![]() He also added considerable shading to define and darken objects, further enhancing the work�s ominous character. In second-edition impressions, Piranesi made notable changes to the image, including the addition of another wooden bridge. In this view, by capturing the complex scene from an extreme perspective, Piranesi imbues a realistic space with an impactful sense of wonder and fantasy, a characteristic feature of his architectural drawings and prints. In the prints small figures inhabit massive subterranean vaults, filled with bridges, stairways, and imposing machinery, the artist taking his architectural studies to new imitative ends. The Carceri (Imaginary Prisons) were first issued as a collection of fourteen etchings around 1749�1750 and then reissued, after significant reworking, as a set of sixteen in 1761. During his stay, he spent a great deal of time exploring Roman ruins and learning the art of etching. Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi.In 1740, Piranesi left Venice for Rome to study the magnificence and majesty of ancient Roman architecture from antiquities. 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. Piranesi was an extraordinarily talented artist who came to be considered the best known engraver and etcher of the 18th century. 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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