It might be nearer the mark to call Piranesi—­though all such comparisons are thorns in the critical flesh—­the Salvator Rosa of architecture, for there is much of Salvator’s unbridled violence, fantasy, and genius for deforming the actual that is to be encountered in some of Piranesi’s works.  His was not a classic temperament.  The serene, airy, sun-bathed palaces and temples which Claude introduced into his foregrounds are seldom encountered in Piranesi.  A dark Gothic imagination his, Gothic and often cruel.  In his etching of public buildings at Rome or elsewhere, while he is not always faultless in drawing or scrupulous in observation, such was the sincerity and passion of the man that he has left us the noblest transcriptions of these stately edifices and monuments.  It is in the rhythmic expression of his personal moods that his sinister romantic imaginings are revealed, and with a detail and fulness that are positively overwhelming.

It should not be forgotten that in the eighteenth and in the early part of the nineteenth centuries Piranesi achieved widespread popularity.  He was admired outside of Italy, in England, in France, and Germany.  A generation that in England read Vathek and Mrs. Radcliffe, supped on the horrors of Melmoth and Frankenstein, knew E.T.W.  Hoffmann and the German romantic literature, could be relied on to take up Piranesi, and for his lesser artistic side.  Poe knew his work and Baudelaire; we see that for De Quincey he was a kindred spirit.  The English mezzotinter John Martin must have studied him closely, also Gustave Dore.

The Carceri (1750) of Piranesi are indoor compositions, enclosed spaces in which wander aimlessly or deliriously the wraiths of damned men, not a whit less wretched nor awful than Dante’s immemorial mob.  Piranesi shows us cavernous abodes where appalling engines of torture fill the foreground, while above, at vertiginous heights, we barely discern perilous passageways, haunted windows peering out upon the high heavens, stone-fretted ceilings that are lost in a magic mist.  By a sort of diabolic modulation the artist conducts our eye from these dizzy angles and granitic convolutions down tortuous and tumultuous staircases that seemingly wind about the axis of eternity.  To traverse them would demand an eternity and the nerves of a madman.  Lower barbaric devices reveal this artist’s temperament.  He is said to have executed the prison set “during the delirium of fever.”  This is of the same calibre as the clotted nonsense about Poe composing when intoxicated or Liszt playing after champagne.  It is a credible anecdote for Philistines who do not realise that even the maddest caprice, whether in black and white, marble, music, or verse, must be executed in silence and cold blood.  Piranesi simply gave wing to his fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares—­as did Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir.  We recall one plate of Piranesi’s in which a miserable devil climbs a staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower one crumbles into the depths below.