And I was writing a story about someone who lives largely alone, but in a vast house, in a house in which there are many, many things to explore and many avenues of exploration, and there's still knowledge to be found and still wonders to be seen, and there's still beauty to fill your eyes, even though you are cut off from a lot of other things. I was aware while I was writing it that I was somebody who'd become incapacitated by illness, who is to a large extent housebound and cut off from people. On the parallels between her experience and Piranesi's I very much wanted to write another big book, but I didn't feel that was a very sensible place to start. But the pressure of all the years when I hadn't written, and all the stories I hadn't written, weighed very heavily on me. But I got to a point where I felt I could write. So at some points during my illness, I suffered very badly with cognitive impairment, with what they call brain fog. The pressure of all the years when I hadn't written, and all the stories I hadn't written, weighed very heavily on me. The statues and the house all feel generally overwhelmingly benevolent to him and he feels like he is in communion with them, like he is sort of almost having a conversation with the world in which he finds himself." "He's in a very strange and in some ways inhospitable place, but he doesn't feel it's inhospitable," Clarke explains. He catches fish in the oceans that roar through rooms down below. The fictional Piranesi explores the massive halls lined with towering statues. They're meant to be gloomy, but I find them quite attractive." I must admit, I kind of want to go to those fantastic prisons. "They could possibly be real places, but quite dark and looming. "He did some engravings of fantastic prisons which have haunted my imagination for a long time," Clarke says. His name comes from a real-life person, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th-century architect and artist. Her latest is called Piranesi - that's also her narrator's name - and his whole world is a strange, labyrinthine house. Now, 16 years later, Clarke is focused on feeling locked in. That blockbuster book was all about escape. Eco’s fabulous medieval library maze and Hogwarts’ stairwell are vintage Piranesi.Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was a sweeping page turner about ancient magic set during the Napoleonic Wars. It becomes even more explicit in the film adaptations. The influence is also discernible in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and the Harry Potter books. An etching from the Carceri series hung in his office and the scenes in heaven in The Discovery of Heaven (and in its film adaptation) are clearly inspired by it. Harry Mulisch (one of the great Dutch novelists) was also a fan. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948) are dystopian novels in which the menacing world of Piranesi is recognisable. A tyranny of order and efficiency that reduces humanity to a predictable cog in a process. He compares Piranesi’s prisons to the panopticism that was so popular in architecture at the time. Aldous Huxley wrote an essay accompanying an edition of Piranesi’s prints in 1949. That started early on with writers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, Lord Byron, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Edgar Allan Poe. Like Escher, Piranesi was an artist who infuses his prints with both order and chaos, thus garnering mass appeal. For many artists it is an abiding source of inspiration, particularly in terms of its utopian and dystopian character. Piranesi’s oeuvre not only influenced M.C. Conversely, Escher’s prints lack the dark, menacing element that characterises Piranesi’s series. But in terms of abandoning gravity and creating truly impossible buildings and spaces, he never goes to the extreme to which Escher would eventually go. Piranesi exaggerates the perspective and renders his spaces hugely impressive with dramatic lighting and a beautiful light/dark contrast. Here he creates a threatening, hidden world full of ominous caverns and hanging pulleys and cables, in which man is occasionally present yet markedly insignificant and vulnerable. Labyrinths filled with an infinite number of stairs, ladders, bridges, gates and galleries, none of which seem to lead anywhere. The Carceri is a series of etchings with colossal, vertiginous spaces that seem to never end. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (plate 7, The Drawbridge), second version, etching, 1761 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (title plate), second version, etching, 1761
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |