alter ego in the dialogue, propounds that all ornament in architecture should be
recognised as independent of function and extraneous to structure, constituting a
separate apparatus that satisfies the human desire for variety. In his argumentation
variety is linked to invention and innovation, and this is crucial because it identifies
change as an intrinsic quality of architecture, not in terms of its wearing and decay
in time, but in terms of bringing time into the very act of design, that is, in the project.
Architecture, argues Didascalo/Piranesi, must be designed to change, otherwise it
can only repeat itself.13 Intrinsic to architecture are change and its possibility of

12
Sarah E. Lawrence has observed that in Parere su l’Architettura ‘Piranesi finally liberated
himself from the stultifying terms of the Graeco-Roman debate, and addressed the deeper issues of
artistic originality and creative licence that, for Piranesi, lay at the heart of the matter.’ (Lawrence,
2007, 103).
13
‘Let us imagine the impossible: let us imagine the world – sickened though it is by
everything that does not change day to day – very gracefully to accept your monotony; what would
architecture become? A LOW TRADE, IN WHICH ONE WOULD DO NOTHING BUT COPY, as a
certain gentleman has said. So that not only would you and your colleagues become extremely
ordinary architects, as I said before, but further you would be something less than masons. By
constant repetition, they learn to work by rote; and they have the advantage over you, because they

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variation, and not just in the form of the capriccio as a product of unrestrained
imagination. In its very essence architecture is only if it changes. Without change
architecture would become ‘a low trade, in which one would do nothing but copy’,
and the architect would be ‘something less than masons’. (Piranesi, 2002, 110-111).
Erasure is a mode that allows for change to occur in situ: in the drawing, in
the copper plate, in the stone slab, before the line of representation is translated into
the building. Not only a political gesture that challenges insolvent or despondent
patrons, erasure in fact allows Piranesi to condense and represent change as
architecture’s true nature: it allows him to represent an architecture of the dynamic.
Erasure then is to be understood as a practice that, far from removing a given,
provides the time of the project-process from which a form emerges. In Plate VII of
the Opinions on Architecture Piranesi inscribes on the building façade a verse from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Rerum novatrix ed alias reddit natura figures (‘Nature, the
great renewer, makes up forms from other forms’).14 Erasure enables a process of
transformation that works with the given, allowing it to ‘make up forms from other
forms’. This is not the production of a tabula rasa, but an always partial erasure that
bears traces as it enables change. The argument is carried forward in Piranesi’s
designs for chimneypieces, where change is identified as the practice that enables
the very existence of architecture. Here he exhorts: ‘Let the architect be as
extravagant as he pleases, so he destroys no architecture, but gives every member
its proper character.’ (Piranesi, 1769, pp. 2-3). As Piranesi identifies a plural origin
of architecture – Greek, Etruscan and Egyptian – the true beginning for him is not in
a fixed or identifiable moment of origin, but in the recombination process performed
by Roman architecture. ‘Variation with’, and ‘origin and’ are what Piranesi practises
in his late works. The ‘metamorphoses’ that he performs in the plates of the
Opinions and in the Chimneypieces are achieved by combining fragments and
styles in non-syntactical ways. And yet, what allows him to produce this chaotic
recombination of elements is the precision of his lines. The minute definition of each
element or component produces an illusion of order that disguises the dissolution of
the syntax. (Fig. 23.10)
In Opinions ornament is rendered as independent, non-imitative, non-
narrative and, ultimately, essential to architecture, as architecture cannot be without
it. Here Piranesi establishes, in the form of a graphic provocation, the autonomy of
architecture, and his excessive use of ornamentation proclaims a non-referentiality
that dismisses a source, an external referent, and a sole origin. Architecture as an
operation of manipulation of itself and on itself becomes autonomous. The

have the mechanical skill. You would ultimately cease to be architects at all, because clients would
be foolish to use an architect to get a work that could be done far more cheaply by a mason.’ And so
Didascalo advocates: ‘I ask only this: by all means treasure the rationality that you proclaim, but at
the same time respect the freedom of architectural creation that sustains it.’ (Piranesi, 2002, 110-
111).
14
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Metamorphoses, 15.253.253. In Dryden et al. (1818): ‘But
chang’d by Nature’s innovating hand; All things are alter’d, nothing is destroy’d’. Available from the
University of Adelaide E-Library at URL: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/ovid/o9m/> (accessed on
12/12/2011).

Stoppani 11
congestion that clutters, structures, de-structures and re-structures is ultimately self-

