Skip to main content
Home
Toggle menu
  • Home
  • Editions
    • Latest
    • Explore
  • Praxis
    • Latest
    • Explore
  • Gallery
    • Explore Latest Exhibits
    • Explore Past Exhibits
    • Explore All Images
  • Resources
    • Index of Authors
    • Booklists
    • Syllabus Repository
    • Timelines
  • About
    • Masthead
    • History
    • Index of Contributors
    • Submissions, Use & Citation Guidelines
    • Archived Material

Ancient Circus

Image Item
Detailed black and white engraving showing the ancient circus.
Description

This fantastical image is an imaginative reconstruction of the Circus Maximus, a lost ancient site devoted to public spectacle.

  • Read more about Ancient Circus

The Gothic Arch

Image Item
Black and white depiction of stone walls with arches.
Description

This etching includes a prominent instance of the architectural impossibilities that appear throughout the Carceri. “The Gothic Arch,” the title bestowed by later scholars, refers to the pointed arch that nearly meets the upper margin of the image.

  • Read more about The Gothic Arch

Jeanne Britton

  • Read more about Jeanne Britton

Giambattista Piranesi

  • Read more about Giambattista Piranesi

The Drawbridge

Image Item
Black and white engraving of various connecting drawbridges.
Description

Piranesi’s Carcerid’Invenzione is a series of 16 menacing, mysterious etchings that depict impossible architectural structures inhabited by laboring, manacled, or tortured men. The series originally appeared in the 1740s as Invenzioni capric. di Carceri., including an abbreviation of “capriccio” [“caprice” or “fancy”].

  • Read more about The Drawbridge

“The Sublime Dreams of Piranesi”: Imagination, Information, and Antiquity

detail from "Rovine d’una Galleria"
Curators
Jeanne Britton
Date Published:
May 2025
Description

Students and scholars of British Romanticism likely know the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720-1778) through at least one of two lenses: the gaze of the grand tourists or the hallucinations of Thomas De Quincey’s English opium eater. His architectural studies of Rome’s scenic ruins, urban vistas, and archaeological marvels nourished the cultures of antiquarianism and tourism as well as the cults of the ruin and the Romantic artist. His Carceri d’invenzione, or “Imaginary Prisons,” constitutes a key series of critical prints that together suggest parallels between architectural and mental spaces that strain beyond reality, reach beyond received ideas of structure and even gesture, perhaps, to the human imagination itself.

  • Read more about “The Sublime Dreams of Piranesi”: Imagination, Information, and Antiquity

Alana Rigby

  • Read more about Alana Rigby

Elizabeth Bernath

  • Read more about Elizabeth Bernath

Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants

  • Read more about Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants

Historical Agency and Civic Action through Antislavery Pedagogy

Pagination

  • First page « First
  • Previous page ‹ Previous
  • …
  • Page 154910
  • Page 154911
  • Page 154912
  • Page 154913
  • Current page 154914
  • Page 154915
  • Page 154916
  • Page 154917
  • Page 154918
  • …
  • Next page Next ›
  • Last page Last »
Subscribe to

 

Masthead

About

Contact Us

sfy39587stp18