300 years ago a famous Italian artist called Giovanni Battista Piranesi did something strange. He drew an infinite, imaginary prison filled with impossible architecture, shadowy figures, and mysterious torture devices. Why? Nobody knows...
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the son of a master stonemason, was born near Venice in the year 1720. After training as an architect and set designer he went to Rome at the age of twenty, where he would become one of the most popular and influential artists of the century.
This was the age of the Grand Tour, when rich travellers from across Europe came to Italy in masses. And it was the Age of Enlightenment, an era of new ideas about philosophy, politics, history, and architecture. Three new forms of art were in fashion at the time.
The first were "veduti" — highly detailed cityscapes — which were popular with wealthy tourists as souvenirs of the places they had been. Canaletto is the most famous vedutista; his views of Venice were hugely successful in England, where he went himself to paint London.
But paintings were expensive. The *real* veduti were etchings and engravings, used to make prints which could be sold in the thousands to travellers rich and not-so-rich, from pilgrims to itinerant workers. Like this one by Giuseppe Vasi, Piranesi's tutor in Rome.