I began to imagine a spooky parallel between Piranesi's archaic castles of pain and the forbidding gallery structure, equally a kind of captivity of the aesthetic. The surface ground is inscrutable and the way the pins fan out suggests a wide-angle perspective. He became famous for his engravings of subjects of archaeological interest entitled Views of Rome. ![]() I imagined that the white ground was the gallery wall and that the several drawings had been installed in the white cube as sculpture. ![]() When I first saw the works, I didn't realise that the string was stretched out over a board. And even when the cord thickens into clumps, the shadows create more of a dark dissolve, very gentle and soft. The surface must have been photographed in perfectly flat light, so that the pins cast no shadows. Photographically, the works are ingenious. The strings are passed around the pins at the level of the head so the mesh is conspicuously suspended some distance from the white background. They replicate both a drawn line and the tonnes of stone that they denote. The lines denoting architectural structures are in themselves a kind of flimsy sculpture. The cat's cradle method of line-making is both a celebration and a caricature of drawing. These frightening vaults are the tomb of compassion, a temple of slow death and psychological rot. With crashing diagonals and circular rhythms, wood and stone conspire to crush the nerve of the spectator giant cavernous spaces are set up in morbid defiance of reason, monumentalising the sinister impulse to terror and cruelty. You can almost hear an empty silence, interrupted by the occasional echoing of ratchets that operate the gantries, the moaning, the rattling of chains and winching of cages, the loud reverberation of beams that turn to the end of their huge bearings with a thud. The wretched humans condemned to languish within are dwarfed and cowed by the architecture. 8 Paris: Firmin Didot, 1837-9 Piranesi’s series, which he titled Prisons of the Imagination, shows both his careful manipulations of perspective and lighting and his knowledge of Baroque stage design. The vast blocks of stone are oppressive and the light is thin. Prisons of the Imagination (Carceri d’Invenzione) Works ( Opere ), vol. In the Prisons, enormous stairs and arches, gangways and towers, beams, wheels, cables and grates, collide with overbearing forces. The artist had mainly represented noble and admirable antiquities but in the Prisons, Piranesi cultivates a dark obsession, exploring the ghastly sites of torture that fill the mind with dread. In the rough and bold etchings of the Carceri, Piranesi achieved the immediacy of a drawn sketch in print. From the middle of the 18th century, an epoch best known for its elegance and rococo charm, a harrowing vision of Roman dungeons grew perversely on Piranesi's delicate plates. The Prisons of Invention by Giovanni Battista Piranesi are among the gravest artworks ever.
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