Giovanni battista piranesi carceri10/21/2023 It is a place without limits or contexts: Piranesi's prison interiors have no outer walls, and each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. They are a place his imagination can wander, and at the same time an impossible place - the prints contain spatial paradoxes, including a staircase that exists on two planes simultaneously. Piranesi is more than half in love with his prisons. The reason these images have such a dark vitality is not that they are protests or satires, however. Or perhaps he wanted to cover the subversive possibility that these prisons are dream images of his own time, his own society. Perhaps he wanted to cash in on what by now was an international reputation as a student of Rome. It was only in the second edition of his carceri that Piranesi sited his prisons in ancient Rome. It seemed as if the boundary between the deathly other world of prison and the illuminated outside world was very thin, as if you could slip constantly between the two, as if the boundaries of prison were able to ensnare you as you slept. The space from floor to ceiling is about 5ft.Įighteenth-century artists, writers and radicals routinely compared the social order to a prison. He was taken from his home to the doge's palace and, without a trial, dumped in a cell high in the building, which can still be visited today. His sexual relationship with a nun didn't help. In 1755 Casanova was arrested by the Inquisition for crimes ranging from blasphemy to encouraging Venetian aristocrats to become freemasons. The place was well on its way to becoming "a ghost upon the sands of the sea", as John Ruskin described it in 1851.Ī story about another famous contemporary Venetian suggests the reality behind Piranesi's fantasia, conceived when he was only in his 20s. What was it, after all, to be a "Venetian architect" in the 18th century? The chances of creating something new seemed remote in a country that was already an architectural museum. Today, museums don't know quite what to do with these oddities. Piranesi sold "antiques": that is, he put together bits of ancient Roman sculpture that he and others had dug up - a carving of a lion's foot, a couple of fauns' heads - to fabricate imposing, profuse objects you can imagine gracing Nero's palace. But Piranesi's chief contribution to practical - as against imaginary - design was to fabricate what an ungenerous critic would call fakes. He did build one church in Rome, S Maria del Priorato, and he published books of architectural history and theory. This was as much a fantasy as the prisons themselves. When Piranesi republished the series in the extra-sinister edition of 1761, this time announcing them for sale at his own address near the Spanish Steps, he gave himself an opening credit as "G Battista Piranesi, Venetian architect". The first edition of the carceri was not even published in his name instead the frontispiece names the publisher, giving the address of his shop in Rome. Just like Canaletto's paintings, Piranesi's prints were conceived as souvenirs - that is what Italy had come to by the 18th century. The chance to see Le Carceri is a chance to look beyond their mythic charisma to find Piranesi himself inside his imaginary spaces. His addiction to the ruins of Rome, his intoxication with their immensity, their power, seems pathological. He didn't find modernity, or progress, or the Enlightenment. Born in Venice, he got away from the place as soon as he could, but could never leave its pervasive air of decline. In today's architecture, you see Piranesi's imagination in Tate Modern, and London Underground's Jubilee line.Īnd yet Piranesi was a view artist - indeed, that was all he was, he would have said, because his unfulfilled ambition was to be an architect. It was the beginning of a blackly glittering stage and film career for Piranesi's images, from Metropolis and Blade Runner to the moving staircases at Hogwarts. As early as 1760 a spectacular set for Rameau's opera Dardanus copied one of Piranesi's boundless prison spaces. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.Ever since they were published - the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 - Piranesi's monstrous images of prisons as cruelly proliferating mega-cities have inspired designers, writers and architects. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it.
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