Word: levitation
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Views of Rome. Etchings by G.B. Piranesi and photographs by Herschel Levit, at the MFA through...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...