Chapter VII: Part II: “le Carceri D’invenzione” (the Prisons)

Any one who bestows even a passing inspection on the etchings of Piranesi will be struck by the intensity of imagination which they display, a quality whose precise nature it will perhaps be useful to analyze, since, despite the fact that we use the word constantly, the thousand differing values which we attach to it render our ideas of its true meaning in general of the vaguest. Reduced to its ultimate essence, imagination would appear to be the faculty of picture-making; that is to say, the power of bringing images before the mental eye with absolute exactitude, and of clothing ideas with a definite form, so that they have a reality quite as great as that which characterizes the objects of the external world. So long as ideas remain in the mind in the form of abstract conceptions, they are food for reason, but have no power to move us. It is only when, by means of the imaginative faculty, the concept has presented itself as a definite image, that it arouses our emotions and becomes a motive of conduct. When, for example, the idea of an injury to some one we love comes into our sphere of consciousness, a concrete picture of that injury presents itself in some form or other to our inner vision, and is the cause of the emotion which we experience. Our sympathy and understanding will be proportionate to the varying distinctness with which our imaginative power offers such images for our contemplation. Imagination therefore connotes the ability to conceive the emotions and experiences of others, and is thus indissolubly connected with sympathy and all the nobler qualities of human nature.

Size of the original etching, 18¾ × 24⅝ inches]

This etching illustrates a little known side of Piranesi’s talent, namely, his ability to etch pure landscape

The Falls of the Teverone (the ancient Anio) at Tivoli are fifteen miles east-northeast of Rome. Tivoli was the favorite place of residence of many Romans--Mæcenas, Augustus, Hadrian--and the ruins of both Hadrian’s Villa and the Villa of Mæcenas are still to be seen.

Size of the original etching, 18⅞ × 28⅛ inches]

The fact that our conduct is determined not by concepts, but by mental images which motive emotion, although at first it appear paradoxical, will certainly be recognized by any one who is willing to study, if only for a short time, his own mental experiences. This truth was realized with such force as to be made the base of their entire spiritual discipline by that notable Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola, and his followers, the Jesuit fathers, who have understood the complex and subtle mechanism of the human soul more profoundly and exhaustively than any other body of men which has ever existed. In classic times Horace was cognizant of this peculiarity of man’s mind when he wrote that the emotions are aroused more slowly by objects which are presented to consciousness by hearing than by those made known by sight. Burke, it is true, disputes this dictum of the Latin poet, on the ground that, among the arts, poetry certainly arouses emotions more intense than those derived from painting. Although this is probably true, for reasons which he details and which it would be wearisome to reiterate here, it is certain that poetry moves us exactly in ratio to the power it possesses of creating vivid images for our contemplation, while it is certainly doubtful whether any emotion excited through hearing surpasses in vivacity that experienced on suddenly seeing certain objects or situations.

All artists at all worthy of the name are, therefore, possessed to a certain degree of imagination. It is the gift which makes visible to them whatever they embody in words, pictures, sounds, or sculpture. If totally deprived of it, they could create nothing, for no man can express what does not appear to him as having a real existence for at least the moment of creation. In the domain of art, imagination, in its lower forms, is merely the power of recollecting and reproducing things endowed with material existence; but in its highest development, when handling the conceptions and emotions of an original mind, it acquires the power of actual creation, and is inseparably attached to the loftiest acts of which man is capable.

Among later works there are few better expressions of that feeling for nature in its wildest aspects, which, practically unknown until the time of Rousseau, is now considered the speciality of modern artists. That Piranesi appreciated this side of nature, and was able to express its poetry and power, could be proved by this plate alone.

Size of the original etching, 18¾ × 28⅛ inches]

This is perhaps the best example of Piranesi’s exaggerated perspective. It is quite justified, in this case at least, by the success with which it creates an impression of vastness and of grandeur which was certainly aimed at by the architects of St. Peter’s, but which the exterior of the actual building, quite as certainly, fails to arouse.

