Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Sawhorse

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Date

c. 1761

Medium

Etching

Department

European Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

The timeless, gloomy Prisons are entirely man-made. Hewn from stone and timber and fitted out with rope and iron, they exclude the outside world. Not even time exerts its influence here. In Clarel, the longest American poem, Herman Melville captures the impression that the Prisons made on Romantic artists: In Piranesi’s rarer prints, Interiors measurelessly strange, Where the distrustful thought may range Misgiving still—what mean the hints? Stairs upon stairs which dim ascend In series from plunged Bastilles* drear— Pit under pit; long tier on tier Of shadowed galleries which impend Over cloisters, cloisters without end; The height, the depth—the far, the near; Ring-bolts to pillars in vaulted lanes, And dragging Rhadamanthine** chains; These less of wizard influence lend Than some allusive chambers closed. *bastilles (n.) fortress prisons **rhadamanthine (adj.) hellishly severe These two etchings were printed from the same copper plate. As a young man Piranesi had emphasized his freedom of invention with rapid, slashing strokes and airy spaces, but twelve years later, his sensibility had changed. His experience making dozens of large, intricately detailed etchings of ancient and modern structures profoundly deepened his understanding of Rome’s architectural fabric. The clarity and concrete presence of these studies outstripped all others until the invention of photography (see illustration). In rethinking the Prisons, he applied the methods of shading and delineation that he had learned in his documentary work to increase the materiality of his fictive architecture, such as the towering mass at the left or the complex structure in the middle distance. Italy, Europe

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