![]() But as those opportunities failed to materialise, so the character of his imaginings became increasingly febrile and weird – a process which drew him gradually down into the underworld of. While catering to the burgeoning market for vedute Piranesi was also in such works touting for business, pleading for opportunities to translate his visionary sensitivity to the classical past into actual buildings of his own design. In many of his views he presented elaborate and idealised reconstructions of ancient Roman building types like mausolea or theatres. Aristocrats, connoisseurs and dilettantes flocked to the city and few of them left without a portfolio of Piranesi’s prints to jog the memory and stir the imagination. Rome was the principal destination on that culturally improving peregrination for young noblemen known as the Grand Tour. ![]() ![]() He depicted the city’s broken bridges, its half-buried temples, the shattered bulk of the Colosseum. Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Piranesi ( Italian pronunciation: dovanni battista piranezi -esi also known as simply Piranesi 4 October 1720 9 November 1778) was an Italian classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his etchings of Rome and of fictitious and atmospheric 'prisons' ( Carceri d'invenzione ). Until his death in 1778, Piranesi produced a multitude of images celebrating the ruined majesty of ancient Rome. But commissions were slow in coming so he turned his hand instead to the production of souvenir views, or vedute, of the Eternal City. In his early twenties, he moved to Rome in the hope of realising that ambition. The son of a stonemason, he was intended from the outset for an architectural career. Piranesi was born near Mestre, on the outskirts of Venice, in 1720. Its title, which refers to the most prominent of its many fanciful architectural details, is simply The Drawbridge. 1934: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pennsylvania Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. It is one of fourteen large engravings of imaginary prisons, created by the Italian etcher and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the middle years of the eighteenth century. Carceri (Fourth Edition (First Paris Edition)). Over the years this column has prompted a number of letters from people serving prison sentences.
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