re close analogies in their respective handling of darks and
lights.

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 sa