The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi.Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice. It becomes even more explicit in the film adaptations. The influence is also discernible in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and the Harry Potter books. An etching from the Carceri series hung in his office and the scenes in heaven in The Discovery of Heaven (and in its film adaptation) are clearly inspired by it. Harry Mulisch (one of the great Dutch novelists) was also a fan. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) are dystopian novels in which the menacing world of Piranesi is recognisable. A tyranny of order and efficiency that reduces humanity to a predictable cog in a process. He compares Piranesi’s prisons to the panopticism that was so popular in architecture at the time. Aldous Huxley wrote an essay accompanying an edition of Piranesi’s prints in 1949. That started early on with writers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Lord Byron, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe. Like Escher, Piranesi was an artist who infuses his prints with both order and chaos, thus garnering mass appeal. For many artists it is an abiding source of inspiration, particularly in terms of its utopian and dystopian character. Piranesi’s oeuvre not only influenced M.C. Conversely, Escher’s prints lack the dark, menacing element that characterises Piranesi’s series. But in terms of abandoning gravity and creating truly impossible buildings and spaces, he never goes to the extreme to which Escher would eventually go. Piranesi exaggerates the perspective and renders his spaces hugely impressive with dramatic lighting and a beautiful light/dark contrast. Here he creates a threatening, hidden world full of ominous caverns and hanging pulleys and cables, in which man is occasionally present yet markedly insignificant and vulnerable. Labyrinths filled with an infinite number of stairs, ladders, bridges, gates and galleries, none of which seem to lead anywhere. The Carceri is a series of etchings with colossal, vertiginous spaces that seem to never end. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (plate 7, The Drawbridge), second version, etching, 1761 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (title plate), second version, etching, 1761
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