Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
The Round Tower, from ‘Carceri d’invenzione’ (Imaginary Prisons)
Artist: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, Mogliano Veneto 1720–1778 Rome)
Publisher: Giovanni Bouchard (French, ca. 1716–1795)
Date: ca. 1749–50
Medium: Etching, engraving, sulphur tint or open bite, burnishing; first state of four (Robison)
A native of Venice, Piranesi went to Rome at age twenty and where he remained for the remainder of his life. Rome was the inspiration for and subject of most of his etchings that number over a thousand. Piranesi studied architecture, engineering and stage design, and his first plans for buildings reflect his training combined with the tremendous impact of classical Roman architecture. The fourteen plates depicting prisons – probably Piranesi’s best-known series – were described on their title page as ‘capricious inventions.’ These structures, their immensity emphasized by the low viewpoint and the diminutive figures, derive from stage prisons rather than real ones. Actual prisons in the Italy were tiny dungeons. Spatial anomalies and ambiguities abound in all the images of the series; they were not meant to be logical but to express the vastness and strength that Piranesi experienced in contemplating Roman architecture.
About ten years later, Piranesi reworked these plates and added two new images to the series. The reworked plates are even darker and more complex, with added details and inscriptions. While it is hard to find meaning in the first state of the series, the second state includes explicit references to the justice system under the Roman Republic and to the cruelty for which certain emperors were known.
This looks like it’s inanimate, but in fact there are people on the stairs. The people are mostly concentrations of black squiggles. When you enlarge the picture you see it’s all squiggles, all the time.
I wonder what the large pulley system on the far left is for. It looks like it could haul up some enormous objects, but what are they?
I see what seems to be the inside of a monstrous cathedral with people climbing stairs. The picture seems entirely done with dark pencil, and I am amazed at the variety of lines, shadings and strokes the artist used. The picture is also something of a nightmare.
This is like something out of Jorge Luis Borges. Is it the library that contains every book ever written that you could spend your whole life inside, reading non-stop every day, and still never approach reading 3% of all the titles?
The sunlight seems to be coming from overhead and to the right.
I imagine that this drawing shows just a fraction of the entire edifice – think of what the entire building must be like, and how long it too the architects and stone masons and brick layers to design and construct this massive edifice. I agree that the entire thing is something like a nightmare, realized in stone. And it’s interesting how this plays with the mind of the viewer. The impression you get is of immensely heavy architecture that would weigh tons in real life, but in fact this exists entirely on a sheet of paper which probably weighs a few ounces.
If I had to walk up those stairs every day to get to work, I’d have serious thighs and calves.