Frontispiece of Volume 1 of Urbis Aeternae Vestigia, from Le Antichità Romane

In the artistic production of the architect, printmaker, and art theorist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ruins invite experimentation, novel thinking, and flights of imagination. His representations of ancient Roman monuments are not associated with decline or decay. Rather, Piranesi produced a prolific body of engraved images that took Roman ruins as a point of departure in a monumental artistic vision of classicizing, yet fundamentally new, creations. For Piranesi, ruins constitute an imaginative seed, the generative material of a new vision of Rome.

The dense configuration of overgrown ruins in the foreground—fragments of ancient monuments representing trophies, a Roman map, portions of the architectural orders, a grand bridge, and a triumphal arch—suggests the vitality of Piranesi’s imagination. His four-volume set, Le antichità romane, which contained 250 plates, was an imaginative tour-de-force.