HONOLULU, HI (PNAN) – On view, “Piranesi’s Prisons of the Mind” through Sunday, April 20, 2025 at the Honolulu Museum of Art are 18th-century prints from his series Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These labyrinthian, fantastic spaces offer a mind-bending visual experience.
An architect, engineer and stage designer by training, Piranesi is known for his views in and around Rome that emphasized the monumentality of ancient ruins. His representation of antiquities used novel compositional devices such as, a low viewpoint and multiple vanishing points to exaggerate scale. Piranesi’s vertiginous Prisons went even further in their compositional trickery and architectural fantasy.
The series was originally issued as a collection of fourteen prints around 1749–50. The artist reworked and reissued the series in 1761 as a set of sixteen prints. HoMA presents examples from this final series, in which Piranesi enhances the menacing character of the works by altering them, adding substantial detail and stronger tonal contrasts.
The paradoxical spaces in Prisons have inspired artists for centuries, including writers like Thomas De Quincey and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as artists such as M.C. Escher and many Surrealists. The influence these works have had on film is unmistakable, from Bladerunner’s cityscapes to Hogwarts’ moving staircases in the Harry Potter movies.
About
The Prisons (Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’), is a series of 16 prints produced in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines. The series was started in 1745. The first state prints were published in 1750 and consisted of 14 etchings, untitled and unnumbered, with a sketch-like look. The original prints were 16″ x 21″. For the second publishing in 1761, all the etchings were reworked and numbered I–XVI (1–16). Numbers II and V were new etchings to the series. Numbers I to IX were all done in portrait format (vertical), while X to XVI were landscape format (horizontal+). In the second publishing, some of the illustrations appear to have been edited to contain (likely deliberate) impossible geometries.