![]() Many of the bound volumes at the SLV were from the collection of George IV, while those from the Baillieu Library were acquired from James Alipius Goold, Melbourne’s first Roman Catholic archbishop. Edition: Francesco Piranesi, 1800-07, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.īoth The University of Melbourne (Baillieu Library) and the State Library of Victoria (SLV) have distinguished collections of Piranesi prints. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Prisoners on a Projecting Platform’, from ‘Carceri’, 1749-50. As such, Piranesi’s imaginary prisons held a mesmerising fascination for later Romantic writers, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe (‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ 1842). Diminutive figures appear doomed to climb endless staircases without hope of release. As can be seen in the following etching, drama is achieved through contrasts between the lit spaces and the deep shadows. Piranesi’s ‘prison’ etchings convert ancient Roman ruins into elaborate, visionary dungeons filled with stairways that go nowhere, and with mysterious scaffolding and instruments of torture. The English word ‘capricious’ derives from capriccio and suggests the irrational. This form of veduta, the capriccio , combines life-like architectural elements in a rather strange fashion. These days Piranesi is probably best known for his Prisons (or Carceri) etchings of labyrinthine prison interiors, which were constructions of his imagination and pushed the limits of perspective and spatial illusion. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Piazza del Popolo’, ca 1750, etching, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ![]()
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