July 4, 1937
From July 9th through the summer, the Print Department of the Brooklyn Museum will exhibit a set of the fourteen plates in the first issue of the Invenzioni Capric di Carceri by Piranesi. Of these, thirteen are first states and the title page a second state, the first state of the title page differing only by an error in spelling the name of the publisher, Buzard for Bouchard. The set is in excellent condition and extremely rare. The Carceri, or Prisons, etched in 1742, are regarded as Piranosi’s finest work, and the first issue by Bouchard in 1745–1750 is from many points of views more beautiful and interesting than the later issue, called Carceri d’Invenzione, and comprising the fourteen plates elaborated and two additional plates not known to have appeared in the Bouchard edition.
These large prints, admired by the poet Coleridge and described by De Quincy in The Opium Eater, depict scenes in the interior of an imaginary prison of huge proportions fashioned of Cyclopean masonry. The vast building is incomplete. Half finished arches reach out in mid air toward supporting piers that have not yet been built, galleries lead nowhere, and there are wooden scaffoldings, fragments of machinery and groups of workmen almost lost in the great spaces of the building. It is indeed so madly fashioned by the imagination that it could never have been completed. It is not only an imaginary prison but the prison of the imagination, in which fancy is tortured by huge space, confining walls, the temptations of a maze of unfinished projects and the hopelessness of all of them. In the later edition of the prints, the effect is complicated by additional structures of stone and wood, additional engines of torture and additional striving figures; the dramatic effect is also intensified by terrifying contrasts of bright light and darkened shadows. Yet in the first state of the plates, represented by the Brooklyn Museum set, the whole intention has been really expressed and the greater simplicity and freshness carry with a sincerity of inspiration which is somewhat lost in the conscious elaboration of the plates in their late state.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1937 - 1939. 07-09_1937, 128. View Original
