A new collection: Piranesi's imaginary prisons

Around 1750 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Venetian working in Rome, etched a set of prisons that could never be built: stairs that lead nowhere, bridges hung in the dark, wheels and chains the size of buildings. In 1761 he reworked the plates and published them again, darker and more crowded. Architects and writers have been haunted by them ever since.

They open a new collection, Imagined Architecture. All ten come from the Rijksmuseum, most in their 1761 state.