The Title Plate of Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, First Edition
The opening plate of the first edition of Le Carceri d'Invenzione, etched between about 1745 and 1750. Piranesi called them inventions, not records: prisons that exist nowhere, built out of the vaults, chains, gantries and stairs he had spent his life drawing among the real ruins of Rome.
Piranesi trained as an architect and built almost nothing. What he made instead were etchings of Rome so authoritative that they shaped how the rest of Europe pictured the ancient city, and alongside them these sixteen impossible interiors. Their staircases lead nowhere, their scale cannot be resolved, and their machinery has no use — which is why they were reread as psychology by De Quincey and the Romantics a lifetime after they were printed. This impression is held by Leiden University. See the imaginary prisons that haunted the Romantic imagination.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
