Cleveland Museum of Art

Prisoners on a Projecting Platform, Plate 10

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Date

1749–50

Medium

etching, engraving, sulphur tint or open bite, burnishing

Culture

Italy, 18th century

Department

Prints

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

In his series of imaginary prisons, Giovanni Battista Piranesi experimented with scale, perspective, and etching to create disorienting and disturbing images of incarceration. Based on his training as a stage designer rather than on observations of real prisons, Piranesi used a low vantage point and distant staircases to disrupt traditional perspective and to emphasize both the monumentality of the space and the futility of trying to escape. Set against a strange cloud of white smoke, the densely drawn and deeply etched lines of the prisoners at left produce a confusing jumble of bodies that, while imprecise, evoke their pain and punishment. Author Thomas De Quincy compared the disorienting and disturbing imagery of this series to his experience with opium addiction in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater .

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