Piranesi's Prisons are on display in Cesena: sixteen engravings from a private collection

The Galleria del Ridotto in Cesena is hosting Piranesi. Carceri d’invenzione, an exhibition dedicated to the Carceri by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Mogliano Veneto, 1720 - Rome, 1778) that runs through April 13 and displays iconographic nucleus composed of sixteen works from a private collection in Milan.

The execution of the Carceri, made by the Venetian engraver and architect between 1744 and 1747/49, in the period of his last returns to Venice and final establishment in Rome, reveals the influence of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo ’s recent Capricci all’acquaforte and their exuberant richness of chromatic timbres and effects in the treatment of etching, but also of the inspiration of Canaletto ’s etchings and Marco Ricci’s capricious paintings. Carceri’s extraordinary freedom of imagination is expressed through a hitherto unknown ability to transfer into the graphic sign a pictorial sensibility that absorbs every element of formal invention.

The complete edition of the series, in 13 plates plus frontispiece, was printed by the bookseller Giovanni Bouchard, under the title Invenzioni Capric. di Carceri all’acqua forte datte in luce da Giovani Buzard in Roma Mercante al Corso, at an unstated but conceivable date around 1749/50. After several reissues, Piranesi republished the series on his own around 1761, under the title Carceri d’invenzione di G. Battista Piranesi archit. vene., with the branches radically reworked and the addition of two new plates. On display are precisely the works from the second edition of the series, which reproposes the Carceri in a definitive version with the addition of two new etchings. The tangle of staircases, fragments of ruined antiquities, grates, and instruments of torture inserted in a labyrinthine perspective that multiplies the points of escape create a sense of vertigo, in which the rare figures that populate the monumental stone structures wander absorbed and purposeless, all equally prisoners of the same infernal machine.

Thanks to the contribution and technology of the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory, of the TECIP Institute - Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, the exhibition is enriched by the presence of an “immersive” room of Piranesi’s famous prisons rendered in a three-dimensional version, in which one can relive all the fascination of these fantastic and unreal visions.

The exhibition is produced and organized by MetaMorfosi Associazione Culturale, in collaboration with the Municipality of Cesena and the municipal department of culture.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Municipality of Cesena.

Piranesi's Prisons are on display in Cesena: sixteen engravings from a private collection

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