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Architectural and Perspective Designs
Incredibly elaborate Baroque architectural stage designs reproduced from 1750 copperplates. The ultimate in classical sets.
103 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1964
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January 12, 2026
Baroque Escher, mad experiments in the intensification of perspective, overwhelming in their detail, like a mad kind of paradise, a hyper-baroque backrooms, wonderous yet awful palaces of light. More Baroque than any real building could possibly be, almost science-fictional, fantastical, with the slight tenor of fear behind the luxury. What is happening in these densely layered, caked and colonnaded, ornamented super-columned statue-scattered palaces - I imagine being trapped there, I want to close my eyes and turn away, as if surrounded by a loud and constant noise, so much detail that only a mad-man could apprehend it all, everything seems to have a meaning but if *everything* in one image means something, every statue and ornament, then the verse or poem each image, each imagined space is speaking, is more like Black MIDI or some hyper compressed deep fried digital artefact than classical music.
The enormous fineness and terrible density is like a beautiful attack, like a cold fairyland made by a mathematician, an ultra-Europe or meta-court, perhaps humanist, certainly not sacred, but nothing human could survive or be noticed there -
Piranesi is the other equivalent, it is surprising to find that light can be more terrible than gloom, that finery can be more awful than decay, there is a kind of tension within these images, a frantic mania, as if we are in the juddering hands of an amphetamine addict. So different to the soft, nearly warm fear of decay, torture and the unseen that infiltrates the 'Carceri', here the nightmare is that _we can never leave_, that turning our way into these explosions of Baroque mania, we will find ourselves in yet another statue-covered hallway with about a million columns setting off into infinity, each with individual floriate tops.
I like the fun little dog that seems to be included in nearly every outside image.
The enormous fineness and terrible density is like a beautiful attack, like a cold fairyland made by a mathematician, an ultra-Europe or meta-court, perhaps humanist, certainly not sacred, but nothing human could survive or be noticed there -
Piranesi is the other equivalent, it is surprising to find that light can be more terrible than gloom, that finery can be more awful than decay, there is a kind of tension within these images, a frantic mania, as if we are in the juddering hands of an amphetamine addict. So different to the soft, nearly warm fear of decay, torture and the unseen that infiltrates the 'Carceri', here the nightmare is that _we can never leave_, that turning our way into these explosions of Baroque mania, we will find ourselves in yet another statue-covered hallway with about a million columns setting off into infinity, each with individual floriate tops.
I like the fun little dog that seems to be included in nearly every outside image.
Displaying 1 of 1 review