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Carceri d’Invenzione

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 added two new panes, increased contrast, and expanded upon once obscure details for the second edition, published in 1761. The changes amplified a darker, more Kafkaesque theme not present in the first edition. The newly added second pane, titled The Man on the Rack, illustrates a man in the throws of brutal exploitation and torture at the hands of complex machines housed in an even more confusing structure.2 This specific edition is often speculated to serve as a commentary by Piranesi on Italian crime and punishment.

However, the entire series might be examined this way, too, perhaps not as physical prisons exhibiting physical means of torture but rather as imaginary prisons featuring psychological mechanisms of torture.3 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.

Piranesi’s 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.4 Foucault calls it the physical manifestation of the absolutist state.5 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.6

Piranesi’s “Carceri d’Invenzione” remains one of his most acclaimed works, an iconic series embodying imprisonment and the resulting physical or psychological anguish. They connect with their viewer and conduct a robust and absolute narrative, unlike any other engraved work.


Labels

Listed left to right

Title plate, Imaginary Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Venetian Architect, 1761
Etching on paper
Transfer from Gelman Library, 2011
P.11.10c

The Arch with a Shell Ornament, 1761
Etching on paper
Transfer from Gelman Library, 2011
P.11.10e

Prisoners on a Projecting Platform, 1761
Etching on paper
Transfer from Gelman Library, 2011
p.11.10d


  1. Richard Wendort, “Piranesi’s Double Ruin,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (2001): 161–80.
  2. Paul Jamieson, “Musset, de Quincey, and Piranesi,” Modern Language Notes 71, no. 2 (1956): 105–8.
  3. Paul Jamieson, “Musset, de Quincey, and Piranesi,” 105–8.
  4. Paul Hirst, “Foucault and Architecture,” AA Files, no. 26 (1993): 52–60
  5. Paul Hirst, “Foucault and Architecture,” 52–60.
  6. John Altdorfer, “Inside A Fantastical Mind,” Carnegie Magazine: Winter 2000.