Piranesi was a controversial and influential printmaker whose individual vision altered the course of art history in the 1700s. The son of a stonemason and master builder, Piranesi spent his first 20 years in Venice. He studied architecture and stage design and was exposed to the influences of Canaletto and Tiepolo. In 1740, he moved to Rome to practice architecture, but a lack of commissions quickly led him to printmaking. He studied with Giuseppe Vasi in 1740 and began creating etchings of ‘souvenir views' for the Grand Tour market. He did not, however, abandon architecture completely, but devoted his creative energies were to developing scenes of architectural imagination, or capriccio. In 1743, he published his thoughts on architectural reform in Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, and introduced his celebrated suite of fantastical prison compositions, Carceri d'invenzione (first state, c. 1745).
Over the next forty years, Piranesi remained in Rome, exercising a seminal influence on European Neoclassicism through his personal contact with visiting artists, architects, and patrons. From 1748 onwards he began his magisterial folio Vedute di Roma-135 plates, which were issued individually or in groups over the course of the rest of his career. The Vedute di Roma established Piranesi as one of the main proponents of topography, a term that holds negative connotations as secondary to 'fine art' or 'landscape' views. Topography primarily provides a visual record or survey of a particular site rather than as a form of self expression. In these works, he pushed the boundaries of etching techniques to extremes and explored a scenographic perspective, combining remarkable flights of imagination with a strongly practical understanding of ancient cultures.
In the 1750s, archaeology became of increasing concern to Piranesi, resulting in his treatise Le antichità romane (1756), which revolutionized the methods and range of technical illustration and won him international recognition. These images generated a highly charged emotional perception of the past and left an indelible perception of Roman Antiquity in the Graeco-Roman antiquarian debates of the 1760s. These debates pitted "rigorist" proponents of ancient Greek art and architecture against Italian antiquarians who celebrated Roman artistic heritage and its native Etruscan past.
Beginning with the election of the Venetian Pope Clement XIII, the 1760s brought increased patronage for Piranesi, resulting in a series of lavishly produced folios and treatises: Della Magnificenza de l'Architettura de'Romani (1761), which argued for Roman and Etruscan superiority based on inventiveness of spirit and engineering skill; Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma (1762); Parere su l'Architettura (1764), which Piranesi formulated as a polemical response to an attack on Piranesi's pro-Roman stance; and Diverse Maniere d'adornare i Cammini (1769). His greatest legacy, however, remains the powerfully revised plates of the Carceri d'invenzione (second state, 1761) which have continued to exercise an influence on generations of artists. Only a single building of his many designs was ever erected, the Santa Maria del Priorato in Rome (1764-1766).