Size of the original etching, 18 × 27¾ inches]

Every plate etched by Piranesi betrays to even a careless glance the presence of imagination in some form, while in one series this noble faculty is revealed with an amplitude almost unparalleled. If it be only the presentment of fragments of Roman epitaphs, he finds a way by some play of light or shade, or by some trick of picturesque arrangement, to throw a certain interest about them, relieving the dryness of barren facts; if it be the etching of some sepulchral vault, in itself devoid of any but antiquarian interest, he introduces some human figure or some suggestive implement to give a flash of imagination to the scene. In those very plates where he depicts the actually existing monuments of classic Rome, and in which it was his expressed intention to save these august ruins from further injury and preserve them forever in his engravings, he created what he saw anew, and voiced his own distinctive sentiment of the melancholy grandeur of ruined Rome. To-day the word _impressionism_ has come to have a rather restricted meaning in connection with a recent school of art, but Piranesi’s work, like that of all really great artists, is in the true sense of the word _impressionistic_. In passing, it may be remarked that he was one of the rare artists in earlier times who worked directly from nature, a habit distinctive of our modern impressionism. Piranesi is concerned with the expression of his own peculiar impression of what he sees; for the benefit of others and for his own delight he gives form to his own particular vision of whatever he treats. He certainly was desirous of, and successful in, recording the existing forms of the buildings he loved so well; it is also true that his etchings and engravings are in many ways faithful renderings which have immense historical and antiquarian value, since they preserve an aspect of Rome none shall ever see again, but together with the actual facts, and transcending them, he offers the imaginative presentment of his own creative emotion. What he draws is based on nature, and is full of verisimilitude, but it is not realistic in the base way that a photograph would be. It contains while it surpasses reality, and is faithful to the _idea_ of what he sees, using that word in its Platonic sense.

Taine, in what is probably the most lucid and exhaustive definition of the nature of a work of art ever given, starts from the statement that all great art is based on an exact imitation of nature; then proceeds to demonstrate how this imitation of nature must not extend to every detail, but should, instead, confine itself to the relations and mutual dependencies of the parts; and finally states, as the condition essential to creating a work of art, that the artist shall succeed, by intentional and systematic variation of these relations, in setting free, in expressing more clearly and completely than in the real object, some essential characteristic or predominating idea. This is wherein art transcends nature, and a work of art is, therefore, constituted by the fact that it expresses the essential idea of some series of subjects, freed from the accidents of individuality, in a form more harmoniously entire than that attained by any object in nature. Now this is precisely what Piranesi did. He is often taken to task for his departure from a literal statement of fact in his renderings of architectural subjects, but, in so departing, he is varying the interrelation of parts so as to disengage the characteristic essence of what he depicts, and thus create a work of art, not a historical document. If he lengthens Bernini’s colonnade in front of St. Peter’s, he is only composing with the same liberty accorded to Turner, when, in one picture of St. Germain, he introduces elements gathered from three separate parts of the river Seine; and by so doing he expresses the idea of limitless grandeur, latent in St. Peter’s, with a fullness it does not possess in the actual building. In his “Antiquities of Rome,” he disengages a sense of devastation and of desolate majesty which is the fundamental characteristic of Roman ruin, and one that could have presented itself with such directness and force only to the mind of an artist of genius. His own vision of the inner truth of what he saw, stripped of everything accidental, is what he gives to posterity, and what lifts his work out of the field of simple archæology into the proud realm of true art.

It is interesting to note that at the time Piranesi etched this fine plate the avenue of Cypress trees, which now adds so much to the picturesqueness of the Villa d’Este, was not even planted.

Size of the original etching, 18½ × 27⅝ inches]

From “Opere Varie di Architettura Prospettive Grotteschi Antichita sul Gusto Degli Antichi Romani Inventate, ed Incise da Gio. Batista Piranesi. Architetto Veneziano.” (Rome, 1750.)

Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches]

Even in those plates where he etches actual scenes with loving care, Piranesi passes nature, as it were, through the alembic of his own personality, doing this moreover in a way peculiar to him and to him alone. His originality consists in this,--that his mind, when considering an object, seized instinctively on certain distinguishing features peculiar to that object, qualities which his mind, and only his, was capable of extracting from the rough ore of ordinary perception; and that for the powerful impression which he thus experienced, he was able to find an adequate and distinctive expression. It was his good fortune to behold Rome in a moment of pathetic and singular beauty, irrevocably vanished, as one of the penalties to be paid for the knowledge gained by modern excavation. In those days the Roman ruins did not have that trim air, as of skeletons ranged in a museum, which they have taken on under our tireless cleansing and research. For centuries the barbarians of Rome had observed the precept: “Go ye upon her walls and destroy; but make not a full end,” so that only the uppermost fragments of temple columns protruded through the earth where the cattle browsed straggling shrubbery above the buried Forum, while goats and swine herded among cabins in the filth and century-high dirt which covered the streets that had been trod by the pride of emperors. But that which, more than anything else, helped to create an atmosphere of romantic beauty none shall see again, was the indescribable tangle of vine, shrub, and flower, which in those days draped and hid under a mass of verdure the mighty ruins of baths and halls that still stupefy by their vastness when we see them now, devoid of their ancient marble dressing, stripped clean like polished bones. Shelley tells how even in his day the Baths of Caracalla were covered with “flowery glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever-winding labyrinths.”

The sentiment of august grandeur inspired by the indestructible mass of Roman ruins was, therefore, in those days curiously complicated by the contrast between them and the fantastic growth of ever-passing, ever-renewed vegetation which wrapped them as in a mantle. The poignancy of this beauty Piranesi seized with a felicity and expressed with a plenitude given to no one but to him. He was, both by nature and by volition, profoundly classical, yet he enveloped all that he handled, however classic it might be in subject, with a sense of mysterious strangeness so strong as to arouse the sensation called in later times _romantic_. This contrast is one of the distinctive phases of his originality.

It would be pleasant to think that Edmund Burke was familiar with the creations of Giambattista Piranesi when he wrote so searchingly of “The Sublime and Beautiful”; but, if this be perhaps an idle fancy, it is certainly true that it would not be easy to find concrete examples demonstrating more clearly than the etchings of Piranesi the truth of large parts of his enquiry, and in particular of the following definition of the sublime: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the _sublime_; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible, but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.”

Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches]

Size of the original etching, 21½ × 16¼ inches]

The application of these words to the work of Piranesi will probably surprise those persons acquainted only with his etchings of classic ruins. However, even these plates exemplify this definition in many ways which it would be tedious to enumerate, while to feel its full appositeness it is only necessary to study Piranesi’s least-known and greatest achievement, commonly called “The Prisons,” and known in Italian as “Le Carceri d’Invenzione.” These sixteen fantasies, executed at the age of twenty-two and published at thirty, form a set of prints in which it is no exaggeration to say that imagination is displayed with a power and amplitude that have elsewhere never been surpassed in etching or engraving, and only rarely in other forms of pictorial art. Although scarcely known to the public at large, they have always formed the delight of those who feel the appeal of imaginative fantasy, and notably of Coleridge and of De Quincey, who has recorded his impression in golden words. They are reputed to represent scenes which burned themselves into the artist’s consciousness while delirious with fever, and it is certain that they do possess that terrible, vivid reality, so enormously amplified as to lose the proportions of ordinary existence, which characterizes all oppressive dreams and particularly those induced by narcotics. They represent interiors of vast and fantastic architecture, complete yet unfinished, composed of an inexplicable complexity of enormous arches springing from massive piers built, like the arches they carry, of gigantic blocks left rough-hewn. By a contrast that could only have been conceived by genius these monstrous spaces are traversed in every direction by frail scaffoldings, together with ladders, bridges, and all manner of works in wood; and are filled, at the same time, with an inexhaustible succession of ropes, pulleys, and engines, finely described by De Quincey as “expressive of enormous power put forth or of resistance overcome.” They are distinguished by one of Piranesi’s greatest qualities, the power to express immensity as, perhaps, no one else has ever done, and are flooded with light which seems intense in its opposition to the brilliant shadows, so that altogether it would be difficult to understand their title of “Prisons,” were it not for the presence of engines of torment, and of mighty chains that twine over and depend from huge beams, or sometimes bind fast the little bodies of human beings. The unusual and inexplicable nature of these “Prisons” gives to the beholder’s imagination a mighty stimulus productive of strange excitement.

Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches]

Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 15¾ inches]

The “English Opium-Eater” in likening his visions to these pictures,--and what higher praise of their imaginative force could there be?--speaks of their “power of endless growth and self-reproduction.” One of their distinguishing peculiarities is this repetition of parts, as of things which grow out of themselves unceasingly, reproducing their parts until the brain reels at the idea of their endlessness. This characteristic, together with that curious opposition between their air of open immensity and their suggestion of prison-horror, gives them that particular appearance of absolute reality in the midst of impossibility, which is a distinctive feature of dreams. In this way they arouse a sense of infinitude in the mind of the beholder; now, although size is in itself of no importance, it is nevertheless true that, when combined with other qualities of value, “greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.” This greatness, both in conception and in material execution, they possess, together with that opposition of light to obscurity which “seems in general to be necessary to make anything very terrible.” Indeed, that these etchings reveal a more imaginative vigor arouse a kind of awe in any one who gives them more than a passing glance, while the horror which they suggest is never physical so as to nauseate or “press too nearly” and cause pain, but imparts, on the contrary, a sense of danger and of terror that causes a delightful excitement, certainly fulfilling the definition of the sublime as given by Burke.

Although it does not follow that Piranesi is a greater etcher than Rembrandt, it may still be true that these etchings reveal a more imaginative vigor than is shown in those of the great Dutchman. They do not possess that subtle imagination which envelops everything that Rembrandt ever touched in an air of exquisite mystery, and gives to his least sketch an inexhaustible fund of suggestion, nor can they be compared to his etchings as consummate works of art; yet they do have a titanic, irresistible force of sheer imagination, which neither Rembrandt nor any other etcher, however superior in other ways, possessed to the same extent. Their preëminence in this one point is certainly admissible, and as it has been shown, presumably, that they are imaginative, original, and sublime, is it too much to say that, at least in the expression of certain intellectual qualities, Piranesi in these plates carried the art of etching to the highest point yet attained, so that no one who does not know these plates can know quite all that etching is capable of expressing?

“The Prisons” are also the most notable example of that principle of opposition, or contrast, of which Piranesi made so masterful a use in whatever he did. The application of this law in the handling, and at times in the abuse, of blacks and whites, is, of course, apparent to even the most casual observer in all that came from his hand. In the present series, however, this law may be seen carried to its utmost limit. From every stupendous vault there hangs a long, thin rope, while up gigantic pillars of rough masonry climb frail ladders of wood, and great voids between immense piers are spanned by light bridges, also of wood, bearing the slightest and most open of iron railings. In his plates of Roman ruins, Piranesi introduces the human figure dressed in the lovely costume of the eighteenth century, in order to contrast grace with force, and to oppose the living and the fugitive to the inanimate and the enduring; but here his use of the human figure rises to the truly dramatic. In the midst of these vast and awful halls with their air of stillness and of power, of “resistance overcome,” he places men who seem the smallest and the frailest among creatures. Grouped by twos or threes, whether depicted in violent motion or standing with significant gesture, they are always enigmatic in their attitudes, so that their presence and obvious emotion amid this immense and silent grandeur arouse a sense of tragic action, a feeling of mysterious wonder and curiosity that gives to all lovers of intellectual excitement a pleasure as keen as unusual. Particularly in one vision of a monstrous wheel of wood revolving in space, no one knows how, above a fragment of rocky architecture, while three human beings engaged in animated converse are obviously unconscious of the gigantic revolutions, the limits of fantasy are reached, and the mind turns instinctively to those images of the spheres rolling eternally in infinite space which are found in Milton and all mystic poets.

