Piranesi, Giovanni Battista

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista (1720–78). Italian etcher, designer, archaeologist, and architect, born near Venice but active for almost all his career in Rome, where he settled in 1740. In Venice he had studied perspective and stage design and in Rome he achieved great popularity with his spectacular etchings of the ancient and modern city—the Vedute—published from 1745 onwards. He often altered the scale of buildings to make them look even grander than they are in actuality (Horace Walpole said he ‘conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour’) and his work played a major role in shaping the popular mental image of the city. Even more dramatic and original are his images of Carceri d'invenzione, fantastic imaginary prisons, begun c.1745 and reworked in 1761. These striking and obsessive works were later claimed by the Surrealists as an anticipation of their ideas and their influence can be seen in 20th-century horror movies. Only one building was erected to Piranesi's designs (S. Maria del Priorato, Rome, 1764–6), but he was important as an architectural polemicist, most notably in his Della magnificenza ed architettura de' Romani (1761), in which he championed the superiority of Roman architecture over Greek. He influenced not only architects, but also stage designers and painters of capriccios such as his friend Hubert Robert, and he had a powerful impact on the literary imagination. William Beckford, for example, said that in writing his Gothic novel Vathek (1786) ‘I drew chasms, and subterranean hollows, the domain of fear and torture, with chains, racks, wheels and dreadful engines in the style of Piranesi.’ His etchings continued to be published for many years after his death and his work was continued by his son Francesco (1758–1810).