The agony of the man (do you recall The Torture by Hope of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam?) is shown in his tense, crouching attitude, his hands clawing the masonry above him.  Nature is become a monstrous fever, existence a shivering dread.  You overhear the crash of stone into the infernal cellarage—­where awaits the hunted wretch perhaps a worse fate than on the pinnacles above.  It is a companion piece to Martin’s Sadak searching for the Waters of Oblivion.  Another plate depicts with ingenuity terraces superimposed upon terraces, archways spaced like massive music, narrow footways across which race ape-like men, half naked, eagerly preparing some terrible punishments for criminals handcuffed and guarded.  They are to walk a sharp-spiked bridge.  Gigantic chains swing across stony precipices, a lamp depends from a roof whose outlines are merged in the gray dusk of dreams.  There is cruelty, horror, and a sense of the wickedly magnificent in the ensemble.  What crimes were committed to merit such atrocious punishment?  The boldness and clearness of it all!  With perspicacity George Saintsbury wrote of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony:  “It is the best example of dream literature that I know—­most writers who have tried this style have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself.  Any one’s experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong.  The events of dreams, as they happen, are quite plain and matter of fact, and it is only in the intervals that any suspicion occurs to the dreamer.”

Certainly Piranesi remembered his dreams.  He is a realist in his delineation of details, though the sweep and breadth of an ideal design are never absent.  He portrays ladders that scale bulky joists, poles of incredible thickness, cyclopean block and tackling.  They are of wood, not metal nor marble, for the art of Piranesi is full of discriminations.  Finally, you weary.  The eye gorged by all the mystic engines, hieroglyphs of pain from some impossible inquisition—­though not once do we see a monkish figure—­all these anonymous monkey men scurrying on what errand Piranesi alone knows; these towering arches, their foundations resting on the crest of hell (you feel the tremendous impact of the architectural mass upon the earth—­no mean feat to represent or rather to evoke the sense of weight, of pressure on a flat surface); the muffled atmosphere in these prisons from which no living prisoner emerges; of them all you weary, for the normal brain can only stand a certain dose of the delirious and the melancholy.  This aspect, then, of Piranesi’s art, black magic in all its potency, need no longer detain us.  His Temples of Paestum sound a less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them.

II