“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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO, NEAR TIVOLI
Size of the original etching, 18¾ × 24⅝ inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE FALLS AT TIVOLI
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE FALLS AT TIVOLI
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]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. ST. PETER’S AND THE VATICAN
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE VILLA D’ESTE AT TIVOLI
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]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. TITLE-PAGE OF “THE PRISONS”
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.”
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE III
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE IV
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE V
Size of the original etching, 21¼ × 16¼ inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE VI
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE IX
Size of the original etching, 21½ × 16 inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE VII
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE VIII
Size of the original etching, 21½ × 15¾ inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE XI
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.
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE XIII
Size of the original etching, 16 × 21¾ inches]
[Illustration: PIRANESI. THE PRISONS. PLATE XIV
Size of the original etching, 16⅜ × 21½ inches]