Giovanni Battista Piranesi
ARTISTGiovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) trained as an architect in Venice but built almost nothing. He moved to Rome and spent his life etching it instead. The Vedute di Roma, sold to visitors on the Grand Tour, shaped how Europe pictured the ancient city for two centuries, exaggerating scale until ruins loom over the figures beneath them. His Carceri d'Invenzione, the imaginary prisons, abandon the real city entirely for vast interiors of stairs and chains that lead nowhere, and they were read a century later as a forerunner of Romantic and Surrealist space. He was also a fierce polemicist, arguing in print that Roman architecture owed nothing to the Greeks. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his etchings, free to preview and available as originals for printing.
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Clear FiltersGiovanni Battista Piranesi, wall art & digital downloads
0 works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, 1720–1778) are catalogued on Archive Lane, free to preview and available to download or order as a print.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) trained as an architect in Venice but built almost nothing. He moved to Rome and spent his life etching it instead. The Vedute di Roma, sold to visitors on the Grand Tour, shaped how Europe pictured the ancient city for two centuries, exaggerating scale until ruins loom over the figures beneath them. His Carceri d'Invenzione, the imaginary prisons, abandon the real city entirely for vast interiors of stairs and chains that lead nowhere, and they were read a century later as a forerunner of Romantic and Surrealist space. He was also a fierce polemicist, arguing in print that Roman architecture owed nothing to the Greeks. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his etchings, free to preview and available as originals for printing.
At a glance
Most of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's work on the site falls under Prints (849), Drawings (73), Landscape (31).
By movement, it's catalogued as Rococo (950), Neoclassicism (19).
Culture: Italian (969).
By orientation: 696 landscape, 272 portrait, 1 square.
Other Italian artists of the period
Artists from the same country and generation, also in the archive:
- Giovanni Battista Tiepolo — 641 artworks
- Canaletto — 238 artworks
- Francesco Guardi — 218 artworks
- Luigi Mayer — 112 artworks
- Francesco Londonio — 99 artworks
- Giovanni Battista Cipriani — 90 artworks
- Gaetano Gandolfi — 89 artworks
- Richard Wilson — 85 artworks
Prints of these artworks
Every artwork here can be downloaded as the original high-resolution file, or ordered as a Canvas, Rolled Canvas, Framed Canvas or Framed Print from $21.99, shipping included.
Sizes and framing
Sizes are listed in inches and centimetres, with up to 26 sizes available depending on the print type, from small desk pieces up to large statement pieces. A size that doesn't match this artwork's own proportions is centred and trimmed to fit, and each print type's page states exactly how much of the image that removes.