![]() ![]() Numbers I to IX were all done in portrait format (vertical), while X to XVI were landscape format (horizontal). They are capricci, whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin. ![]() While the Vedutisti (or "view makers"), such as Canaletto and Bellotto, more often reveled in the beauty of the sunlit place, in Piranesi this vision takes on what from a modern perspective could be called a Kafkaesque distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthine structures, epic in volume. The images influenced Romanticism and Surrealism. Number XI in the series is also very similar, in reverse, to a Piranesi drawing Study for a palatial interior in the British Museum. Surviving drawings for complicated sets by Filippo Juvarra and Ferdinando Bibiena (both primarily architects) as well as others have evident similaries to the prints in their receding spaces and disappearing staircases. For the second edition in 1761, all the etchings were reworked and numbered I–XVI (1–16), with numbers II and V new etchings in the series.ĭespite being intensely personal imaginative creations, for Piranesi "a source of self-analysis and of creative release", aspects of the Carceri draw on Piranesi's early training as a set designer for the stage prison scenes were often called for. Piranesi reworked the prints a decade later, giving them second states. The first state prints were published in 1750 and consisted of 14 etchings, untitled and unnumbered, with a sketch-like look. The series was started in 1745, when Piranesi was already well-known for more conventional prints of the ancient and modern buildings of Rome. All depict enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines, in rather extreme versions of the capriccio, a favourite Italian genre of architectural fantasies the first title page uses the term. ![]() 1745 to 1750, when the first edition of the set was published. Here it is the act of painting that isolates the artist from reality and ultimately threatens his or her extinction – or the spinning forth of socially imposed patterns.Series of prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi Title page, second edition, 1761Ĭarceri d'invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, is a series of 16 etchings by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 14 produced from c. The works of two contemporaries who have experienced their own selves as a prison are brought together in Rosemarie Trockel’s (b. 1952) wall piece Prisoner of Yourself ( Gefangener deiner selbst) from 1998 and Arnulf Rainer’s (b. 1929) undated Selbstübermalung. Here, beyond the reach of all moral norms, the temptations and threats of Eros could be discovered, the secret life of nature explored, or the absurd conditions in a French internment camp described – as can be seen in the works of WOLS and Hans Bellmer dealing with camp life at a large brickworks in the French Camp des Milles. Uncoupled from the constraints of reality, it offered them a new, “super-real” space. In the 20th century Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) revisited Piranesi’s idea of the paradoxical interweaving of interior and exterior space to establish a higher-level “metaphysical” setting in his paintings, a place that also played an important role in Surrealist painting. The 20th Century: Indoor and Outdoor Space For Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), who had to spend time in a sanatorium because of the biting nature of his caricatures, the prison became the scene of self-deprecating resistance, whereas Odilon Redon (1840–1960) perceived the isolation from the outside world as a protective space that made free and dreamlike imagining possible in the first place. In Francisco de Goya’s (1746–1828) work, the dungeon appears as a place of solitude and existential threat. Works from the 19th century continued to deal with the subject of imprisonment. The 19th Century: Imprisonment as a Motif Gates and arches, stairways and ladders lead to nowhere or into a wall changing perspectives and proportions are a constant source of irritation interior and exterior spaces can no longer be distinguished from one another. Instead, the images deliver the viewer into a world of in-between spaces. The depictions also open the way for speculation because there is not a single enclosed space among them as might be expected in a prison. ![]() The ambiguity of Piranesi’s title – which can be understood as the imprisonment of the imagination, but also as the imagined prison – invites all sorts of interpretations. This year’s collection presentation focuses on Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s (1720–1778) famous series of 16 etchings Carceri d’invezione (Prisons of the Imagination) from 1761. ![]()
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