(1720-1778) Italian architectural designer, builder and artist, in Rome from 1740, where he became best-known for two series of etchings, the views mostly of Rome and generally referred to as the Vedute ["Views"] or "capriccios" [ie fantasies] and the imaginary prisons generally referred to as the Carceri ["Prisons"], published and distributed variously. The first twelve Vedute appeared in Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive inventate ["Part One of Architecture and Perspective"] [for all full or fuller titles see Checklist below] (graph 1743), depicting the great City in a manner that inextricably mingles the ancient and the contemporary, the ruined and the populous, the vertical and the subterranean, all effects conveyed through a profoundly Romantic use of chiaroscuro; it is clear that in his passion to capture the essence of Rome Piranesi felt entitled to imagine the original state of ancient structures so modified by time that his renderings of them have been profoundly fantasticated. One of the frontispieces attached to a second but connected sequence – "Two Roman Roads Flanked by Colossal Funerary Monuments" in Le Antichità Romane (graph 1756 4vols) – almost literally transforms the dream of the city into a dream of Edifice [for Edifice, Gothic Fantasy and a differently couched entry on Giovanni Piranesi see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].
The Vedute are divided between fantastic reconstructions of ancient buildings and monuments, rendered as though by an artist from the same period, and representations of such structures in a state of ruin, rendered from the perspective of the eighteenth century. Both categories almost always include human figures – sometimes alone, sometimes grouped, sometimes scattered – whose functions are various: passers-by, builders, users and, in the retrospective views, contemplators of ruins. From the context of this encyclopedia, it should be noted that Piranesi admits no element of futurity into the temporal dynamics implied by the contemplation of ruins: no eighteenth-century edifice is imagined by him in a state of ruin as viewed by some future contemplator, though he was manifestly central to the work of his acolyte Hubert Robert (1733-1808); and Sir John Soane (1753-1837), deeply influenced by Piranesi since acquiring four Vedute in 1778 from the artist, instructed his in-house painter Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843) to use Piranesian perspectives to create visions of the not-yet-built Bank of England in ruins (see Ruins and Futurity).
Piranesi may for this reason seem to hover at the prior edge of Fantastika without in any real sense inhabiting a world of the imagination whose fourth wall is the future or, more precisely, the world. No element of the Ruins and Futurity dynamic is to be found in Piranesi's second great series, the Carceri presented in Invenzioni Capric di Carceri ["Fanciful Images of Prisons"] (graph 1745; rev vt Carceri d'Invenzione ["Imaginary Prisons"] 1761), a sequence of sixteen images of vast, imaginary Prisons (see also Crime and Punishment). He may not have been the first artist to create oneiric edifices whose passages and chambers seem to extend unendingly from distant heaven to the deep abyssal Underground world that is their natural home – the close resemblance of the Carceri to the structures imagined in Architectura (graph 1593-1594; rev 1598) of Wendel Dietterlin (1550-1599) may be coincidental, though the affinity between the two artists is unmistakable – but by the middle of the eighteenth century the time was ripe for representative icons of the sublime. Some of the Carceri seem to be visions of worlds deep inside the mountains which were soon to become a central focus of perspectives that terrorize the viewer into a state of bliss. With their stone-layered visions of infinity glimpsable at some huge perspectival cost beyond the labyrinthine architectonic chiaroscuros within, the sense they convey of a constant metamorphic play between the animate and the inanimate, allied as it is with a dynamic interplay between construction and ruination, they make it clear – certainly in retrospect – that Romanticism was just around the corner.