Department of Comparative Literature

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian architect, artist, and classist. His views of Rome have been known globally for their artistic quality, photorealism, and their imaginary perspectives of ancient monuments. Piranesi influenced many neoclassical artists and experimented with the usage of space and vastness in a way that preempted the Impressionist exploration of light. His “Imaginary Prisons” influenced many Romantic and Gothic authors and have become the topic of much scholarship in modernity. This essay explores how Piranesi’s choice of aesthetics and content were influenced and influenced Enlightenment thought surrounding punishment, pain, and democratic imaginations of identity. Throughout, Michel Foucault’s history and theorical approach to the development and use of torture in the west is explored through the lens of Piranesi and contemporaneous thought. Piranesi’s influence continues in subtle remarks in various canonical texts and authors, such as De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. This essay explores the historical moment of liberal, enlightenment thought with the artistic representations of power structures by a largely unsuccessful artist at the moment he emerged into relative fame with a comparative literary approach to textual analysis.