Carceri d'invenzione

Carceri d'invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, is a series of 16 etchings by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 14 produced from c. 1745 to 1750, when the first edition of the set was published.

All depict enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines, in rather extreme versions of the capriccio, a favourite Italian genre of architectural fantasies; the first title page uses the term.

Surviving drawings for complicated sets by Filippo Juvarra and Ferdinando Bibiena (both primarily architects) as well as others have evident similarities to the prints in their receding spaces and disappearing staircases.

While the Vedutisti (or "view makers"), such as Canaletto and Bellotto, more often reveled in the beauty of the sunlit place, in Piranesi this vision takes on what from a modern perspective could be called a Kafkaesque distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthine structures, epic in volume.

Piranesi seems to have been "diffident" about the reception of such unusual images, and the first edition title page does not name him as the artist, nor do most of the individual plates.

In various plates new "penal apparatus in the form of chains, cables, gallows and sinsterly indistinct instruments of torture, many of them infused with a sense of decay through endless use.

[17] Plate II has names and busts of "victims punished unjustly by Nero" as recorded by Tacitus, which Piranesi saw as "emphasizing the decline of Roman law under a philhellene emperor".

[19] Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) wrote the following: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 ... 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) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome.