Yourcenar says they are unlike anything that came before, but presage much to come. They "may well be one of the first and most mysterious symptoms of that obsession with torture and incarceration which increasingly possess men's minds during the last decades of the 18th century. One thinks of Sade and the dungeons of the Florentine villa in which his Mirsky imprisons his victims ... both express that abuse which is somehow the inevitable conclusion of the Baroque will to power." (p. 118)
The prints are here. See also an essay by Aldous Huxley on the Prisons etchings, and a piece on a modern exhibition they inspired.
(The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Marguerite Yourcenar, Trans. Richard Howard, 1980. I've posted on another essay in the collection here.)
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