effacing: by saturating the space (of both the image and the architecture) it erases
any possible established order, making room for a new language to come. In this
sense the operation of saturation performed by Piranesi’s now very precise lines
produces an erasure that will find a critical equivalent in the otherwise visually very
different ‘stripping’ of architecture performed only a few decades later in the pure
forms of the projects by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée. This
does not mean that the sources of the parts and ornaments of architecture in
Piranesi’s works are not traceable, but they have been by now fully appropriated:
referentiality is undone by quantity and excess, while not eliminated altogether. His
‘too much’ produces in fact a critical mass that devours the existing orders (which,
are, according to Didascalo/Piranesi, all one and the same), preparing the ground
for the excess of its erasure and disappearance. The systematic congestion and
manipulation of architectural orders suggests in fact the possibility of other orders
and triggers an unstoppable process. Within this process Didascalo hypothesises
even the removal of ornamentation (warning against it), in a systematic stripping of
building elements, which produces a naked architecture. The process and resulting
description would uncannily fit an early Le Corbusier building: read in this light, Le
Corbusier’s five principles and the stripped whiteness of early Modernism appear as
no more than yet another version of the given orders of architecture. Piranesi’s
disordered and congested images, in their chaotic and mutually vanquishing poly-
referentiality, seem to be searching beyond, for another possible thickness or depth
of the surface (of the façade as well as of the sheets of paper on which he imprints
his etchings). The next step of this process – a form of erasure as removal that will
anticipate the modernist stripping – will soon be performed by the ‘revolutionary
architects’ Ledoux and Boullée, (Kaufmann, 1952) and it will really mark the
beginning of an architectural revolution. But this stripping will not be skin deep: with
the rich ornamentation will go also the possibility of relying on a fixed set of rules, on
a universal language of orders and order, and architecture will need to learn to
‘speak’ in other ways.15
Erasure as a project (destruction as construction)
In Piranesi’s etchings, erasure is never a simple removal of lines. The material

nature of his medium, the etching on copper plates, reverses operations: to add
(lines) one needs to remove (copper); to remove one needs to scrape and then add
and remove at once. The plate always bears the marks of these changes. Resilient,
malleable and reworkable, it allows for such changes and carries them physically,
for the production of different originals (the ‘states’). But Piranesi’s work goes
beyond the exploration of the physical possibilities and the potential of
reproducibility and transformation offered by its medium, and turns it into a physical

15
The French term architecture parlante, first used in an anonymous review of Claude
Nicolas Ledoux’s work, was adopted by Emil Kaufmann in his work on Ledoux (Kaufmann, 1952).

Stoppani 12
site for architectural discourse and professional polemic, enacted by the strokes of
the burin. And while his lines record the magnificence of Roman monuments as well
as their ruination and decomposition, his etchings, far from fixing a given moment of
the past, document its changing and undoing, in fact contributing to it, accelerating
it, and turning it into a project that is not only graphic but, more significantly,
architectural and critical. It’s a project of undoing works faster than time, faster than
nature.16
Writing in 1931 on the empowering creative potential of the ‘destructive
character’, and identifying with it the role of the intellectual as a promoter of change,
Walter Benjamin identified the importance of the ‘mak[ing] room’ and the ‘clearing
away’ (Benjamin, 1986, 301) performed by the ‘destructive character’. For Benjamin,
‘The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees
ways everywhere.’ (Benjamin, 1986, 302). Destruction in fact opens up possibilities;
it enables the change that Piranesi had advocated as a generative force. The
‘clearing away’ that Piranesi performs in the 1770s is far removed from the urban
tabula rasa and the architectural stripping of ornament proposed by modernism, or
even from that of the French revolutionary architects at the end of the 19th century.
What Piranesi’s congestion of styles and forms produces is a different form of
erasure, that works by combining obliteration, multiplication, congestion, saturation
and, as is the case with the dedications of the Antichità Romane, by ‘suppression’.
Indeed the process of razing, the tabula rasa’s total removal, is never attempted, not
even as a conceptualisation. There is no search here for a temporal zero, no
fabrication of a moment of the origin, but indeed its obfuscation by a multiplication of
signs. Before the theorisations of an early architectural modernity and the
anticipation of its anxieties,17 Piranesi’s erasures by accumulation of lines question
certainties and render impossible the definition of one origin and one language.
Piranesi’s erasures do not produce a clean slate but prepare, through a series of de-
signifying moves, the saturated ground that makes it possible. The crowding of lines
and details in his etchings denounces the crisis of languages and orders without
proposing an alternative vision. Like Benjamin’s destructive character, Piranesi’s
complex and crowded erasures propose no prefiguration, but perform the important
role of preparing architecture for a crucial change, and this stems from the critical
reinterpretation of the past proposed by his images. Like Benjamin’s destructive
character and anticipating its modernity, his etchings ‘pass on situations, by making
them practicable and thus liquidating them. The[y] are called the destructive’
(Benjamin, 1986, 302).

16
‘The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is nature that dictates his tempo,
indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.’
(Benjamin, 1986, 301).
17
The connection between ‘modernity’ and ‘anxiety’ is discussed by Manfredo Tafuri (1976;
1987).

Stoppani 13
References
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Stoppani 14
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Stoppani 1

There is no hope that an Architect of our times can successfully execute

The remark may sound rancorous and defeatist, but it advocates a

Two digressions on erasure

The practice of erasure in an image very rarely consists of physical removal of

Drawing architecture, erasing the patron

Erasing identity, smoothing space

‘magnificence’ of the Roman edifice resided in the structural and infrastructural

Rome is thus returned to an original bare topography of invention, occupied

congestion that clutters, structures, de-structures and re-structures is ultimately self-

Erasure as a project (destruction as construction)

In Piranesi’s etchings, erasure is never a simple removal of lines. The material

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Carceri d’invenzione di G. Battista Piranesi archit.

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