A Visit to Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome

A VISIT TO SANTA MARIA DEL PRIORATO, ROME This is the only major work built by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (17201778), who is buried inside this church. His intervention, dated 1765, consists in the design of a new façade, of the vault and of the altar dedicated to Saint Basil. He also worked on the surroundings, designing the square that gives access to the site, Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta.

The church belongs indeed to the Order of the Knights of Malta, and is accessible only by appointment. The peep-hole that Piranesi created in the main door of the compound is now a mid-brow tourist attraction, and it simply offers an unusual view of Saint Peter’s dome, a few miles away, framed by a double curtain of dark trees.

The symbology of the design, drawing inspiration from many sources, is typical of Piranesi’s cryptic architecture. In the altar, Manfredo Tafuri sees the embodiment of the crisis that will traverse the discipline until the 1970s, a crisis that Piranesi didn’t open himself – it can be traced back to the tensions of the Renaissance – but that he consciously exacerbated through his etchings and writings. He works within contradictions that can’t be resolved: this is what, according to Tafuri, makes Piranesi and his altar so important. He calls him «the wicked architect», comparing him with de Sade. Disintegration of the significance of architecture and visual redundancy, disenchantment and celebration of arbitrariness are here present at once: hence the title of the book The Sphere and the Labyrinth.