Chapter 1. Old maps of St. Petersburg
Chapter 2. Ancient tale in the north of Europe
Chapter 3. Unity and monotony of monumental structures scattered around the world
Chapter 4. Capitol without a column … well, no way, why?
Chapter 5. One project, one architect or cargo cult?
Chapter 6. Bronze Horseman, who are you really?
Chapter 7. Thunder stone or submarine in the steppes of Ukraine?
Chapter 8. Falsification of most of the monuments of St. Petersburg
Promotional video:
Chapter 9. Peter the First - an ambiguous personality in the history of the whole Europe
Chapter 10. For what to say thank you, Tsar Peter?
Chapter 10-1. This "happy" tsarist era or the House of Holstein in Russia
Chapter 10-2. Why was the chain mail and cuirass replaced with stockings and a wig?
Chapter 11. Ladoga Canals - witnesses of a grandiose construction
Chapter 12. What did you really want to say, Alexander Sergeevich?
Chapter 13. Alexander Column - we see only what we see
Chapter 14. Alexander I. The Secret of Life and the Secret of Death
Chapter 15. Masonic symbolism of St. Petersburg
Chapter 16. Antediluvian city, or why the first floors in the earth?
Chapter 17. Axonometric plan of St. Petersburg - a witness of the great flood
Robert Hubert (1733-1808)
French painter, master of architectural landscape. It is now generally accepted that he painted his paintings in the genre of "architectural fantasy", depicting mainly antique ruins, as well as views of parks and rural landscapes, but did he invent everything? In his paintings, there are too many coincidences not only with Roman and Greek antiquity, they have elements of the Middle East and Egypt, where he has never been.
Hubert Robert was born in 1733 in Paris, in the family of a servant. He studied painting at the Academy of Arts under Sh. Zh. Natuar. In 1754-65. as a pensioner of the academy, he lived in Italy, traveled around the country with J. O. Fragonard. The poetics of the ruins is already formed in his drawings of the sanguine, made at the Villa d'Este near Rome. Returning to his homeland, he lived mainly in Paris. In 1775 he took part in the reconstruction of the park at Versailles. Since 1784 - curator of the Louvre. Robert's paintings, exhibited at the Salons, quickly gained popularity. D. Diderot praised him for "beautiful and majestic ruins." The artist was actively developing a fashionable theme, creating both piece pieces and whole cycles designed for the design of large interiors. He organically combined his "architectural fantasies" with everyday genre details ("Garsky Bridge");at the same time, he often "decorated" authentic views with invented details ("Destruction of the Notre Dame Bridge", 1786-88, Carnavale Museum, Paris). During the Great French Revolution, suspected of being disloyal to the new regime, he was arrested and imprisoned, where he continued to work, leaving a number of picturesque images of prison life. After his release, he varied the old motives, in new works he sometimes leaned towards romantic fantasy, presenting quite intact buildings in the form of ruins ("The Imaginary Ruins of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre"). His paintings have adorned many palaces, and then museums in Europe, including in Russia, where his things were willingly acquired, starting from the era of Catherine II. In old age, he was practically forgotten, but his images with their subtle sense of contrasting interaction of different historical eras had a great influence on the development of romanticism.
He died in Paris in 1808.
Another remarkable artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian Giovanni Battista Piranesi, or Giambattista Piranesi; 1720-1778) - Italian archaeologist, architect and graphic artist, printmaker, draftsman, master of architectural landscapes. He had a strong influence on subsequent generations of artists of the romantic style and - later - to the surrealists.
Gianbattista Piranesi was born on October 4, 1720 in Mogliano Veneto (near Treviso), in the family of a stonecutter. The real name of the Piranese family (from the name of the town “Pirano d'Istria”, from where the stone for buildings was supplied) acquired the sound “Piranesi” in Rome …
His father was a stone carver, and in his youth Piranesi worked in his father's workshop "L'Orbo Celega" on the Grand Canal, which carried out orders from the architect D. Rossi. He studied architecture with his uncle, the architect and engineer Matteo Lucchezi, and also with the architect J. A. Scalfarotto. He studied the techniques of perspectivist painters, took lessons in engraving and perspective painting from Carlo Zucchi, a famous engraver, author of a treatise on optics and perspective (brother of the painter Antonio Zucchi); He independently studied treatises on architecture, read works of ancient authors (his mother's brother, the abbot, became addicted to reading). The young Piranesi's interests also included history and archeology.
As an artist, he was significantly influenced by the Vedutist art, which was very popular in the middle of the 18th century in Venice.
