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This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set sixteen in all which the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble.
His Temples of Pæstum sound a less morbid key than his Carceri, and as etchings quite outrank them. Giambattista Piranesi was born at Venice in 1720. Bryan says that about 1738 his father sent him to Rome, where he studied under Valeriani, through whom he acquired the style of Valeriani's master, Marco Ricci of Belluno. With Vasi, a Sicilian engraver, he learned that art.
You pass from one church to another from S. Francesco, with its façade of green and white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle Carceri, to S. Niccolò da Tolentino, to S. Domenico and you ask yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see: only this flower fallen by the wayside.
The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare, like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri.
Here, too, is the beautiful Cappellone that Brunellesco built for the Pazzi family, whose arms decorate the porch. Under a strange and beautiful dome, which, as Burckhardt reminds us, Giuliano da Sangallo imitated in Madonna delle Carceri at Prato, Brunellesco has built a chapel in the form almost of a Greek cross.
Perhaps I have got the man safe in that room, but who knows? If you had come first, you might have gone to the Carceri Nuove instead of him. After all, he may be in love too." The cardinal smiled, but Gouache started at the suggestion, as though it hurt him. "I doubt that," he said quickly.
The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri.
The amphitheatre of Arles is vaster and more sublime in its desolation than the tidy theatre at Nismes; the crypts, and dens, and subterranean passages suggest all manner of speculation as to the uses to which they may have been appropriated; while the broken galleries outside, intricate and black and cavernous, like Piranesi's etchings of the 'Carceri, present the wildest pictures of greatness in decay, fantastic dilapidation.
Now in the year 1524, after M. Baldo Magini had caused Antonio, the brother of Giuliano da San Gallo, to build in the Madonna delle Carceri, in the town of Prato, a tabernacle of marble with two columns, architrave, cornice, and a quarter-round arch, Antonio resolved to bring it about that M. Baldo should give the commission for the picture which was to adorn that tabernacle to Niccolò, with whom he had formed a friendship when he was working in the Palace of the above-mentioned Cardinal dal Monte at Monte Sansovino.
But in truth Prato is the child of Florence, a rosy child among the flowers in the country, too, as children should be. Her churches are small. What could be more like a child's dream of a church than La Madonna delle Carceri? And the Palazzo Pretorio it is a toy palace wonderfully carved and contrived, a toy that has been thrown aside.
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