The work of the famous graphic artist Piranesi is exhibited at the Clam-Gallas Palace

Prague - An exhibition of works by the Baroque Italian graphic artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi will open on Thursday at the Baroque Clam-Gallas Palace in the Old Town. The extensive exhibit, prepared mainly from the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, showcases one of the most prominent figures in world graphics. His most famous and striking set of works is the graphic cycle Carceri (Prisons), which captures the unsettling atmosphere of endless corridors and staircases of ancient prisons.
    Their expressiveness captivated the Romantics as well as the Surrealists, inspiring Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, and Marguerite Duras. "Since the last Prague exhibition in 1973, his name has somewhat faded from the awareness of the local cultural public," said Alena Volrábová, the director of the Collection of Drawings and Prints of the NG, to reporters today.
    Exhibitions of Piranesi’s work are held frequently worldwide, and this current one should help the Czech audience rediscover him. Moreover, it takes place in a palace built according to the design of the famous architect Johann Fischer von Erlach, whose work was one of Piranesi’s sources of inspiration. Piranesi was originally trained as an architect and came from a family of builders.
    He spent his childhood and youth in Venice, where he received artistic education. He settled in Rome, where he fell under the spell of ancient monuments, which he began to study and draw. In his time, he was admired as a vedutista celebrating the beauty of both ancient and contemporary Rome.
    The exhibition curator Blanka Kubíková pointed out that Piranesi’s vedutas were different from similar works by his predecessors or contemporaries. "Vedutas were period postcards, precise drawings with a view of the city that people liked to buy, but they were somewhat dull. Piranesi's vedutas are primarily captivating. He managed to infuse the cityscape with a lot of emotions, depicting a wall in such a way that the viewer expects some kind of story behind it," she stated.
    In addition to the vedutas and scenes from the Carceri cycle, the exhibition displays graphic sheets depicting ancient monuments of Rome and nearby towns such as Tivoli, Castel Gandolfo, Cori, and the famous Doric temples from Paestum. Visitors will also see the artist’s designs for furniture, his architectural fantasies, interior architecture designs, and his theoretical writings.