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 […]