About
The University of South Carolina is one of few institutions to hold a complete set of Piranesi’s posthumous Opere (1835-9), a set of twenty-nine elephant-folio volumes, housed in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. This publication assembles nearly all of his individual works and images (such as Views of Rome and Imaginary Prisons). Alternatively historical and imaginative, Piranesi’s representations of ruins are exercises in rigorous archaeological investigation as much as they are fanciful experiments in urban imagination.
“The Digital Piranesi” aspires to appeal to these two elements of Piranesi’s own works—the historical and the imaginative—and to explore the ways that Piranesi’s works seem to predict many elements of digital design. His illustrations of ruins and crypts are immersive, his architectural studies often consist of multiple layered images, and his maps and ruins include detailed alphabetic keys. His indexed maps, annotated architectural studies, immersive interiors, and multi-image views push the limits of the printed page. While his earliest works were individual engravings of Roman ruins marketed towards visitors on the grand tour, he quickly began producing increasingly larger images and adding not only textual keys but also indices, prefaces, and dissertations. Pushing against the limits not only of the printed page but also of the bound book, his multi-plate engravings become elaborate foldouts in bound volumes, and the references in his maps and indices direct users through unnumbered pages and between different publications.
His works are rare—his complete works are exceedingly so—and they constitute a colossal corpus with expansive pedagogical and scholarly potential lacking in any comprehensive searchable index. “The Digital Piranesi” aims to make the content and connections in this rich body of work easily accessible and searchable.
In addition, this project aims to share and generate new scholarly discussions of Piranesi’s images. Collectively, his works have been the subject of substantial critical comment; individually, though, his etchings stand up to close analysis that goes beyond current scholarship. Beginning with his Views of Rome and the first volume of his Roman Antiquities, essays on each of his images have been written by members of the interdisciplinary team of scholars below.
Authors
Jeanne Britton (JB) is the project PI and Curator in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina. Her book Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750-1850, was published with Oxford in 2019. Using her background in Comparative Literature and the resources of the Irvin Department, she researches and writes about the history of reading, the art of information, and literature of the Enlightenment and Romantic period. Her recent work examines printed, typographical forms, including paratexts, tables, and illustrations, for the ways that they multiply reading experiences. Her contributions appear throughout the site.
Cosette Bruhns Alonso (CBA) is Assistant Editor of Brown University Digital Publications. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her primary area of research and teaching is in thirteenth to sixteenth century Italian literature with a focus on the relationship between word and image, visual culture, and intersections between literature, media, and technology. She is the Managing Editor of Dante Studies, the annual journal of the Dante Society of America. She previously held the positions of Assistant Editor for Book and Style Publications at the Modern Language Association, Contemporary Digital Publishing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, Mellon Foundation, and the Visual Resources Association. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Sean P. Burrus (SB), Ph.D., is an art historian whose research, among other things, explores the enduring relevance of antiquity to the construction of modern culture and creation of contemporary art. He has previously explored the formative influence of Piranesi and of European antiquarian culture, on American culture in the 18th and 19th, resulting in the exhibition Antiquity & America at Bowdoin College Museum of Art. He currently serves as Curator of Judaic Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. His contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Penny Combe (PC) is the Kelekian Curatorial Fellow in Ancient Art at Harvard University. She is a specialist in ancient art and archaeology, especially from the north-west of the Roman Empire. Her research interests include constructions of regionality and localism, particularly witnessed in transmission of objects, materials, techniques, and form between Roman Britain and Germany. At the Harvard Art Museums, she is assisting with the development of a 2026 exhibition on Celtic art, as well as working on a range of cataloguing, research, and gallery projects across the ancient collection. Hailing from the United Kingdom, Coombe has previously worked at the Ashmolean Museum, the Getty Research Institute, and the Museum of London and has taught classical archaeology at the University of Oxford, University of Sheffield, and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Aria Dal Molin (ADM) is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of South Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in French and Italian literature, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her scholarly interests lie in the areas of sex and gender in the sixteenth-century literary academies, anticlassicism in the comedies of the late Renaissance, and transnational mobility in the early modern theater of Italy and France. Her book, Early Modern Bromance: Love, Friendship, and Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Italian Academies, looks at the clash of ideals of perfect friendship and compulsory marriage in the early years of the Renaissance Italian literary academies. She is currently working on a book on heterodoxy in early modern theater which considers theatrical depictions of conjugal experiments which offer a means to acknowledge changing ideologies and subtle resistance to the prescriptive rules around marriage introduced by the Council of Trent. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Sofia Hernandez (SAH) is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, working under the supervision of Professors Carolyn Yerkes and Basile Baudez. She is an architectural historian of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on Italian architecture and urbanism. Her research investigates the relationship between architecture, political power, and natural disaster in Spanish Italy. Her dissertation focuses on the rebuilding of eastern Sicily after the earthquake of 1693, and the response of the Spanish Crown. More broadly, her research deals with cultural exchanges between Spain and Sicily throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her further research interests include the travels of architects, earthquakes and natural disasters, the circulation and reception of prints and drawings, architectural ruins and spolia, and the historiography of baroque art and architecture. She received her B.A. in art history from Columbia University, where she wrote her senior thesis on hand-colored, eighteenth-century prints of Rome. For the 2024-2025 academic year, Sofia is the Princeton pre-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Dr. Tanja Michalsky at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Anna Swartwood House (AH) is an art historian (Ph.D., Princeton 2011) whose research focuses on Renaissance cross-culturalism, the art of Venice 1400-1600, artists’ biographies, and the reception of art. Currently she serves as Associate Professor of art history in the School of Visual Design at the University of South Carolina. Her book Antonello da Messina and the History of Art (2025) was supported by a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Art History from the Renaissance Society of America. Research for her second book, on the frescoed façade in Cinquecento Venice and the Veneto, is supported by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which awarded her the Henry A. Millon Award in Art and Architectural History. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Zoe Langer (ZL) [bio forthcoming] … Her contributions appear in the Views of Rome.