In 1740 he left Veneto forever and from that time he lived and worked in Rome. Piranesi came to the Eternal City as an engraver and graphic artist as part of the Venice embassy delegation, supported by Ambassador Marco Foscarini himself, Senator Abbondio Rezzonico, nephew of the “Venetian Pope” Clement XIII Rezzonico - prior of the Order of Malta, as well as the “Venetian Pope” himself; the most ardent admirer of Piranesi's talent, the collector of his works was Lord Carlemont. Piranesi independently improved in drawing and engraving, worked in the Palazzo di Venezia, the residence of the Venetian ambassador in Rome; studied engravings by J. Wazi. In the workshop of Giuseppe Vazi, young Piranesi studied the art of metal engraving. From 1743 to 1747 he lived mostly in Venice, where, among other things, he worked with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Piranesi was a highly educated person, but unlike Palladio he did not write treatises on architecture. A certain role in the formation of Piranesi's style was played by Jean Laurent Le Geuer (1710-1786), a famous French draftsman and architect who worked in Rome from 1742, close to the circle of students of the French Academy in Rome, with whom Piranesi himself was friends.
In Rome, Piranesi became an avid collector: his workshop in Palazzo Tomati on Strada Felice, full of antique marbles, was described by many travelers. He was fond of archeology, participated in the measurement of ancient monuments, sketched found works of sculpture and decorative arts. He loved to do their reconstruction. similar to the famous Warwick crater compiled by him (now in the collection of the Barrell Museum, near Glasgow), which he acquired in the form of separate fragments from the Scottish painter H. Hamilton, who was also fond of excavations.
The first known works - a series of prints "Prima Parte di architettura e Prospettive" (1743) and "Varie Vedute di Roma" (1741) - bore the imprint of the manner of engravings by G. Wazi with strong effects of light and shadow, highlighting the dominant architectural monument and at the same time techniques of Veneto masters-scenographers, using "angular perspective." Agrippa, Interior of Villa Maecenas, Ruins of the sculpture gallery in Villa Adrian in Tivoli - series "Vedute di Roma").
In 1743 Piranesi published his first series of prints in Rome. The collection of large prints by Piranesi "Grotesques" (1745) and a series of sixteen sheets "Fantasies on the themes of prisons" (1745; 1761) enjoyed great success. The word "fantasy" is not accidental here: in these works Piranesi paid tribute to the so-called paper, or imaginary, architecture. In his engravings, he imagined and showed fantastic, impossible for real embodiment architectural structures.
In 1744, due to a difficult financial situation, he was forced to return to Venice. He improved his engraving technique, studying the works of G. B. Tiepolo, Canaletto, M. Ricci, whose style influenced his subsequent editions in Rome - "Vedute di Roma" (1746 -1748), "Grotteschi" (1747-1749), "Carceri" (1749-1750). The famous engraver J. Wagner offered Piranesi to be his agent in Rome, and he again went to the Eternal City.
In 1756, after a long study of the monuments of Ancient Rome, participation in excavations, he published the fundamental work "Le Antichita romane" (in 4 volumes) with the financial support of Lord Carlemont. It emphasized the greatness and importance of the role of Roman architecture for ancient and subsequent European culture. The same theme - the pathos of Roman architecture - was devoted to a series of engravings "Della magnificenza ed architettura dei romani" (1761) dedicated to Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico. Piranesi emphasized in it and the contribution of the Etruscans to the creation of ancient Roman architecture, their engineering talent, a sense of the structure of monuments, functionality. This position of Piranesi irritated the supporters of the greatest contribution of the Greeks to ancient culture, who relied on the works of the French authors Le Roy, Cordemois, Abbot Laugier, Comte de Keylius. The main exponent of the Pan-Greek theory was the famous French collector P. J. Mariette, who spoke in the Gazette Litterere del'Europe with objections to Piranesi's views. In the literary work Parere su l'architettura (1765) Piranesi answered him by explaining his position. The heroes of the artist's work Protopiro and Didascallo are arguing like Mariette and Piranesi. Didascallo Piranesi put an important idea in the mouth of Didascallo Piranesi that everything should not be reduced to dry functionality in architecture. “Everything should be in accordance with reason and truth, but it threatens to reduce everything to huts "- Piranesi wrote. The hut was an example of functionality in the writings of Carlo Lodoli, an enlightened Venetian abbot whose works Piranesi studied. Piranesi's dialogue of heroes reflected the state of architectural theory in the 2nd half. XVIII century. Variety and imagination should be preferred,Piranesi believed that these are the most important principles of architecture, which is based on the proportionality of the whole and its parts, and its task is to meet the modern needs of people.
