![]() The ceiling is about five feet high.Įighteenth-century artists, writers and radicals routinely compared the social order to a prison. He was taken from his home to the doge’s palace and, without a trial, dumped in a small cell in the building, which can still be visited today. His sexual relationship with a nun did not help. In 1755 Casanova was arrested by the Inquisition for crimes ranging from blasphemy to encouraging Venetian aristocrats to become freemasons. A story about another famous contemporary Venetian suggests the reality behind Piranesi’s fantasia, conceived when he was only in his 20s. The place was well on its way to becoming a ghost upon the sands of the sea, as John Ruskin described it in 1851. What was it, after all, to be a “Venetian architect” in the 18th century? The chances of creating something new seemed remote in a country that was already an architectural museum. Today, museums do not know quite what to do with these oddities. Piranesi sold “antiques”: that is, he put together bits of ancient Roman sculpture that he and others had dug up - a carving of a lion’s foot, a couple of fauns’ heads -to fabricate imposing, profuse objects you can imagine gracing Nero’s palace. But Piranesi’s chief contribution to practical - as against imaginary - design was to fabricate what an ungenerous critic would call fakes. He did build one church in Rome, Santa Maria del Priorato, and he published books of architectural history and theory. This was as much a fantasy as the prisons themselves. When Piranesi republished the series in the extrasinister edition of 1761, this time announcing them for sale at his own address near the Spanish Steps, he gave himself an opening credit as “G Battista Piranesi, Venetian architect”. The first edition of the ‘Carceri’ was not even published in his name instead the frontispiece names the publisher, giving the address of his shop in Rome. Just like Canaletto’s paintings, Piranesi’s prints were conceived as souvenirs – that is what Italy had come to by the 18th century. ![]() The chance to see Le Carceri is a chance to look beyond their mythic charisma to find Piranesi himself inside his imaginary spaces. His addiction to the ruins of Rome, his intoxication with their immensity, their power, seems pathological. He did not find modernity, or progress, or the Enlightenment. Born in Venice, he got away from the place as soon as he could, but could never leave its pervasive air of decline. In today’s architecture, you see Piranesi’s imagination in Tate Modern, and London Underground’s Jubilee line.Īnd yet Piranesi was a view artist - indeed, that was all he was, he would have said, because his unfulfilled ambition was to be an architect. It was the beginning of a darkly glittering stage and film career for Piranesi’s images, from Metropolis and Blade Runner to the moving staircases at Hogwarts. As early as 1760 a spectacular set for Rameau’s opera Dardanus copied one of Piranesi’s boundless prison spaces. And yet he was a Venetian, and it is in the decadent, pessimistic fancies of a doomed city that we may find the true source of his macabre ecstasy.Įver since they were published - the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 - Piranesi’s monstrous images of prisons as cruelly proliferating mega-cities have inspired designers, writers and architects. ![]() He was a draughts man and print maker, his most famous views are of the ruins of ancient Rome, and while Canaletto is stuck in a realm of greeting-card elegance, Piranesi is a fiercely living artist, a spectacular influence on modern culture. Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s series of etchings of imaginary prisons, Le Carceri, is not often thought of in terms of Venetian view painting, for good reason. But Canaletto, Bellotto and the Guardi brothers, the painters who catered for this market, liked to take time off to let fancy fly, to imagine other cities and fantastic versions of their own.Īs he drew the silhouettes against the vast machinery, suspending them, haggard, bent in a direction that was not a direction, for the stairs and bridges, the future extends as far as one can see, as far as one can stand it. In 18th-century Venice, as the canals turned fetid, the heirs to the tradition of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini settled for selling pictures of the Rialto bridge to tourists.
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