As the Imperial Perspective Shines through the City. Piranesi notes

J.A. Tillmann 

Art is a historical degree of spatial awareness, and a real painter is the type of person who sees people and things better and with greater accuracy than do others – 
with greater accuracy in terms of the historical reality of the period he lives in.    

	Carl Schmitt: Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung

(History of Space)
The concept of space is accompanied by the idea of permanence: the constancy of mountains and valleys, the sky and the earth. At best, it is ourselves, our situation, the things that fill our space, our houses and cities that we think of as variable. But space, too, changes, it has a history - and not only in the geological or cosmic sense. Space as we conceive of it and experience it today is an outcome of history. The history of space has been and is shaped by concepts about, and the varying experiences of relating to, space, both in public and private respects. New findings in developmental psychology and the history of sciences also support this position. János Kállai, psychologist, writes: “Earlier it was said that between two things close to each other there is but space – nothing. This space, however, is filled with human relationships. It is a network of communicative and imaginative interactions. Space perception is subject not only to early, preverbal experiences, but also to knowledge of space. Knowledge of space changes the experience of space.” 

(Space as Cultural Product)
The human being grows up in expanding space. His paths through space draw him further and further away from his mother, his home, his place of birth. The paths travelled become part of experienced space, thus forming the spaces and maps of remembering. “Past a certain age, a mental structure – or mental map – forms, which continually represents the spatial condition of the environment (…) The development of space perception is not founded on the creation of Euclidian spaces. Similarly to gravitational pull, emotional effects distort space. It is the adult person’s intellectual knowledge and interpretations that provide it with a form, which obeys Euclidian rules.  The mental map-mechanism, however, does not reflect, but guarantees and constructs the reference characteristics of the activity.”
While our personal history of space may not be a retracing of the shared history of our ancestors, it is nevertheless parallel to it: “By way of the pure sciences we know a multiplicity of spaces. Space (…) is the product of culture and history, and maybe not only of geometry, but also of theology and politics,” writes Michel Serres, a mathematician and philosopher of science who approaches the subject from within the paradigm of research on the evolution of concepts of space. Max Jammer’s work titled Concepts of Space had a major role in the establishment of this paradigm. According to his basic thesis: “From the age of Philon to that of Newton, and even after, in addition to metaphysics and physics proper, theology proves to be an important factor in the development of the field theory in physics.”

(Expanding Space)
Newton provides the best example for the alterable nature of space-related experience and thinking. The author of the classical field theory regarded absolute space as God’s sensorium, as something for which his principles of field theory – which laid the foundation for modern physics – and his theological concepts held equally valid.
Newton conceived of universal space as a place filled with divine presence. Not even the facts of the new worlds (the newly discovered continents, the macro- and micro-worlds made visible by the telescope and the microscope) or his contemporary critics could shake his conviction. The expanded space of the world, however, proved to be a jarring experience for his contemporaries. Pascal’s famous declaration is especially noteworthy, as he was religiously or theologically inspired to no less extent: “The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.”  
The shock caused by this expansion of space into infinity was also a fundamental experience for another of Newton’s contemporary’s: Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This is just as apparent in his open-space architectural fantasies as in the closed inner world of his Prisons.  In reference to the Carceri series, Thomas de Quincey writes: “ thestairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams.” 

