Prisoners on a Projecting Platform, Plate 10
Medium
etching, engraving, sulphur tint or open bite, burnishing
Dimensions
{"sheet":{"height":0.495,"width":0.634},"plate":{"height":0.412,"width":0.542}}
Classification
Department
Prints
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Dudley P. Allen Fund
Accession Number
1941.26.8
Tags
About this artwork
In his series of imaginary prisons, Giovanni Battista Piranesi experimented with scale, perspective, and etching to create disorienting and disturbing images of incarceration. Based on his training as a stage designer rather than on observations of real prisons, Piranesi used a low vantage point and distant staircases to disrupt traditional perspective and to emphasize both the monumentality of the space and the futility of trying to escape. Set against a strange cloud of white smoke, the densel...