I need to produce great ideas. If I were ordered to create plans for a New World, I believe that I would be mad enough to undertake the task. -- Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Piranesi's fantastic Carceri etchings (dating from 1739) depict a series of perspectives of an infinite prison. The horizon is elusive; the viewer's gaze is teased ever upward and beyond. The space is criss-crossed with numberless bridges and staircases, odd mechanical torture devices, and plently of dark corners.

Piranesi's "inventions" have retained a fascination across the centuries. In the Nineteenth Century, De Quincey saw in the Carceri the delirious architecture of an opium dream. Closer to our time, Manfredo Tafuri saw in Piranesi's "inventions" a critique of Enlightenment reason. In his book Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri uses Piranesi's work to discuss the inevitable failure of the utopian socialist projects of Modern architecture. While Tafuri uses Piranesi to talk about Modernism, Jennifer Bloomer relates Piranesi's fantastical works to Postmodern aesthetics. She describes Piranesi's etchings as "literary in their ambiguity" and uses them in tandem with Finnegan's Wake to discuss the idea of a writing that combines the visual and verbal and is a spatial writing.