Carceri d'invenzione

's portrait of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1779 Some preparatory drawings, mostly in ink wash, have survived, but for example two studies for Plate XIV in London and Edinburgh both differ significantly from each other and either state of the print (allowing for a reversal of the image between drawing and etching). But there are drawings for Plates VIII and XII that are close to the etchings. A drawing of Plate XIII appears to be a copy of the first edition print, as yet lacking the changes made for the second edition. Though the second edition was the last, Piranesi continued to print individual plates at least into the 1770s, experimenting with the printing "with regards to the effects of ink, in both extent and colour". The first edition was reprinted together with Piranesi's archaeological ''Della Magnificenze ed Architettura de' Romani'' in 1751. The reworking all the plates underwent before the second edition around 1761, as well as perhaps effacing signs of wear on the plates, saw "heightened tonal contrasts and the introduction of more explicit details... the final traces of Rococo linear atmospheric subtleties were to be replaced by strongly bitten lines and broad areas of tonal contrast". The second edition takes a darker thematic, as well as visual, turn, with the new Plate II featuring a scene of torture near the bottom. In various plates new "penal apparatus in the form of chains, cables, gallows and sinsterly indistinct instruments of torture, many of them infused with a sense of decay through endless use." In the second edition, some of the illustrations appear to have been reworked to contain deliberate impossible geometries. Wilton-Ely describes these as "visual ambivalences and contrived irrationality of space formulated in the early version and extended for new creative ends in the later one. ==Crime and punishment==

The second edition in particular reflects Piranesi's idiosyncratic views on Italian history. In earlier works he had already deplored Greek influence on ancient Rome, and emphasized Rome's Etruscan heritage. The new Plates II and V, and the extensively reworked Plate XVI "reveal these new concerns in a more overt form", including inscriptions. Plate II has names and busts of "victims punished unjustly by Nero" as recorded by Tacitus, which Piranesi saw as "emphasizing the decline of Roman law under a philhellene emperor". The inscriptions in Plate XVI are quotations or paraphrases from Livy's history of the early Roman Republic, showing the justice of early Roman law. Plate V includes "a giant relief in a late Imperial style" of a prisoner in chains being "led to punishment". ==Reception==

Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) wrote the following:Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him. An in-depth analysis of Piranesi's Carceri was written by Marguerite Yourcenar in her Dark Brain of Piranesi: and Other Essays (1984). The twentieth-century forger Eric Hebborn claimed to have forged Piranesi sketches. Piranesi's dark and seemingly endless staircases and blocked passages prefigure M. C. Escher's images with endless stairs such as his 1960 lithograph "Ascending and Descending", and are said to have inspired Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum". Piranesi's work inspired the ''Carceri d'invenzione'' series of chamber works by the English composer Brian Ferneyhough. The 1998 film The Sound of the Carceri presents cellist Yo-Yo Ma performing works by Johann Sebastian Bach in a computer generated simulation of Piranesi's Carceri. The film is part of the Inspired by Bach series. Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi (2020) was inspired by Piranesi's Carceri etchings. The video game Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken (2025) has a level based on Piranesi's Carceri etchings, which is presented as a place of torment inside of humanity's collective dream world. == Notes ==