| A deep sadness animates the work of Piranesi, which depicts the modern, morbid and saturnine treatises of the humanist tradition, and reveals itself in those territories which are marked by the end of their history (Venice and Rome). The definitive dissolution of classical thought according to which the stability of norms, rules and canons enabled architecture to renew itself constantly giving continuity to tradition, took place during his era. "Classicism" derived from a mysterious and broken world and fed off ancient learning and the cult of ruins. It had as its basic cypher (as his theoretical works show) "fragments", an analytical study of Graeco-Roman art, rather than an abstract fusion of idealised norms. The classical was the "ancient", a temporal dimension which no longer existed, and remained unfathomable; it presented itself in scholary work, in a perfectly complete representation, which however clashed with the agonising notion of decadence and corruption that time and confusion promote. So the relationship between the classical tradition and representations of antiquity highlighted the eternal conflict between the limited and unlimited, and the tension between the finite and infinite. Architecture revealed itself as an archaeology of forms which were worn-out, adulterated and forgotten by the world. It recreated and reconstructed antiquity on the evidence of forms which were the fragments of history. The dirt which time deposits on things, and the corrosive action that transforms a pillar into a ruin which in turn becomes a model for a new architectural concept, do not establish an inflexible classicism, but they do define the terms for a continuous discovery, interpretation and re-invention of the ancient world. |