Piranesi _verified_ Now

In his famous Vedute (Views), the Colosseum or the Appian Way looms larger than life, shrouded in dramatic, Rembrandtesque darkness. But it is his series of fourteen prints, Imaginary Prisons (1750), that cemented his name as an artist of the sublime. Look at The Round Tower or The Drawbridge . You are not looking at a dungeon. You are looking at a nightmare of scale. Stairs go nowhere. Archways span impossible distances. Machines that serve no purpose hang from the ceiling. The perspective is deliberately broken; your eye cannot find the floor or the ceiling.

Giovanni Battista saw the infinite and flinched. Susanna Clarke’s character saw the infinite and smiled. Between those two reactions lies the entire range of human experience—the terror of existence and the quiet joy of simply being there to witness it. Piranesi

Clarke performs a clever inversion. Piranesi the artist saw the labyrinth as a prison of the soul. Clarke’s character sees the same labyrinth as a sanctuary from the cruelty of the real world. In his famous Vedute (Views), the Colosseum or