Venice had been one of the great trading powers of medieval and Renaissance Europe, but by the 18th-century its political dominion was waning. Although past its heyday, the republic still possessed great appeal to the emerging tourist market; it was a preeminent destination for the thousands of prominent young adult males embarking on the “Grand Tour”. Capitalising on the tourists’ desire to secure a memento, there developed the genre of view painting, spawning a plethora of paintings of the Rialto Bridge, the Grand Canal and St Mark’s Square, by the likes of Canaletto, Bellotto, and the Guardi brothers.
As well as real city views, the artists sometimes liked to let their fancy fly and paint imaginary views (capricci) that placed buildings, archaeological ruins and other architectural elements together in fictional and often fantastical combinations. The name of one such artist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, is not particularly well-known these days but nonetheless left to history a series of etchings whose influence is felt to this day: the so-called Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri).
These prisons of Piranesi’s imagination were dark, labyrinthine depictions of a nightmare world. Ever since they were published – the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 – Piranesi’s images have inspired designers, writers and architects alike. We can see elements of them in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and in Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The etchings foreshadow M C Escher’s playful explorations of perspective, and we can even see their influence in the moving staircases at Hogwarts.
Piranesi’s prison interiors have no outer walls; each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are large and continuous: they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. We see strange devices suggestive of torture: wheels with spikes, pulleys, baskets big enough to contain a person. You don’t quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. Prisoners undergo mysterious torments, chained to posts, whilst high above them spectators gather on a vertiginous walkway. It is impossible to tell at times who is a prisoner, who a guard, who a visitor, and in the end you suspect that everyone in this place is a prisoner.
