![]() ![]() Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi. Giovanni Battista Piranesi Italian Neoclassical Engraver, 1720-1778 Guide to pictures of works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in art museum sites and image. It becomes even more explicit in the film adaptations. The influence is also discernible in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and the Harry Potter books. An etching from the Carceri series hung in his office and the scenes in heaven in The Discovery of Heaven (and in its film adaptation) are clearly inspired by it. Harry Mulisch (one of the great Dutch novelists) was also a fan. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) are dystopian novels in which the menacing world of Piranesi is recognisable. A tyranny of order and efficiency that reduces humanity to a predictable cog in a process. There are currently over 7,500 high-resolution images (and counting) to choose from. He compares Piranesi’s prisons to the panopticism that was so popular in architecture at the time. ![]() Aldous Huxley wrote an essay accompanying an edition of Piranesi’s prints in 1949. That started early on with writers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Lord Byron, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe. The Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina holds a rare complete set of his posthumous Opere Works (1837-9), which consists. Like Escher, Piranesi was an artist who infuses his prints with both order and chaos, thus garnering mass appeal. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an innovative graphic artist who is most known for architectural studies of Rome and his imaginary prisons. For many artists it is an abiding source of inspiration, particularly in terms of its utopian and dystopian character. Piranesi’s oeuvre not only influenced M.C. Conversely, Escher’s prints lack the dark, menacing element that characterises Piranesi’s series. But in terms of abandoning gravity and creating truly impossible buildings and spaces, he never goes to the extreme to which Escher would eventually go. Piranesi exaggerates the perspective and renders his spaces hugely impressive with dramatic lighting and a beautiful light/dark contrast. Here he creates a threatening, hidden world full of ominous caverns and hanging pulleys and cables, in which man is occasionally present yet markedly insignificant and vulnerable. Labyrinths filled with an infinite number of stairs, ladders, bridges, gates and galleries, none of which seem to lead anywhere. The Carceri is a series of etchings with colossal, vertiginous spaces that seem to never end. Le antichita romane : opera del cavaliere Giambattista Piranesi. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (plate 7, The Drawbridge), second version, etching, 1761 Goolds first Paris edition of Piranesis works. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (title plate), second version, etching, 1761 ![]()
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