In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Thomas De Quincey recalls the poet Coleridge describing a set of prints by Piranesi called his "Dreams." In them, Coleridge said, you see vast halls and stairways, and on the stairs a figure, Piranesi himself, climbing. Follow the stairs and they end abruptly over an abyss. Look higher and there is another flight, and Piranesi on it, climbing again, and then another, until both climber and staircase vanish into the gloom of the hall. De Quincey had never actually seen the prints. It didn't matter. The description became one of the most famous accounts of nightmare in English literature, and Piranesi's Carceri have been haunted by it ever since.
The real series is called Carceri d'invenzione, "Imaginary Prisons." Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Venetian who trained as an architect but found few chances to build, published the first version in Rome around 1749 to 1750, when he was still in his twenties. The plates were loose and sketchy, almost improvised. About ten years later he reworked them for a second edition, adding two new plates, deepening the shadows, and filling the spaces with chains, pulleys, torture wheels and endless bridges.
Nothing in these prisons obeys the rules, and that is the point. Architects love them because Piranesi understood construction perfectly, which is exactly how he knew how to break it convincingly. The real subject is the building itself, a structure so vast it has become a kind of weather.
Their afterlife is enormous. Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe and Aldous Huxley all wrote about them. M. C. Escher's impossible staircases owe them an obvious debt, and film designers have borrowed their tangled interiors for everything from dystopian cities to the architecture of dreams. Piranesi also helped invent how we see ancient Rome itself: his huge etchings of ruins, sold to Grand Tour travelers, shaped the European imagination of the city for a century.
There's a reason these prints feel so current. They are pictures of systems too large to see the edges of, where every path leads to another passage. Piranesi drew them in the age of the Enlightenment, and yet they look like the inside of an anxious mind at 3 a.m. That's the trick of the Carceri: they are prisons with no walls you could ever find.
Piranesi's The Round Tower appears on our: