Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi. 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. Medium: Etching, engraving, sulphur tint or open bite, burnishing first state of four (Robison) Dimensions: Sheet: 24 13/16 x 19 1/2 in. ![]() Marking: On verso at center: The Metropolitan Museum of Art stamp Focillon 32 Giesecke 76-84 Wilton-Ely I.64.34 Hind 27.9 ii/iii. 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. Artist: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, Mogliano Veneto 17201778 Rome) Publisher: Giovanni Bouchard (French, ca. The Giant Wheel, plate 9 from 'Carceri dInvenzioni' (Imaginary Prisons) Giovanni Battista Piranesi Italian. 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. 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. Like Escher, Piranesi was an artist who infuses his prints with both order and chaos, thus garnering mass appeal. 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. Dante’s epic poem Divina Commedia is often mentioned as a source of inspiration for Piranesi when he was imagining his dark and tortuous prison scenes. The Carceri is a series of etchings with colossal, vertiginous spaces that seem to never end. Initially published anonymously in 1750, Piranesi reissued his collection of prison prints Carceri d’Invenzione under his own name in 1761. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (plate 7, The Drawbridge), second version, etching, 1761 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (title plate), second version, etching, 1761
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