In 1757 the architect became a member of the London Royal Society of Antiquaries. In 1761 Piranesi was admitted to the Academy of St. Luke for his work "Magnificenza ed architettura dei romani" in 1767 he received the title "cavagliere" from Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico.
Piranesi expressed the idea that architecture would be reduced to a craft without diversity in his subsequent works - the decor of the English Cafe (1760s) on the Plaza de España in Rome, where he introduced elements of Egyptian art, and in the series of engravings “Diverse maniere d'adornare I cammini (1768, also known as Vasi, candelabri, cippi …). The latter was carried out with the financial support of Senator A. Rezzonico. In the preface to this series, Piranesi wrote that the Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans - all made a significant contribution to world culture, enriched architecture with their discoveries., watches became the arsenal from which the Empire architects borrowed decorative elements in the interior decoration.
In 1763, Pope Clementius III commissioned Piranesi to build the choir stalls in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Piranesi's main work in the field of real "stone" architecture was the rebuilding of the church of Santa Maria Aventina (1764-1765).
In the 1770s, Piranesi also measured the temples of Paestum and made the corresponding sketches and engravings, which after the artist's death were published by his son Francesco.
J. B. Piranesi had his own vision of the role of an architectural monument. As a master of the Age of Enlightenment, he thought of it in a historical context, dynamically, in the spirit of Venetian Capriccio, he loved to combine different temporal layers of the life of the architecture of the Eternal City. The idea that a new style is born of architectural styles of the past, the importance of diversity and imagination in architecture, that the architectural heritage gets a new appreciation over time, Piranesi expressed by building the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato (1764-1766) in Rome on the Aventine Hill. It was erected by order of the Prior of Malta Order of Senator A. Rezzonico and became one of the major monuments of Rome during neoclassicism. The picturesque architecture of Palladio, the Baroque scenography of Borromini, the lessons of the Venetian perspectivists - all combined in this talented creation of Piranesi,which has become a kind of "encyclopedia" of elements of antique decor. The facade emerging onto the square, consisting of an arsenal of antique details, reproduced, as in engravings, in a strict frame; the decoration of the altar, also oversaturated with them, looks like collages made up of "quotes" taken from antique decor (bucrania, torches, trophies, mascarons, etc.). The artistic heritage of the past for the first time so clearly appeared in the historical assessment of the architect of the Age of Enlightenment, freely and clearly and with a touch of didactics teaching his contemporaries. For the first time, the artistic heritage of the past appeared so clearly in the historical assessment of the architect of the Age of Enlightenment, who freely and clearly and with a touch of didactics teaches him to his contemporaries. For the first time, the artistic heritage of the past appeared so clearly in the historical assessment of the architect of the Age of Enlightenment, who freely and clearly and with a touch of didactics teaches him to his contemporaries.
JB Piranesi's drawings are not as numerous as his prints. The largest collection of them is at the J. Soane Museum in London. Piranesi worked in various techniques - sanguine, Italian pencil, combined drawings with Italian pencil and pen, ink, adding more wash with a bistre brush. He sketched ancient monuments, details of their decor, combined them in the spirit of the Venetian capriccio, depicted scenes from modern life. In his drawings, the influence of the Venetian masters-perspectivists, the manner of G. B. Tiepolo, was manifested. In the drawings of the Venetian period, pictorial effects dominate, in Rome it becomes more important for him to convey the clear structure of the monument, the harmony of its forms. Drawings of the Villa Adrian in Tivoli, which he called "a place for the soul", sketches of Pompeii, made in the later years of creativity. Modern reality and the life of ancient monuments are combined in sheets into a single poetic story about the eternal movement of history, about the connection between the past and the present.
J. B. Piranesi's words: “the Parere su l 'Architettura” (“They despise my novelty, I am their fearfulness”) - could become the motto of the work of this outstanding master of the Age of Enlightenment in Italy. His art had a significant influence on many architects (F. Gilly, R. and J. Adam, J. A. Selva, C. Percier and P. Fontaine, C. Clerisso, etc.). Decor elements from his work "Diverse maniere "… reproduced in their editions T. Hope (1807), Persier and Fontaine (1812) and many others. He had no students in engraving, except for his son Francesco (1758-1810), who published the series" Raccolta de Tempi antichi "(1786 or 1788) and the last work of his father "Differentes vues de la quelques restes" … with views of the temples of Paestum, which Francesco visited with him in 1777 and 1778. His daughter Laura, who performed drawings, also helped his father in his work.
The artist died on November 9, 1778 in Rome after a long illness and was buried in the church of Santa Maria del Priorato.
Continuation: "Chapter 18. Who are you, builders, or why are there so many inconsistencies among historians?"
Author: ZigZag
