"Invenzioni capric di carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)," Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 153.ġ7Marchesano, “Invenzioni capric di carceri,” 151. 17ġ4Lucchi, Lowe, Pavanello, The arts of Piranesi, 125.ġ5Marchesano, Louis. The prisons of I Carceri stand out as one of his major achievements. For example, in Italy, a popular representation of the sublime involved depictions of Mount Vesuvius erupting, a terrific and devastating event. The images presented by these plates would have been deeply haunting to his audience as an expression of the sublime, a style founded in the emotion of terror which was becoming fashionable in the art world. Each of the original 14 prints was roughly the size of a 16-by-20 photograph, large by most etching standards. In the midst of these popular prints, in the late 1740s, Piranesi began making a series of fantasy prints of imaginary prisons, or carceri, built of immense dank spaces and torture devices. 16 In these prints, Piranesi demonstrated an investment in a unique visual experience for the viewer, evidenced by the tug of war between light and shadow. The more extravagant the fantasy, the better. No other prints by Piranesi force the eye to move so deeply inward and upward. Moreover, it is known that the first Prison that Piranesi engraved Carcere oscura, which does not belong to this series, is occasionally referred to as Prison of Dardanus because it was later used as a maquette for the stage set of Dardanus by Jean Philippe Rameau (1739). Piranesi’s dabbling in stage design must have also been an influence in the invention of I Carceri, as the fantasy and narrative of such architecture is omnipresent. 15 The second edition of I Carceri was inspired by his obsession with archaeology and antiquity and was influenced by the impressions he gathered in Rome. I Carceri allowed Piranesi an experimental outlet with which he ventured into his interests of scale and monumentality. Eisenstein, Sergei (1986), The Film Sense, trans. Piranesi betrays the rules of perspective and even hides important elements of the architecture itself when his etched lines fade into the edges of the paper. (Figure 3) and Giovanni Battista Piranesis etchings of Le Carceri (The Prisons) not. In I Carceri, Piranesi never presents an entire building, nor does he ever give enough information to distinguish the complete form of the structures, as in The Pier with Chains. In both pieces, there is a sense of cluttered and claustrophobic space, endlessly extending structures, and impossible structures. The Man on the Rack and The Pier with Chains, representative examples of I Carceri, both contain large cavities of space and gigantic pillars, buttresses, walls, and arches. 14 These pieces represented unrealistic architectural structures that have little to do with actual prisons. In I Carceri, Piranesi explored the possibilities of perspective and spatial illusion while pushing the medium of etching to its limits. In addition to Piranesi’s lithographs, the exhibition also displays works by Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, Ragnhild Keyser, Alvin Coburn, Sergei Eisenstein, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas, Julie Mehretu.Īt the event, Ambassador Nicoletti thanked the National Museum of Norway for dedicating one its first exhibition to the Italian artist.Piranesi created the series of convoluted prison interiors, I Carceri, after being influenced by his upbringing in the printmaking scene in Venice. Innovations in fields such as abstract painting, film editing, and strong contrasts in photography all owe their art to this Italian artist.Įven if Piranesi is best known for his lithographic portrayals of Rome, the exhibition focuses on his lithographs of imaginary architecture contained in his Prigioni immaginarie (Imaginary Prisons, 1761) and the Campo Marzio plan of Rome (1762), which highlight how artists, architects, filmmakers, and writers of the 20 th and 21 st centuries have drawn inspiration from his labyrinthic passageways and infinite spaces. The exhibition analyses the influence that the visionary 18 th century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi had on defining the idea of modernity in a range of artistic disciplines through the 20 th and 21 st centuries. The Italian Ambassador in Oslo, Stefano Nicoletti, attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the exhibition titled “Piranesi and the Modern” set up at the National Museum in the Norwegian capital.
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