![]() Sixteen pictures show the interior of vast prisons, littered with arches, stairways, pulleys, ropes and various relics of classical antiquity. From 1745 onwards Piranesi produced his most disturbing prints, the Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’. Piranesi produced etchings of Roman ruins and deliberately made them three times bigger, the implication being that a) ancient civilisation was huge and powerful and b) the bigger the ruin the greater the hubris of pitiful man in the face of a remorseless cosmos. ![]() Slightly exaggerated, to the annoyance of Piranesi fans who actually visited Rome Instead of order they turned to nature, and instead of a world where man and his civilization stood supreme, they created landscapes where tiny figures struggled amid the immense ruins of the ancient past. Instead of Reason they embraced Dreams and Madness. Fed up with classical order, writers and artists like Piranesi went hell for leather in the opposite direction. The Romantic era was partly a reaction against the Enlightenment idea that calm, measured Reason was the foundation of society. Which is a long-winded introduction to Piranesi himself, one of the most influential fantasy artists of the eighteenth century. Not only does the coachman turn into a cyclops but the coach ends up hurtling through a titanic cathedral based on the equally barmy visions of the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His essay is probably the first recorded acid trip in artistic history (if we discount the mad visions of the 12th century Abbess Hildegard von Bingen). His friend Thomas DeQuincey, faced with the prospect of writing about a trip with the postman ( The English Mail Coach (1849)), downed some Laudanum to kill the boredom. Coleridge took opium ‘for toothache’, and came up with Kubla Khan (1797). ![]() So while Jane Austen penned her novels of sensibility on pieces of paper small enough to hide under a book when someone came into the room, most other writers and artists were tanking up on opium and committing their magnificently deranged visions to text and canvas. It’s important to remember that books like this were mainly read by precisely the young middle class women that populate Austen’s books, a fact she gleefully makes fun of in Northanger Abbey. In the year that Jane Austen started writing, one of the most popular novels was The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, in which an evil friar rapes a young woman on a heap of corpses. ![]() After all, this is the era that saw the beginning of both the Horror genre (with the Gothic novel) and Science Fiction (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). In reality, the bulk of literature and art produced during what we now call the Romantic period was resolutely dark, horrific, passionate, often drug-addled and frequently downright bonkers. Both the BBC and Jane Austen have a lot to answer for, forever embedding the notion that England was locked in fifty years of Regency propriety where the most traumatic thing ever to happen was when old Mr Woodhouse felt a draft down the back of his neck. 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s Animation Art Astronomy Book Children comic Cyberpunk Dystopia Expressionism Fantasy Film France game German Gothic History Horror Japan Magazine Medieval Music New Wave New Weird Novel Prog Rock Pulps Ragged Claws Retro Romanticism Russia Science Science Fiction Shakespeare Space Race Steampunk Surrealism Symbolism Theatre Thumb Victorian WritingĪnyone watching TV would think that the late 18th and early 19th centuries were full of demure young ladies taking tea and unfavourably comparing the balls of Bath with the balls of Highbury.
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