Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate IV
Size of the original etching, 21½ × 16¼ inches
The application of these words to the work of Piranesi will probably surprise those persons acquainted only with his etchings of classic ruins. However, even these plates exemplify this definition in many ways which it would be tedious to enumerate, while to feel its full appositeness it is only necessary to study Piranesi’s least-known and greatest achievement, commonly called “The Prisons,” and known in Italian as “Le Carceri d’Invenzione.” These sixteen fantasies, executed at the age of twenty-two and published at thirty, form a set of prints in which it is no exaggeration to say that imagination is displayed with a power and amplitude that have elsewhere never been surpassed in etching or engraving, and only rarely in other forms of pictorial art. Although scarcely known to the public at large, they have always formed the delight of those who feel the appeal of imaginative fantasy, and notably of Coleridge and of De Quincey, who has recorded his impression in golden words. They are reputed to represent scenes which burned themselves into the artist’s consciousness while delirious with fever, and it is certain that they do possess that terrible, vivid reality, so enormously amplified as to lose the proportions of ordinary existence, which characterizes all oppressive dreams and particularly those induced by narcotics. They represent interiors of vast and fantastic architecture, complete yet unfinished, composed of an inexplicable complexity of enormous arches springing from massive piers built, like the arches they carry, of gigantic blocks left rough-hewn. By a contrast that could only have been conceived by genius these monstrous spaces are traversed in every direction by frail scaffoldings, together with ladders, bridges, and all manner of works in wood; and are filled, at the same time, with an inexhaustible succession of ropes, pulleys, and engines, finely described by De Quincey as “expressive of enormous power put forth or of resistance overcome.” They are distinguished by one of Piranesi’s greatest qualities, the power to express immensity as, perhaps, no one else has ever done, and are flooded with light which seems intense in its opposition to the brilliant shadows, so that altogether it would be difficult to understand their title of “Prisons,” were it not for the presence of engines of torment, and of mighty chains that twine over and depend from huge beams, or sometimes bind fast the little bodies of human beings. The unusual and inexplicable nature of these “Prisons” gives to the beholder’s imagination a mighty stimulus productive of strange excitement.
Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate V
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches
Piranesi. The Prisons. Plate VI
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 15¾ inches