For the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, Giovanni Battista Piranesi was “the inventor of Rome’s tragic beauty.” The son of a Venetian stonemason, Piranesi arrived in Rome around 1740 and soon became infatuated with the Eternal City’s antiquities. His etchings of Roman ruins, which he began producing as a 20-year-old architectural draftsman, went on to capture all […]

This post was originally published on Jacobin.