The elaborate and enigmatic drawings of the Milan based artist Marco Mazzoni are created entirely by coloured pencils. Drawing on Sardinian folklore of an underground matriarchal culture of witches and herbalist healers, his drawings frequently feature a female face surrounded by, (with the eyes always obscured), finely detailed studies of variegated flora and fauna. Combined with an undisputed mastery of chiaroscuro the effect is seductively disturbing with an undercurrent of bewitching danger and riotous decadence.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the would be Venetian architect, etcher of Roman views and manufacturer of hybrid artefacts, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, produced a remarkable series of prints entitled Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The Imaginary Prisons can be classed as capricci, architectural fantasies, however these astounding visions would have an impact far beyond the narrow limits of this particular genre.
The first plate of fourteen prints was published between 1745-1750 and later revised with two additional etchings in 1761. It’s most obvious and immediate influence was upon the craze for the Gothic novel that swept throughout Europe in the late 18th Century. The Prisons would also exercise a considerable hold upon the imagination of the English Romantics. Not only do we find the two original gentleman junkies, Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Coleridge, discussing Piranesi at length in De Quincey’s classic autobiography and drug memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, but De Quincey’s entire writing style can be seen as an attempt to replicate Piranesi within literature. Critics have found echoes of the Prisons in the works of Byron, Shelley and Victor Hugo.
In the 20th Century, the Surrealists saw in the Imaginary Prisons a visual metaphor of the mind and hailed them as an important precursor of their own explorations of the unconscious. Aldous Huxley linked Piranesi to Kafka and certainly such stories as In the Penal Colony seem to be set in the world of the Prisons.
In the visual arts Piranesi direct heir was M.C Escher, complete with paradoxical geometry and labyrinthine structures that offer a vertiginous glimpse of an infinity that may well also be infernal. For the most terrifying aspect of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons, is the suggestion, re-enforced by the fact that we are only seeing a section of the whole and that the buildings are never fully enclosed, that the portrayed Prison is conterminous with the world, or indeed the universe.
Piranesi-Carceri II-The Man on the Rack 11745-1761Piranesi-Carceri III-The Round Tower-Second Plate 1761Piranesi_-Carceri IV-the Grand Piazza 1761Piranesi-Carceri V-the Lion Bas Relief–First Plate-1745-1750Piranesi-Carceri VI-The Smoking Fire-1761Piranesi-Carceri VII-The Drawbridge-1745-1750Piranesi-Carceri VIII-The Staircase with Trophies-1761Piranesi-Carcerri IX-the Giant Wheel-1750Piranesi-Carceri-X Prisoners-on-a-Projecting-Platform-1761Piranesi-Carceri XI-The Arch With the Shell CasementPiranesi-Carceri XII-The SawhorsePiranesi-Carceri XIII-the WellPiranesi-Carceri XIV-the Gothic ArchPiranesi- Carceri XV-the Pier with the LampPiranesi- Carceri XVI-the Pier With Chains
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