D'Invenzione, image area approx. 16" X 20 1/2" plus mat, 22" X 27" overall......Biography from the Archives of askARTPhoto of Giovanni Battista PiranesiGiovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)He was a major Italian printmaker, architect and antiquarian. The son of a Venetian master builder, he studied architecture and stage design, through which he became familiar with Illusionism*.During a visit (1740) to Rome, which was then emerging as the center of European Neoclassicism*, Piranesi began his lifelong obsession with the visual diversity of the city's architecture.He was taught (1740-44) etching*, the art form for which he remains best known, by Giuseppe Vasi. Piranesi then began to etch views of Roman architecture that reflected his deeply felt emotional response to the surviving remnants of ancient grandeur.Piranesi's etchings, executed from the 1740s onward, are technically masterful evocations of ancient buildings that are simultaneously scholarly inquiries and fanciful essays in space, light, and scale. When collected and published (1756) in Antichita Romane (Roman Antiquities) the 135 etchings created a sensation throughout Europe. Equally stimulating are the superb architectural fantasies depicted in his Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, begun c.1745, reworked 1761).Source:Grolier Electronic Publishing...Carceri d'invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, is a series of 16 etchings by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 14 produced from c. 1745 to 1750, when the first edition of the set was published. All depict enormous subterranean vaults with stairs and mighty machines, in rather extreme versions of the capriccio, a favourite Italian genre of architectural fantasies; the first title page uses the term.The series was started in 1745, when Piranesi was already well-known for more conventional prints of the ancient and modern buildings of Rome. The first state prints were published in 1750 and consisted of 14 etchings, untitled and unnumbered, with a sketch-like look. The original prints were 16" x 21". Piranesi reworked the prints a decade later, giving them second states.[1] For the second edition in 1761, all the etchings were reworked and numbered I–XVI (1–16),[2] with numbers II and V new etchings in the series.Despite being intensely personal imaginative creations, for Piranesi "a source of self-analysis and of creative release",[3] aspects of the Carceri draw on Piranesi's early training as a set designer for the stage; prison scenes were often called for. Surviving drawings for complicated sets by Filippo Juvarra and Ferdinando Bibiena (both primarily architects) as well as others have evident similaries to the prints in their receding spaces and disappearing staircases. Number XI in the series is also very similar, in reverse, to a Piranesi drawing Study for a palatial interior in the British Museum.[4]The images influenced Romanticism and Surrealism. While the Vedutisti (or "view makers"), such as Canaletto and Bellotto, more often reveled in the beauty of the sunlit place, in Piranesi this vision takes on what from a modern perspective could be called a Kafkaesque distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthine structures, epic in volume. They are capricci, whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin.[5]Numbers I to IX were all done in portrait format (vertical), while X to XVI were landscape format (horizontal). Piranesi seems to have been "diffident" about the reception of such unusual images, and the first edition title page does not name him as the artist, nor do most of the individual plates.

light foxing around perimeter.