![]() Next we shall explore how Le Caceri has continued to live beyond the limits of the plane by inspiring the work designers, writers and architects across the centuries. As early as 1760 a spectacular set for Rameau’s opera Dardanus copied one of Piranesi’s boundless prison spaces, marking the beginning of a darkly glittering stage and film career for Piranesi’s labyrinths, from Metropolis and Blade Runner to the moving staircases at Hogwarts.īentham's Panopticon Design c. In this section of the workshop we shall explore how Piranesi employed (and subverted) the rules of Linear Perspective and the trade secrets of Roman set designers to create the illusion of an unfolding virtual world beyond the picture plane. The prints series enabled Piranesi to explore the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. The first edition was printed in 1749, and the second, even darker edition, in 1761. They depict ancient Roman or Baroque ruins converted into fantastic, visionary dungeons filled with mysterious scaffolding and instruments of torture. ![]() While Piranesi was a successful view (Vedute) artist – creating about 2000 vedute plates in his lifetime for the Grand Tour market – his unfulfilled ambition was to be an architect. Le Carceri (The prisons) are his finest early prints and presented Piranesi with the opportunity to show-off his architectural knowledge. Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi."The Drawbridge" (1761). 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. 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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