Size of the original etching, 21½ × 16 inches]

Size of the original etching, 21⅝ × 16⅛ inches]

These plates are also interesting as a striking and curious proof of Piranesi’s conscious mastery of his art. They are filled with such a fury of imagination, and are etched with such dash and boldness of execution that it seems as though they must be, if not, as was once said, the sane work of a madman, at least burned directly on the plate by the force of a fever-stricken mind. But not so; they are, however fevered their original inspiration may have been, the result of careful elaboration, and are but one more proof of the saying of that other and still greater etcher, Whistler, that a work of art is complete, and only complete, when all traces have disappeared of the means by which it was created. There exists in the British Museum a unique, and until recently unknown, series of first states of “The Prisons.” Now, although these first states have the main outline and, as it were, the germ of the published states, these latter are so elaborated and, on the whole, improved, as to make it at first incredible that they could ever have grown out of, or had any relation to, the earlier states. The idea of vast masses of masonry is there, thrown on the paper with a simplicity of decorative effect and a directness of touch which have been lessened in the later work; but, on the other hand, all those scaffolds, engines of torment, and groups of men above described, are lacking, so that the power of contrast and the sense of terror, productive of the sublime, are entirely wanting, and are, therefore, shown to be the result of conscious art used by Piranesi in elaboration of an original inspiration.

Piranesi possessed a style so intensely individual that every print he produced is recognizable as his by any person who has ever looked at two or three of his plates with moderate attention, yet this style never degenerated into _manner_; that is to say, into an imitation not of nature, but of the peculiarities of other men or of one’s own earlier work. It became a manner or process in the hands of his son, Francesco, but with Giovanni Battista it always remained _style_, which is the expression of an original intellect observing nature before consciously varying the relations of elements drawn by it from nature, to the end of producing a work of art. This style, whose faults lie in excessive contrasts of black and white, in inadequate handling of skies, and, at times, in a certain general hardness of aspect, is marked by great boldness, breadth, and power, both in conception and in actual execution, but it is never marred by crudity or roughness. It is a remarkable fact that the immense force, which first of all impresses one in Piranesi’s work, does not exclude, but is, on the contrary, often combined or contrasted with extreme elegance and fineness of touch. To cite but one instance: in that wonderful print which forms the title-page of “The Prisons,”--the figure of the chained man, who imparts such a sense of terror to the whole scene, is handled with a grace and delicacy worthy of Moreau or any of those French contemporaries who filled the land with their exquisite creations for the endless delight of later generations. It is this contrast, together with his dramatic introduction and grouping of the human figure, which gives to Piranesi’s style a character that has been aptly qualified as _scenic_. An etching by Piranesi produces very much the same curious effect that a person experiences on entering a theater after the curtain has risen, so that he receives from the stage a sudden, sharp impression, not of a passing moment of the play, but of one distinct, dramatic picture. His etchings are never theatrical in the sense of something factitious and exaggerated beyond likeness to nature, but are always truly dramatic.

Size of the original etching, 21½ × 15¾ inches]

Size of the original etching, 16 × 21½ inches]

It will have been noticed that plates by Piranesi have been referred to both as etchings and engravings; this is because he used both etching and engraving in the same plate, a proceeding which, if decried by theoretical writers, has none the less been habitually employed by many of the greatest masters of both means of expression. Despite his faults and his Latin exuberance, Piranesi is technically one of the great etchers, in whose hands, particularly in certain plates in “The Prisons,” the etching-needle attained a breadth of vigorous execution that no one has surpassed. In judging an artist, the obvious precept, to consider what he was aiming to do, is unfortunately too often neglected. To expect of Piranesi either the incomparable delicacy of Whistler, or the unsurpassed crispness of Meryon would be futile, but he does possess certain forceful qualities which are not theirs. When he used the burin, he could handle it with the greatest precision and skill. In such a plate as the one known as _The French Academy_, the building is engraved with a skill not at all unworthy of the engravers who were at that time doing such wonderful work in France, while the plate, as a whole, gains a delightful quality,--that neither pure etching nor pure engraving could have given,--from the contrast which the sharp and delicately engraved lines make with the figures that are etched with a consummate freedom and dash worthy of Callot, who, one cannot but think, must have influenced Piranesi.

In his valuable monograph on Piranesi, Mr. Arthur Samuel makes the statement that “architectural etching has culminated with him”; and it is certain that in this field his work surpasses, both in architectural correctness and in artistic merit, any that has been done either before or since his day.

Size of the original etching, 16 × 21¾ inches]

Size of the original etching, 16⅜ × 21½ inches]