Piranesi's Dream

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, master engraver of the 18th century, is the subject of this fictionalized life by German novelist and university professor K pf. Styled as a long soliloquy, the novel details Piranesi's tumultuous career. The artist's depictions of colossal Roman ruins set against scenes of the pointedly less-than-colossal modern world helped define the era's view of itself vis- -vis antiquity. In addition, he did a famous series of copperplate engravings called Prisons, a dark and freely imaginative work that was out of step with the optimistic mood of the age. For K pf, Piranesi embodies the underbelly of the European Enlightenment. In his personal life, Piranesi is a brooding and spiteful man who rants at turns of fate he believes have ruined his existence: his failure to become a working architect, the burden of his beautiful but faithless wife and, especially, the success of the vastly more influential historian of art and architecture, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose grubby death (he is murdered by a homosexual pickup in Trieste) belies the ideal of ""noble simplicity and serene grandeur"" that he trumpeted professionally. Oddly independent of time and space, the elaborately styled novel allows Piranesi to narrate from the present day. The engraver even rattles on a good deal about modern Australia, where he imagines he might construct a great city. The narrative style of embittered monologue begs for a comparison with Thomas Bernhard but does not stand that comparison well. The professor in K pf tends to overpower the artist, causing this ambitious work to be swamped by its intellectual baggage. (Sept.)