Word: carceri
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...took Europe by storm. During most of the 19th century, with its taste for Greek classicism and Gothic gloom, Piranesi's reputation receded, even though his prints were continuously reproduced. One series, drawn when he was about 25, still grips the modern imagination. These are the Carceri d'Invenzione, or Imaginary Prisons, which are the centerpieces of the National Gallery's show. Overpowering machines loom darkly. Ropes dangle ominously from huge beams. Towering arches soar, balconies thrust across them, stairways lead upward to rooms that are not really rooms but more spaces...
...will probably ever know just what inspired this remarkable group of etchings. Certainly the vast vaults derive from his study of Roman baths, the massive masonry perhaps from his childhood memories of Venice's sea walls. But down through time the Carceri have fascinated men as various as De Quincey, Coleridge, Victor Hugo and Aldous Huxley...
...while preparing the Magnificenze; the outskirts of Rome were infested by mosquitoes, buzzing over the swamps, from which emerged, like dinosaur bones, the battered marble of ancient Rome. If this is so, it adds a facet to one's view of Piranesi's most famous suite, the Carceri d'Invenzione or "Imaginary Prisons," which he engraved in 1745. They are among the most potent dream images ever evoked. To call them precursors of Surrealism is to diminish their oneiric power, for their directness as statements about hallucination has not been equaled this century...
...from these scribbled and echoing crypts, with their swinging cables, their proliferating vaults and huge iron grilles: one imagines Piranesi, gripped by some mastering paranoia, trying to stabilize it and give it a "real" form. In the 18th century, opium was the usual medicine for fever, and perhaps the Carceri were inspired by it; certainly their feeling of limitless dread, of imprisonment by infinite space, pertains to opium experience. Hence Piranesi's interest for some 19th century writers who, like Coleridge and Baudelaire, were opium addicts. "With the same power of endless growth and reproduction," wrote Thomas de Quincey...
High spot of the show were twelve of the 16 famous drawings of imaginary carceri" (prisons). Tiny tattered figures cowered beneath enormous vaults and arches; huge spiked wheels ground inexorably; stairs spiraled up the dank walls to nowhere. In a world where nightmare prisons and melancholy ruins were once more an appalling reality, Piranesi's treatment of them hit as hard as ever...
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