Prisoners on a Projecting Platform, Plate 10

In his series of imaginary prisons, Giovanni Battista Piranesi experimented with scale, perspective, and etching to create disorienting and disturbing images of incarceration. Based on his training as a stage designer rather than on observations of real prisons, Piranesi used a low vantage point and distant staircases to disrupt traditional perspective and to emphasize both the monumentality of the space and the futility of trying to escape. Set against a strange cloud of white smoke, the densely drawn and deeply etched lines of the prisoners at left produce a confusing jumble of bodies that, while imprecise, evoke their pain and punishment.