Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi made etchings of Rome that shaped how Europe imagined antiquity for two centuries. Born near Treviso in 1720, the son of a stonemason, he trained as an architect under his uncle in Venice and learned stage design, which taught him the dramatic perspective his prints depend on. He went to Rome in 1740 in the retinue of the Venetian ambassador, learned etching, and found almost no architectural work; only one building of his was ever constructed, the church of Santa Maria del Priorato on the Aventine. He made his living from the Vedute di Roma, views of the city produced over four decades and sold to visitors on the Grand Tour. They are not accurate records. He exaggerated scale, dwarfed figures against monuments, deepened shadows and steepened viewpoints, so that the Colosseum and the baths appear vaster and more overwhelming than they are — and it was this image of Rome that fixed itself in the European imagination. The Carceri d'invenzione, imaginary prisons published in 1750 and reworked far more darkly in 1761, show cavernous vaults with staircases that lead nowhere, ropes, winches and instruments of torture, in spaces with no consistent perspective. They anticipate the Romantic sublime, influenced De Quincey and Coleridge, and are still the standard visual reference for architectural nightmare. He was a combative antiquarian, arguing in Della magnificenza in 1761 that Roman architecture derived from the Etruscans and owed nothing to Greece — a losing position in the Greek revival, defended with enormous energy. He recorded ancient structures with real archaeological care as they were being quarried away. He died in Rome in 1778.

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