Mireille Linck (ML) is an art historian specialized in works on paper from the early-modern and modern period, and collecting history. She obtained her Master’s degree in curating from The Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. As a aficionado and connoisseur of prints and drawings, she previously worked at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and Teylers Museum. Currently, she is assistant curator at Escher in The Palace in The Hague, where she conducts research on M.C. Escher, and curates exhibitions on his life, work and contemporaries. During her curator-position at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen she wrote and published an online collection catalogue called 'Piranesi on Paper'. This was the result of a two-year research project into all the prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the museum’s collection. Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Helen B. Marodin Kampmann (HMK) [bio forthcoming] … Her contributions on Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons appear in volume eight of the Opere.
Carla Scagliosi (CS) is an art historian of the Italian Ministry of Culture, since 2018 working at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia, where she is responsible for the artworks of the Modern and Contemporary Collections and the exhibitions office. Previously, after various collaborations with national and international museum institutions, she was an art historian curator at the Sovrintendenza Capitolina in Rome (Museo Carlo Bilotti - Aranciera di Villa Borghese). Her research focuses on the history of the visual arts in the Modern era, with particular reference to the 17th-19th centuries. She is author of scientific articles and essays and curator of various exhibitions, including Piranesi nelle collezioni della Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria (Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, 30 September 2022 - 8 January 2023). Her contributions appear in volume one of Roman Antiquities.
Project Staff
Mackenzie Anderson (2019-2020)
Jessica Atkins, Magellan Scholar (2017-2019)
Mallory Baskin (2017-2018)
Karleigh Belli (2025-1016)
Constance Caddell, Project Manager (2017-2018)
Diem Dao (2018-2019)
T. Zachary Frazier (2018-2019)
Avery Freeman (2019-2022)
Mike Gavin, co-PI (2017-2024)
Erin Jones (2018)
Adams Keefer, Magellan Scholar (2022-2024)
Alexis Kratzer (2018-2019)
Harith Kumte (2019-2022)
Khadijahh Kumte, Magellan Journey Scholar (2023-2024)
Clio Lang (2020-2022)
Daniel Neath (2020-2021)
Ava O’Donnell (2025-2026)
Walt Pach, Magellan Scholar (2021-2023)
Stephanie Roznowski, Magellan Apprentice Scholar (2023-2024)
Adiv Sivakumar (2018)
Aniruth Sivakumar (2019-2022)
Chris Terry, Magellan Scholar (2017-2019)
Nathalie Watson (2017-2018)
Lindsay Wright (2019-2021)
Advisory Board and Faculty Members
Alexandre Bonafos, French, USC
Kate Boyd, Digital Collections, USC
Lydia Brandt, Art and Architectural History, USC
Curtis Fletcher, Ahmanson Lab, Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, University of Southern California
Hunter Gardner, Classics, USC
Andrew Graciano, Art History, USC
Carol Harrison, History, USC
Anna House, Art History, USC
Lawryn Henderson, Preservation Specialist, USC
Evan Meaney, Media Arts, USC
Heather Hyde Minor, Art History, University of Notre Dame
Aria dal Molin, Italian, USC
Megan Oliver, Digital Collections, USC (now University of Missouri, Kansas City)
John Pinto, Princeton, History of Art and Archaeology, Emeritus, Princeton University
Jason Porter, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, USC
Rebecca Zorach, Art History, Northwestern University
The Digital Piranesi has been generously supported by an NEH grant from the Division of Preservation and Access (2019-2023), a Digital Art History grant from the Kress Foundation (2022-2024) and, at the University of South Carolina, an ASPIRE II grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research (2017-2019, 2021-2022, and 2025-2026), the Center for Digital Humanities, the Magellan Scholar Program, the Maners-Pappas Endowment, the Humanities Collaborative, and the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.