Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista) Piranesi (4th October 1720 in Mogliano Veneto (near Treviso) - 9th November 1778 in Rome) was an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric "prisons" {Carceri d'Invenzione).

The prisons (Carceri)

The "prisons" (Carceri d'invenzione), or known as the single Italian word for prisons - carceri, are a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states, which show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines.

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These in turn influenced Romanticism and Surrealism.

Related Topics:
Romanticism - Surrealism

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The first state was published in 1745 and consisted of 14 etchings. In the second publishing in 1761, all of the etchings were reworked and numbered in roman numerals from I - XVI (1-16). Numbers II and V were new ones which were introduced in the second edition. Numbers I through IX were all done as portraits (taller than they are wide), while X to XVI were landscapes (wider than they are high). The works are:

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• I - title plate
• II - The Man on the Rock
• III - The Round Tower
• IV - The Grand Piazza
• V - The Lion Bas-Reliefs
• VI - The Smoking Fire
• VII - The Drawbridge
• VIII - The Staircase with Trophies
• IX - The Giant Wheel
• X - Prisoners on a Projecting Platform
• XI - The Arch with a shell ornament
• XII - The sawhorse
• XIII - The well
• XIV - The Gothic Arch
• XV - The Pier with a lamp
• XVI - The Pier with Chains

The style of Piranesi was imitated by 20th-century forger Eric Hebborn.

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Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1820) wrote the following:

Related Topics:
Thomas De Quincey - 1820

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:Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. ... But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. ...

Related Topics:
Mr. Coleridge - Gothic

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