(Revolution of Space)
In the imagery of modernity, the spaces that stretch into infinity make their first appearance in Piranesi’s works. As for the reasons behind this – barring personal speculations – two main factors should be mentioned. The first is more general: the ‘atmospheric’ element of the period. The second has to do with Piranesi’s interest in archaeology and the unearthing of Imperial Rome. Piranesi’s period bore the inheritance of the previous century, of the age of the first European globalisation; consequences of the influx of merchandise, people and information from the newly ‘discovered’ worlds, of mondialisation and the accompanying revolution of space. The “revolution of space” concept was introduced by Carl Schmitt, according to whom: “ a revolution of space requires more than landing on an unknown shore. What is required is an alteration of the concepts of space, which affects all aspects of human existence on all counts. The epochal turning point of the 16th and 17th centuries illustrates what such a shift means.”
Significantly, “an alteration of the concepts of space, which affects all aspects of human existence on all counts” brings with it also the re-evaluation of the meaning of largeness and smallness. It can be regarded as a consequence that “Piranesi (…) deemed invalid all principles and rules of construction that had been created with great care by artists, scientists and mathematicians during the long course of the history of European art,” writes Dorottya Cs. Dobrovits in her monography. As can, what she mentions in conjunction with Prisons: “Coleridge and Quincey pointed to the true aim of this series rather insightfully: evoking a sense of uneasiness by the depiction of infinite spaces. Because our eyes would like to rest, on however horrid a site, but nevertheless in safety.” 
The unsettling effects of the oppressive spaces of the Carceri are indisputable. Anxiety can be caused by the tightness of space, but also by its opposite –spaciousness. Psychological researchers have found that “anxiety can considerably distort space perception and can influence the individual’s ability to obtain information about the space, to integrate its signals and to engage in the exploration of it.”

(Magnificenza)
In addition to the revolution of space brought on by the modern age, Piranesi’s images of infinity can also be explained by his growing fascination with the antiquities of Rome. Having grown up in Venice, his initial artistic and archaeological work only extended to the representative architectural structures of Imperial Rome. Later, however, his interest deepened to include both the hidden details and the whole of the city: the water and road systems, the aqueducts and the viaducts. “Previous generations had not been preoccupied by the examination of non-representative creations, such as the aqueducts, the roads, the bridges, or the Cloaca Maxima for that matter. In the eyes of Piranesi, however, these grand masterpieces of engineering represented Rome’s magnificence.” 
It seems to me that for Piranesi, out of the more modest scale of the contemporary Italian city-state/oligarchy, a magnitude of greatness – the dimensions of the imperial space – began to emerge, and, at a certain point, the space of Imperium Romanum shined through the reality of the city.  As to what extent the vista of the empire, which spanned three continents, differed from the perspectives of his own day, is perhaps best illustrated by the lines of a letter by Lucius Annaeus Seneca: “Great and splendid is the human mind, for it allows no limit to be placed before it, unless it is one shared only by itself and God. Its home is the space that encompasses the highest and the universal, it is the ceiling which spans the oceans, the lands, within which the air both separates and marries the divine and the human.” 

(Piranesi – in Expanding Space)
Time after time, the mental shapes and artistic products of the past are made relevant by a sense of similarity and parallelness. In addition to the stylistic affinity between the baroque and the postmodern, Piranesi’s world is made relevant by a more fundamental similarity in two respects: the change of pace resulting from global processes and the appearance of virtual spaces. As a consequence of transport and medium technologies the earth’s space simultaneously constricts and expands. The earth becomes “smaller and smaller,” in other words its various regions, cultures and worlds are becoming increasingly connected, transversed and reachable. 
The transformation of the experience of space and the reconfiguration of concepts of space also take place as a result of the different procedures of virtuality. “The true problem of virtual reality is that it does not allow for any type of orientation,” writes Virilio, “thereby a constant state of weightlessness becomes manifest between being and space. But let us not forget that this weightlessness is a disorientation in space and time that brings about the brutal deconstruction of the real environment. As ‘high’ and ‘deep,’ ‘future’ and ‘past’ assume equal value, this sudden reversibility returns the body as centre – as the central foci of the surrounding world – to its prominent position. In consequence, we are moving no longer towards organizing an exo-centric (extraverted) space as before, but towards monitoring an ego-centric (introverted) space.” 
At the same time, new findings of brain research show that the revolutions of space, the temporary confusion in orientation, are not permanent as “in our heads, there exists not only a virtual, but also a subjective, vertical, which at any given moment provides us with the coordinates of the above and below. We retain this system of orientation even in the weightlessness of outer space. Almost as if the axis of the spinal column, passing though the skull, continued into our own all-time world image. (…) The verticality of the high and deep (…) is more basic than the basis, as it indicates not only the earth and the fundament but also the direction of growth and construction. Researchers suggest that while height is assigned to the left hemisphere of the brain, depth is assigned to the right hemisphere. In height metaphors, the dynamic of the soul primarily shows the relationship between the left and the right hemispheres.“

J.A. Tillmann