Friday Art Find: Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons

In the mid-1700s, Giambattista Piranesi created 16 etchings in the Imaginary Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione) series. A young aspiring architect at the time, he was inspired by the magnificent structures by which he was surrounded in his new city, Rome. In these etchings, however, Piranesi—inadvertently perhaps—sees beyond the stone and brick and reveals the hidden structures sensed around him.

The animation below created by Grégoire Dupond in 2010 activates the etchings to depict a surreal nightmarish world—one that is not so far from parts of our reality, when one begins to look beyond the surface. There comes a sense of overpowering oppression coupled with empty alienation. What magnificent, terrible, and subtle prisons might we notice in the spaces around us?

1. The Imaginary Prisons of Piranesi. (2011 Aug 26). Art History Blogger. Retrieved from: https://arthistoryblogger.blogspot.com/2011/08/imaginary-prisons-of-piranesi.html.
2. The Round Tower, from "Carceri d'invenzione" (Imaginary Prisons). The Met. Retrieved from: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/337725.