The Eternal City Exposed in Time

Rome is history's eternal litmus aper. Dipped in the perceptions f an era or an individual, it changes color-republican white, imperial purple, Christian gold-indicating the nature of those perceptions and their changes from one century to the next. Comparing Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings and Herschel Levit's photographs of Rome, exhibited together in the MFA, is a fascinating study in perceptive, historical or otherwise When the 18th century Italian looks at these imperial Roman monuments he sees a totally different structure than the 20th century New Yorker does. One wonders which has changed more; Rome or the ways people have looked at it.

The differences are all the more striking because Levit has tried to reproduce Piranesi's image as exactly as possible, trying to find the same angle, the same perspective, or a similar effect of light and shadow. He has not succeeded in a single instance. It is impossible to recapture Piranesi's vision; either the monument itself has changed, or the ground level, or the surroundings. In some instances Piranesi drew scenes the eye (or the camera) could not see in any age; there is not nor has there ever been enough space in front of the Trevi Fountain to make it possible to see the whole fountain and the buildings on either side at once. Piranesi's Rome is partly fictitious; when his observation of a monument clashed with his conception of it, the subjective reality always won over the objective. Thus the Tiber Island becomes a ship; Piranesi straightens the bent island and makes it narrower to complete the illusion the ancient Romans suggested by building a stone prow.

Levit's objectivity is equally illusory; he too is an artist. His photographs resolve things more sharply than either Piranesi or the eye can, details such as the frescoes in the apse of St. Paul's, the freize of the Temple of Jove the Thunderer. Levit's ruins do not pull weathered marble's trick of fading into the sunny haze of a Roman sky, or the dust of Roman earth. He has set them off against a darkened world by burning the film up to the contour of the monument.

The photographers' view of these ruins, churches, monuments as defined, standing clearly apart from their surroundings, as objects for a scientific investigation, which, like the photograph, aims to reveal the hidden secrets of the temple, contrasts sharply with Piranesi's mythical vision of Ozymandian monuments, overgrown with vegetation, sunk in the accumulated dust of ages, eroded stone structures are feats of mathematics and engineering; Piranesi's are works of the gods, Cyclopean walls. The eighteenth-century people who infallibly appear in his drawings use the ruins as cow fields (the Forum), houses (the Temple of Vesta), or buttresses for their own constructions (the Arch of Titus). The ruin was part of the landscape of the time--in the gardens of the Villa Borghese fake ruins were along with an artificial waterfall and a man-made lake. Piranesi's Characters explore the ruins as they would a natural wonder, they admire them and scurry on top of them as they would a huge tree, or a rock. The small figure looking up at Trajan's Column in awe, or those dancing around the almost-buried columns of the Temple of Jupiter, come from a world which revered antiquity as it did nature, seeing the same mystery in both.

The centuries since Piranesi have demystified both nature and the past modern explorers have excavated the Campo Vaccino (Cow Field), restored the temples and the Colosseum. The Tiber Island has been firmly established as dry land; the Arch of Titus shorn of vines and bushes. Levit's photographs testify to the knowledge and understanding we've gained--and the drama lost. Piranesi, in one of his more imaginative moments, etched a smart temple at Tivoli, surrounded by figures in various melodramatic poses, stalking the ruined stairs, lurking behind the columns. One dark figure assumes a Byronic posture in the doorway; the thick stone lintel looms threateningly over him. In Levit's photograph of the spot, crisscrossed by the wires of a restaurant awning, the door assumes its proper proportions and the waiter standing in the doorway (in roughly the same position as Piranesi's mysterious character) looks rather silly. The ruin is now officially designated a ruin, not a stage set.

Is the difference that the temple itself has been cleaned and restored? Or that the photograph renders it in a more "objective" light? What the exhibit shows perhaps, is that the process works both ways. Rome has changed and has been changed by our views of it.