The exhibition of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's prints at the Portland Museum through March 13 features views of Rome and visions of prisons. Piranesi's world feels something like Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. As the film opens upon Xanadu (Kane's massive, ornate mansion), a voiceover recites the first lines of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree..." Throughout the film we are given dramatically lit views of its vast, intimidating interior. While Welles conveys longing for childhood lost, Piranesi conveys nostalgia for the lost "paradise" of ancient Rome. But where Citizen Kane cautions against power, Piranesi, like the romantics he would inspire, relishes the power of "the sublime"-sensations of terror and awe regarding massiveness, greatness, infinity; what we might today venture toward in the great outdoors, or decry as Stendhal Syndrome.

Piranesi (1720-1778) grew up and trained as an architect in Venice, whose gloomy magic clearly inspired him. Unsuccessful at finding work, he designed stage sets for extravagant theatrical productions before turning to drawing and printmaking as vehicles for his fantastic architectural visions. Setting up shop in Rome, Piranesi began, like many artists, to depict ruins. Romanticism would later thoroughly transform the unkempt "ruins" of Rome into objects of reverie, yet Rome, the mecca of Western civilization, had attracted cultured pilgrims for centuries. Unlike one-of-a-kind drawings, multiples of prints were sold as souvenirs-"ricordi," or records of Rome-before the invention of photography. A master of perspective and chiaroscuro, Piranesi's amazing memory and imagination gave his prints greater detail, invention and intensity than his competitors'. Most are engravings, which call for almost surgical skill and patience. For the prison series, however, executed in his 20s, he turned to etching, a painterly method possessing the expressive immediacy of drawing. Nowadays drawing is a legitimate art form for architects, but Piranesi's prisons ("Carceri," as in "incarcerated") were trailblazing.

Purchasers of Piranesi's views of Rome sometimes complained about his exaggerations of scale, but in the prisons he could let it all hang out. This was something new, found occasionally in art-as in Brughel's "Tower of Babel" (based on the Roman Coliseum), or Chinese landscape painting.

With a vastness inspired by that of the Roman Empire, Piranesi's proto-surreal prisons have a spatial drama frenetic as Futurism's, curious as Cubism's, anxious as Giacometti's. Piranesi inspired painters like Turner, Friedrich, Cole and the Hudson River School. Though Piranesi is underknown, his trippy sense of space seems channeled by the wondrous japanimation remake of Lang's Metropolis.

In the 1821 "Confessions of an Opium Eater," de Quincy explored how drugs exaggerate imagination, and recalled his conversation with Coleridge while viewing Piranesi's prisons; Coleridge was reminded of how his own imagination, out of control from drugs taken for an illness, had been inspired to write "Kubla Khan." With or without drugs, to our jaded, postmodern eyes, the effects of "the sublime" will be less forceful. But with a little imagination, Piranesi's visions can be appreciated as truly awesome.