Even those of us who shared quarantine with family and loved ones have at least a passing familiarity with Piranesi’s monastic life in the House. The COVID pandemic has constrained our lives in various ways, forcing most of us to live in greater confinement than we’d like, making travel more difficult, and death more likely. In Piranesi, and in Piranesi, it’s prisons all the way down.Ĭlarke’s novel comes at a moment with an unfortunate resemblance to Piranesi’s Italy. And reading her novel in 2020 makes it clear why Piranesi’s Carceri have, in the end, become even more indelible than his images of Rome’s decaying grandeur. The eponymous hero of her new novel Piranesilives alone in a version of them, a salt-soaked and sun-drenched series of halls he calls the House.

Susanna Clarke is the latest writer to draw inspiration from the endless halls, staircases and arches of the prison engravings. Marguerite Yourcenar, the novelist and member of the French Academy, borrowed Hugo’s description of the engraver for the title of her long essay about his work: “The Dark Brain of Piranesi.” Piranesi’s goth genius was like catnip for Herman Melville and Victor Hugo. But the sinister, unique and inscrutable prisons, though unpopular during Piranesi’s lifetime, later became the darling subject of moody writers and critics. The Carceri d’Invenzione (imaginary prisons), first sold as a set of fourteen prints, were a flop, especially compared to the images of Roman ruins Piranesi would make later in his career. When he recovered, instead of doing his best to forget about the nightmarish dungeons he’d imagined while he was sick, Piranesi set them to copper plates and had them published. Delirious with fever, the 22-year-old aspiring architect hallucinated prisons. Malaria, a seasonal epidemic that killed thousands of Italians every year until the middle of the 20th century, afflicts sufferers with high fever, chills, and pounding headaches, among other nasty symptoms. In 1742, the Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi fell ill.

Piranesi clarke