Room 115

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

1720–1778, Italy (Venice, Rome), Neoclassicism

Piranesi was an architect, an archaeologist and the greatest etcher of Rome. In hundreds of plates he recorded the ruins of antiquity – baths, temples, bridges and burial chambers – and heightened them into vast, almost theatrical spaces. His “Views of Rome” shaped the image of the city for travellers on the Grand Tour.

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