For all the skill in evidence, the work has often seemed gimmicky.īut when he undertook, in 2002, to rework the Carceri, outlining the pictures with straight pins, then winding black thread between them to mimic Piranesi's scratched line, he hit upon a technique that makes us regard the prisons anew. He has drawn with dust, chocolate, sugar, fake blood and skywriting smoke. The Brazilian-born, New York-based Muniz is known for photographs of images he makes with quirky, often fugitive substances. Other workers still were required to build them and staff them. Underlying the brooding, dizzying grandeur is an Enlightenment-era understanding that for "Abandon All Hope" to be emblazoned above the gates of Hell, somebody had to inscribe it there. Their vastness connotes not so much a sublime terror as the notion of Hell as an enormous bureaucracy. Regardless of the diagnosis, evidence of a proto-romantic sensibility can be found in the sheer outlandishness of the scale of Piranesi's spaces. It was amid the ancient ruins of Rome, however, that his imagination found a platform on which to play out its schemes.Īs legend has it, the Carceri are the stuff of fever dreams, conceived during a bout of malaria. Born a Venetian, with all the love of theatricality that implies, he was a student of stage design as well as architecture. Piranesi (1720-78) was in his twenties when he made the first edition of plates for what he would later call his Carceri d'Invenzione. It's on view at the National Academy of Sciences. Successive generations just naturally find their way through the twisting staircases and cavernous vaults to walk among the ropes and chains and thrill to the smoking braziers, spiked wheels and other instruments of torture.īut an installation that pairs the portfolio of 18th-century etchings with new photos of string-art re-creations of them by contemporary artist Vik Muniz offers a timely reinterpretation of Piranesi's architectural allegories of power. The dark, dreamlike images are broadly circulated, widely reproduced and possessed of great visual appeal and narrative implication. Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Prisons of the Imagination aren't exactly begging to have new life breathed into them.
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