But Piranesi's chief contribution to practical - as against imaginary - design was to fabricate what an ungenerous critic would call fakes.
He did build one church in Rome, S Maria del Priorato, and he published books of architectural history and theory. This was as much a fantasy as the prisons themselves.
G. B. PIRANESI PRISON SERIES
When Piranesi republished the series in the extra-sinister edition of 1761, this time announcing them for sale at his own address near the Spanish Steps, he gave himself an opening credit as "G Battista Piranesi, Venetian architect". The first edition of the carceri was not even published in his name instead the frontispiece names the publisher, giving the address of his shop in Rome. Just like Canaletto's paintings, Piranesi's prints were conceived as souvenirs - that is what Italy had come to by the 18th century. The chance to see Le Carceri is a chance to look beyond their mythic charisma to find Piranesi himself inside his imaginary spaces. His addiction to the ruins of Rome, his intoxication with their immensity, their power, seems pathological. He didn't find modernity, or progress, or the Enlightenment. Born in Venice, he got away from the place as soon as he could, but could never leave its pervasive air of decline. In today's architecture, you see Piranesi's imagination in Tate Modern, and London Underground's Jubilee line.Īnd yet Piranesi was a view artist - indeed, that was all he was, he would have said, because his unfulfilled ambition was to be an architect. It was the beginning of a blackly glittering stage and film career for Piranesi's images, from Metropolis and Blade Runner to the moving staircases at Hogwarts. As early as 1760 a spectacular set for Rameau's opera Dardanus copied one of Piranesi's boundless prison spaces. Ever since they were published - the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 - Piranesi's monstrous images of prisons as cruelly proliferating mega-cities have inspired designers, writers and architects.
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