Beginning initially as a documentation of funereal architecture, the central project of his entire career, the Antichità Romane, became an immense recording of Roman antiquity, numbering 250 plates and four volumes in total. Travelling as part of a Venetian papal delegation, he became fascinated with the remains of Ancient Rome, and argued for its importance against an intellectual consensus that had deemed it inferior to Ancient Greece. Image courtesy of Dietmar Katz / Kunstbibliothek der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlinīefore creating his fictions, Piranesi had first mastered the study of surviving architecture. Sketch of an altar for the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato on Rome’s Aventine Hill. Enthralled by antiquity, he chose the medium of etching and printmaking, which seemed to embody within it the passage of time, giving even his invented works the sense of having a past. While he is buried at the Church of St Mary on the Aventine, a minor treasure he worked to restore between 17, his genius lay in print, specifically in the exploration of the realms outside extant architecture the unbuilt, the demolished and the derelict.Ī Venetian by birth and outlook, he belonged to the capriccio tradition of imaginary, or composite, cityscapes. While proudly declaring himself an architect, Piranesi built very little. The latter was an artist and an architect a Venetian and a Roman the last of the Ancients and the first of the moderns a visionary who studiously documented imperial ruins while predicting the ‘dark Satanic mills’, in Blake’s words, of the coming Industrial Revolution a prophet who spent his days recreating the past a designer of heaven and hell. Often depicted with two faces gazing in opposite directions, this was a god who reflected Piranesi’s nature.

Its colossal arches hinted at the nature of the Roman god to whom it was dedicated – Janus, the god of gateways, journeys and change. In 1748, Giovanni Battista Piranesi depicted the Temple of Janus overgrown and in a state of disrepair.

Piranesi prison etchings