Piranesi. Title-page of “The Prisons”
From “Opere Varie di Architettura Prospettive Grotteschi Antichita sul Gusto Degli Antichi Romani Inventate, ed Incise da Gio. Batista Piranesi. Architetto Veneziano.” (Rome, 1750.)
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches
Even in those plates where he etches actual scenes with loving care, Piranesi passes nature, as it were, through the alembic of his own personality, doing this moreover in a way peculiar to him and to him alone. His originality consists in this,—that his mind, when considering an object, seized instinctively on certain distinguishing features peculiar to that object, qualities which his mind, and only his, was capable of extracting from the rough ore of ordinary perception; and that for the powerful impression which he thus experienced, he was able to find an adequate and distinctive expression. It was his good fortune to behold Rome in a moment of pathetic and singular beauty, irrevocably vanished, as one of the penalties to be paid for the knowledge gained by modern excavation. In those days the Roman ruins did not have that trim air, as of skeletons ranged in a museum, which they have taken on under our tireless cleansing and research. For centuries the barbarians of Rome had observed the precept: “Go ye upon her walls and destroy; but make not a full end,” so that only the uppermost fragments of temple columns protruded through the earth where the cattle browsed straggling shrubbery above the buried Forum, while goats and swine herded among cabins in the filth and century-high dirt which covered the streets that had been trod by the pride of emperors. But that which, more than anything else, helped to create an atmosphere of romantic beauty none shall see again, was the indescribable tangle of vine, shrub, and flower, which in those days draped and hid under a mass of verdure the mighty ruins of baths and halls that still stupefy by their vastness when we see them now, devoid of their ancient marble dressing, stripped clean like polished bones. Shelley tells how even in his day the Baths of Caracalla were covered with “flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths.”
The sentiment of august grandeur inspired by the indestructible mass of Roman ruins was, therefore, in those days curiously complicated by the contrast between them and the fantastic growth of ever-passing, ever-renewed vegetation which wrapped them as in a mantle. The poignancy of this beauty Piranesi seized with a felicity and expressed with a plenitude given to no one but to him. He was, both by nature and by volition, profoundly classical, yet he enveloped all that he handled, however classic it might be in subject, with a sense of mysterious strangeness so strong as to arouse the sensation called in later times romantic. This contrast is one of the distinctive phases of his originality.
It would be pleasant to think that Edmund Burke was familiar with the creations of Giambattista Piranesi when he wrote so searchingly of “The Sublime and Beautiful”; but, if this be perhaps an idle fancy, it is certainly true that it would not be easy to find concrete examples demonstrating more clearly than the etchings of Piranesi the truth of large parts of his enquiry, and in particular of the following definition of the sublime: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible, but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.”
Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate III
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches