Reginald Blomfield wrote a vehement appreciation in his Architectural Drawing

and Draughtsmen in 1912. "I doubt if, among all his inventions of buildings, there
is a single one that would be of real use to an architect, and his combinations of de
tails were licentious in the last degree. . . . The draughtsmanship is superb, the de

sign about as bad as it is possible to imagine. Piranesi's direct influence on design —

the motives that he may have provided for immediate conversion into detail
is,

that
— believe to have been almost entirely for the bad. It resulted in that stodgy classic
I

that prevailed in England in the early part of the last century, and appeared in
quite another form in the pedantic and finicking designs of Percier and Fontaine.
. . . On the other hand, no one ever possessed keener sense of the dignity of archi

a
tecture and of its poetry. The quality of genius, which raised him above other art
ists, was shown not only in his assured and astonishing technique, but in certain

a
imaginative outlook on architecture — in his conception of as great and even stu

it
a
pendous art, full of mystery, full of profound beauty and poetry. . . . The art of
a

Piranesi not manner to be learnt: was the intensely personal expression of

is

it
a

wild and melancholy genius." would be hard to weigh Piranesi more judicious
It
a

from the standpoint of practising architect.

ly

Finally in the 1940's Aldous Huxley fitted Piranesi into the framework of our
own time. Speaking of the Views Rome he amusingly comments on the figures:
of

"Men and women are reduced to the stature of children: horses become as small as
mastifs. Inside the basilicas the pious reach up to the holy water fonts and, even on

tiptoe, can hardly wet their fingers. Peopled by dwarfs, the most modest of Baroque
buildings assumes heroic proportions."
Huxley gives new and really original twist to the dark riddle of the Prisons:
a

"Considered from purely formal point of view, The Prisons are remarkable as be
a

ing the nearest eighteenth-century approach to purely abstract art. . . . Piranesi

a

uses architectural forms to produce series of beautifully intricate designs, which

a

resemble the abstractions of the Cubists in being composed of geometrical ele

ments, but which have the advantage of combining pure geometry with enough sub

ject matter, enough literature, to express, more forcibly than a mere pattern can
do, the obscure and terrible states of spiritual confusion and acedia."
This apt comparison from Themes and Variations might have been suggested by
the exhibition of Timeless Aspects Modern Art in in which the Museum of
of

1948
Modern Art in New York hung one of the Prisons (fig. 21) beside charcoal abstrac
a

tion by Picasso. Both had the identical sharp-edged bleakness of the dispossessed.
The Prisons fascinate because their abstract patterns are like clouds, or ink blots, or

29