Reading Pictures: Piranesi and Carceral Landscapes

Abstract Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’. Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language. The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.