I have often wondered wky these "caprices" or "jokes of the imagination " - which take shape as rigorously calculated architectural structures, yet are so inclined to give themselves up to the generative drives (uncontrollable, manifold, and extremely variable) of a natural organic pro cess - so strongly resist an exact description, i.e. an analysis that, as far as possible, avoids the risk of an arbitrary interpretation. They almost force one, at every approach, to adopt a contrary cognitive method, in a sort of dialectic between order and disorder, or perhaps rather a never-resolved clash between irrational night and rational clarity. For these Carceri, which unequivocally depict a gloomy, closed, narrow space, like a crypt (or, metaphorically, a womb), and in which the dizzying accumulation of the most disparate objects makes the feeling of claustrophobia even more acute, not only always open themselves up to the outside with rays of blinding light, marking every form in an almost abstract way, but inexplicably they also suggest a vertical continuum, even in spite of the clearly dominant shadow, that dark core where it seems to move inwards and outwards at the same time, with a disquieting effect of sinking down while the look penetrates that matter with the aim of ascending. It thus indicates one and the same time and place, where time is a flowing and the place is a coming back into oneself, uninterruptedly. It is a bit like what happens in a "mandala," simulating a composite figure made of both sphere and cube, a receptacle (labyrinth of intimacy and totality, including the objects and people that frequent it, signs of a similitude between organic and inorganic), where the manifold is perfectly identifiable in its individual components despite the overall perception of a swarming crowd. It is as if the look, turned inwards, could not avoid that void, or formless immensity, that manifests itself beyond every possibility of fligbt. This effect might be said to be caused by the presence of an invisible combinatory axis around which every element revolves until it exposes the paradox of an unstable and hallucinated immobility. For, in the end, it is this compulsive and yet immobilized agglomeration, rendered "metaphysical, " organized in a moment of its enveloping itself(or developing?) as an organic element but seen as structured by a mechanical action, that rejects any description that, to be exact and empirical, would keep the subject in a state of passivity. In such a texture, one may intuit the intricacy as intrigue, as a machination of the visible, a conspiracy of the senses to express from/by the prison that profound malaise that tends to be translated as enjoyment. "The eye has this sort of enjoyment in spiral walls, " Hogarth said even thouth bis attitude was so differente; it is no accident that he was writing at the same time (bis Analysis of Beauty dates from 1753), since even he was not unaware of the metaphorical vocation of an ari "in formation" as opposed to the '"formed" art of the classical tradítion. Unlike Winkelmanns, Piranesis vision of the ruins is already neo-Gothic, or pre-Romantic. And perbaps it is still linked to the residue of Baroque expressiveness; this would help to explain the leap from the harmonious and ideal clarity of neo-Classicism, and the tendency to the "sublime" as being a subtle fear of that nocturnal material that indefatigably works away at the bottom of these etchings.

All these things have been said before, as well as the appropriate definition of "dreams", on the suspicion that they might be visions induced baci taking opium. The description of the Antichità di Roma made by Coleridge to Thomas De Quincey, and contained in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), is well known and often quoted. "With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams ".. and it is above all significant that the perception is of a process of building by stages, of the spreading out and proliferation of forms reported in terms of organic germination. In a device, if we read Kubla Khan (1797), wherein the "stately pleasure-dome" is seen as a whirling composite of archiectural elements and, by association, of natural elements too: "a miracle of rare device" which seems to be defined, for its environmental effect, as a "deep romantic chasm ", and "huge fragments" of stone, and caverns, "dancing rocks", a tumult of water andforests that embrace everything. It is hard not to compare this with the perturbed vision of Ara Antica, "above which the ancients made sacrifices, with other ruins around, " , and even more with the "two caverns," with the entrance gallery excavated near Lake Albano. Preceding the execution of the Carceri, it is here that we see, with a still front-on theratrical setting, an action not unlike the invasive organic world on an architecture whose imposing artifice is no longer a sign of solidity but of crumbling.

In this complex mechanism of embedded objects, in the binocular perspective that causes the eyes to look through various planes of construction up to the last passage-way (which in some cases is blocked, and all the more disquieting), one observes a dramatization of the action of time which contradicts every classicistic theory, which instead believed it was re-building. This is not an art that takes as its aim a "noble simplicity and calm grandeur, " but rather an art that has already been touched by a nocturnal image, an image of ontological sinking into an ambiguous matter, which is both hostile and attractive. Sometimes the hybrid anthropomorphic aspect of these inner spaces is so strong that the human figures seem to be exasperated, or find themselves here with the same relief as some small decorative detail, "set in miniature. " Greatly, enlarged, muscular and tormented, or else drawn with rapidity, as if they were transparent ghosts, insubstantial and marginal bodies, they are felt to belong to these closed-in places in the same way as the stone fragments piled up on the ground, and the roots that wrap them round. In the frontispiece oasi the Carceri che only dominant human figure is míxed up with the twisting chains; be is almost knotted in them, a prisoner, while be observes with fear the toothed wheel, the ropes, the manifold beams, the iron rings, which Piranesi added to the second edi tion, accentuating every contrast. And one is reminded of what Victor Hugo was to say in Contemplation supreme (an appropriate definition also for the Carceri): "unheard-of thing, it is inside oneself that one must look at what is outside .... The deep, dark mirror is in man's depths .... There one fínds the terrible light-and-dark."

