One of Piranesi’s most revered series, the “Carceri d’Invenzione,” often translated as ‘Imaginary Prisons,’ illustrates the intersectionality of grand design, fantastical exaggeration, and dystopian themes. At the time, well-known for conventional prints of Rome, this represented a significant alteration in Piranesi’s style. A composition of fourteen, and later sixteen, engravings published over two editions from 1750 to 1761 all feature large subterranean structures, mechanisms, and impossible geometries.[1] Throughout, Piranesi leans heavily on capriccio through the juxtaposition of familiar subjects in unfamiliar manners and widespread aggrandizement of features.
Piranesi’s architectural and engineering choices are confusing and reminiscent of optical illusions like the Penrose stairs or mid-20th-century artist M.C. Escher’s use of staircases and passages. His dark fortified walls embody nightmare, guilt, and anger, all in a manner beyond comprehension, leaving anyone contained within with little hope of escape or liberation. Through this, Piranesi’s work has been tied to the philosophy of Michel Foucault, whose work on the panopticon concludes such structures to be a form of savage punishment as their latticework of bridges, stone, and machines physically and mentally isolates whoever they hold captive.[2] Foucault calls it the physical manifestation of the absolutist state.[3] Perhaps this element of psychological oppression led the series to inspire poet and writer Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which hones in on the sensations of torment.[4]
1. Richard Wendort, “Piranesi’s Double Ruin,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (2001): 161–80.
2. Paul Hirst, “Foucault and Architecture,” AA Files, no. 26 (1993): 52–60.
3. Paul Hirst, “Foucault and Architecture,” 52–60.
4. John Altdorfer, “Inside A Fantastical Mind,” Carnegie Magazine: Winter 2008, https://carnegiemuseums.org/magazine-archive/2008/winter/article-123.html.