“I met Piranesi through Thomas de Quincey,” Borges admitted in an interview a few years before he died. With the reference to the “Carceri” architecture as palaces - and not prisons - Borges, who was a student of English Romantic literature, inscribes himself into a tradition of literary emulations of Piranesi’s images.Įven more devious than a building that has no exits, like a prison, is a building with exits that lead nowhere, like a labyrinth. The “Carceri,” on De Quincey’s cue, came to occupy a domain beyond the finite and the rational and provide a scenery - a mental stage set - in a vast and varied literature of introspection from Joyce to Jung, from Baudelaire to Borges. Piranesi’s disconcerting prisons, recreated as captivating prose, enriched the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry, and literary criticism as well as the history of art and architecture.

De Quincey, with an arresting paragraph on Piranesi published in his drug memoir “ Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” (1821), largely reinvented Piranesi, pushing the limits of architecture, or, rather, extending its range to include also metaphorical realms Piranesi emerged as the architect of an entirely new conceptual landscape that spanned hallucinations, dreams, and memories. “Mighty palaces,” however, form an ensemble grounded less in Piranesi’s prints than in the English essayist and critic Thomas De Quincey’s romantic interpretation of them.

This article is adapted from Victor Plahte Tschudi’s book “ Piranesi and the Modern Age.”

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