Piranesi does not invert the analytical process, but finds his self at the bottom of his contemplation of the ruins. It is a process of descent as elevation very similar to that tbeorized by William Blake a few years later It is not so much (Though we should not exclude it) a marriage of heaven and bell to give new importance to the abyss; rather with a strong esprit do geometrie, the constitution of a very mobile dialectic structure, so that every plate or vision becomes the representation of a formative moment, in a sort of blocked photogram or frame. The idea of in loco repetition of one and the same act is implied: stairs and bridges disappear into nothingness or are enigmatically interrupted, even more forcibly marking their resumption, and it is from this suspension of movement that our anguish arises.

But it is the comparison of the finisbed plates with certain preparatory drawings that furnishes us more important clues for understanding the intentions, as well as the effects (and it is these that fascinate us, in the constant risk of undergoing an overwhelming emotional transport) of the series as a whole. It is certainly disharmonic, and consequently escapes our grasp. If, that is, our attention is guided by the ready-made filters of a romantic sensibility, inclining to a reading of them which also contains psychoanalytic elements, for example, or generically mythical and symbolic interpretations, or phenomenological-existential considerations (and other aproaches, too, cannot be excluded from a free investigation), it is possible that some objective components may remain on the sidelines.

An apperception of some plates in a proto-cubist sense, wbich is perfectly legitimate if one considers only the constructive aspect, ignores residual stylistic features (such as the influence of Tiepolo, or a cerlaín insistence on the curvilinear 'fringíng " of the drawing, etc.), in favour of a more or less metaphysical organization of the planes and architectural masses (in the manner of Escber) and metaphorical reflection. We may risk minimizing some striking plastíc clusters, and convulsions of living matter, of true bodies against the no less numerous stone bodies - in short, all that swarming of limbs thast completes the scene, leaving it unclear to a first overall look whether these are figures on a bas-relief, a group of workers, an inspector of ruins, a Roman bust, a prisoner being led to torture or an image carved out of marble.

This is probably the place to bring up the problem of the inscriptions, which would deserve a more detailed comparative analysis between formal resolutions and meaningful allusions, even though we may imagine that the latter were made unconsciously - except, obviously, for the precise historical references, based on Livy.

Inscriptions, with their solemn engraved letters, uphold a principle of collocation in which technical or explanatory reasons combine with symbolic ones. For example, a stele generally has this function. But here what is striking is that the inscriptions are an integral part of the scene as objects, as concrete elements in the construction, and undergo the same sorl of wear and fragmentation, being both memories of the past and warnings for the present. It is as if this were an alternative system of communication, one based on dreams, which Piranesi uses and is used by. In the portrait of 1750 ("F. Polanzani faciebat") the architect is an active subject; be observes and is observed; be is an object in the scene as a person, and as a bust and fragment of the ruin that be still dominates as the author The inscription that identifies him belongs to two intertwining cognitive levels, which move away in opposite directions, outside- inside, artificial matter, stone, memory, body, expressing the "included" vision in the name. The recognizable body expresses its unknowable obscurity. The ímages that Piranesi shows us are always events-in-progress.

This does not mean that one cannot grasp the dífferences between all these apparitions, but once again they will be clarified - if such a "staging" can be said to clarify - by an opposition between the imposing presence of some figures (and ruins) and the reduction to a few gesticulating signs of the "bit actors ". This relativization of large and small, true and false, occurs in a continuous, frenetic mechanism of syncbronous inversions. It is as if there were an abrupt alternation of shadow and light, black and white, even damnation and salvation if one attempts an "ideological" interpretation, with a continual overturning of the meaning of the work with in the work itself. Both visions co-exist at the same time. What remains of the "caprice," aside from the jumbled-up trophies and the host of enigmatic or threatening objects scattered everywbere, is manifested in this ambiguous proliferation. It is the same proliferation that, in a sense, is doubled (metaphor as deviation) and is exchanged between column and trunk, rope and root, etc., in some plates dedicated to excavations, to the re-emergence of ancient buildings. And even the notion of time is lost there.. Coleridge saw everything in Gothic terms. We can see (and fee1) it in terms of metaphysical super-reality and psychoanalytic penetration. The tricking of perception is probably due to a residual Baroque influence, and not to the new emerging rationality. This explains The effect that, nowadays we interpret by inevitably superimposing on it The later developments in art that, are well-known to us.

However we want to define The nightmare with which the Carceri overpower us, attracting us into their dark pit, losing us in a set of possibilities to be interpreted, it keeps the nature of the sublime.- yet this wonder and horror are not found only in the soul of the observor, but also - the artist seems to insist - in the "things of nature"- it belongs to them even more if they are openly identified with the works of man, which are subjected to an identícal (mutual) action of consumption and loss. Outside such images, while we contemplate them, Piranesis reading of the sublime, unlike Kants, gives us no sense of security. For Piranesi, while be organizes the place, the pit of such a "fuscum subnigrum", summons us to enter this matter, and forces us to grow along with everything that, happens there. Its constructive and metaphorical status is ambiguity.