In Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri reads Piranesi's Carceri as meditations upon the emergence of the modern sensibility:

"In these etchings, the space of the building--the prison--is an infinite space. What has been destroyed is the center of that space, signifying the correspondence between the collapse of ancient values, the ancient order, and the "totality" of the disorder. Reason, the author of this destruction. . . is transformed into irrationality. But the prison, precisely because it is infinite, coincides with the space of human existence. . .

"Thus what we see in the Carceri is only the new existential condition of human collectivity, liberated and condemned at the same time by its own reason."