Past Perfect: Reinventing Antiquity

Life seldom turns out the way we expect. When 20-year-old Giovanni Battista Piranesi moved to Rome in 1740, he hoped to become a famous architect. But the young Venetian soon discovered that the eternal city had little need for the services of an unknown, provincial draftsman. Unable to support himself as a designer, Piranesi was forced to look to the past for a means of survival.

Sometime in the early 1740s, Piranesi apprenticed himself to a local printmaker, Giuseppi Vasi, and began producing small engravings of Roman landmarks to sell as souvenirs. The young artist’s brooding evocations of the city’s dilapidated, weed-choked monuments instantly struck a chord with European tourists eager to recapture the aura of imperial Rome.

By the early 1760’s, Piranesi had become successful enough to open his own studio, just above the Spanish Steps, and he devoted the remainder of his life to producing a remarkable series of more than 1,000 engravings depicting many of Rome’s ancient structures. Piranesi’s works were famous, in part, for their architectural precision and attention to detail, but they were even more widely admired for their unusual sense of perspective, dazzling baroque style and unabashed celebration of Roman culture.