'Prisons' by Giovanni Battista Piranesi--research in Architecture

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" (Le Carceri d'Invenzione).

The Prisons (Carceri d'invenzione or 'Imaginary Prisons'), is a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines.

These images influenced Romanticism and Surrealism. While the Vedutisti (or "view makers") such as Canaletto and Bellotto, more often reveled in the beauty of the sunlit place, in Piranesi this vision takes on what from a modern perspective could be called a Kafkaesque distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthine structures, epic in volume. They are capricci, whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin.

The series was started in 1745. The first state prints were published in 1750 and consisted of 14 etchings, untitled and unnumbered, with a sketch-like look. The original prints were 16" x 21". For the second publishing in 1761, all the etchings were reworked and numbered I–XVI (1–16). Numbers II and V were new etchings to the series. Numbers I to IX were all done in portrait format (vertical), while X to XVI were landscape format(horizontal+). Though untitled, their conventional titles are:

·         I – Title Plate

·         II – The Man on the Rack

·         III – The Round Tower

·         IV – The Grand Piazza

·         V – The Lion Bas-Reliefs

·         VI – The Smoking Fire

·         VII – The Drawbridge

·         VIII – The Staircase with Trophies

·         IX – The Giant Wheel

·         X – Prisoners on a Projecting Platform

·         XI – The Arch with a Shell Ornament

·         XII – The Sawhorse

·         XIII – The Well

·         XIV – The Gothic Arch

·         XV – The Pier with a Lamp

·         XVI – The Pier with Chains

Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1820) wrote the following:

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him.

In the second publishing, some of the illustrations appear to have been edited to contain (likely deliberate) impossible geometries.

An in-depth analysis of Piranesi's Carceri was written by Marguerite Yourcenar in her Dark Brain of Piranesi: and Other Essays(1984). Further discussion of Piranesi and the Carcerican be found in The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi by John Wilton-Ely (1978). The style of Piranesi was imitated by twentieth-century forger Eric Hebborn. 

Carceri Plate VII---The Draw Bridge

Carceri Plate VI---The Smoking Fire

Carceri Plate XI---The Arch with a shell ornament