Dark It’s Piranesi’s 293rd birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piranesi-Portrait.jpg I’d never heard of him until his name appeared in a poem John Fuller addressed to James Fenton in The Review, back in the summer of 1972: ‘…It is impressive, I agree, Although I know it’s not for me. I take the windfalls from the tree, I’m much too lazy, The prisons that I want to see By Piranesi….’ poetryfoundation.org/poem/177073 [James Fenton wrote a reply in the same Burns-like stanza, and I wrote a reply to both in the same form which I sent to John Fuller and which he was kind enough to commend for publication. You have to be at least sixty to get lots of the jokes in the poems now, mine included, though I’m pleased to recall I had some good cracks about Clive James.] Then I read de Quincy: ‘…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, called his Dreams, and 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) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c., 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 and abrupt termination without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose at least that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld, and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.…’ No wonder Piranesi is seen as a forerunner of surrealism and Escher. Here’s one: taliacannistra.files.wordpress/2012/01/785.jpg Here are others: brnrd.net/blog/archive/2006/07/09/carceri-dinvenzione There are more. Sweet dreams.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Oct 2013 06:08:41 +0000
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