This composite image assembles Ionic column capitals from various buildings in Rome in order to argue for the superiority and the magnificence of Roman as opposed to Greek architecture. His argument relies on fragments of texts and buildings. Visual citations and architectural details serve as his bibliographical and graphical evidence.
Veduta della fonte e delle Spelonche d’Egeria fuor della porta Capena or di San SebastianoIn this view, Piranesi depicts the sacred fountain grotto associated with Egeria, the water nymph who was thought to have advised Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. For subsequent generations of artists and writers, the grotto represented the return to a natural state after neglect an
Known as the Porta Maggiore or Porta Prenestina, this magnificent gate lies at the convergence of eight aqueducts and two ancient roads. In the full title of the image, Piranesi explains that this monument was erected by Titus Vespasian to commemorate the restoration of two aqueducts—the Anio, or Aniene nuovo, and Claudia.
This engraving depicts a ruined architectural interior that opens to the sky even as it is emphatically enclosed by successive archways that are overgrown with draping vines.
This fantastical image is an imaginative reconstruction of the Circus Maximus, a lost ancient site devoted to public spectacle.
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.
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”].
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.
