5/21/2023 0 Comments Piranesi prisons![]() There are just 16 in the set of Imaginary Prisons. More than 1,000 copper plate engravings by him have survived. Yet the Imaginary Prisons form a tiny portion of Piranesi’s output. These are images that inspired Max Escher and the filmmaker Fritz Lang. ![]() Many critics have seen them as pre-figuring the giant factories of the industrial revolution, and as describing the hell of living in a mechanical civilisation in which nature has been completely replaced by man-made constructions. It is not surprising that these etchings caught the imagination of romantic writers such as Coleridge, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, nor that they have defined Piranesi’s reputation today. There is a strong sense that what holds anyone captive in these engravings is their own frazzled brains, their own conception of where and what they are, rather than the locked doors and high walls of a dungeon of someone else’s making. Other than the poor unfortunates actually being tortured, any of the “prisoners” depicted would be free to walk out into the world beyond the walls whenever they chose. There are no locked doors in Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons. There is a great deal that is strange about these Imaginary Prisons, not least the title - for they do not depict prisons in the usual sense of that word: a place for keeping criminals under lock and key so that they cannot escape into the outside world. Others appear to be about to fall off the edges of impossibly high walls. Some of them are being pulled apart on the rack. The human figures are spindly and insignificant. They contain stairways that lead nowhere, perspectives that contradict each other, vast pulleys and other machines that appear to have no function, as well as instruments of torture. T he Italian engraver Giambattista Piranesi (1720 - 1778) is most famous for Imaginary Prisons, a series of dark, nightmarish images of the insides of colossal buildings. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10. This article is taken from the December/January 2022 issue of The Critic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |