The Digital Piranesi

Genres, Subjects, and Themes

“The Digital Piranesi” organizes Piranesi’s works in two primary ways: according to their original publication in the individual works collected in the volumes of the Opere under “Works and Volumes,” and, below, according to their primary subject or genre. Accessing Piranesi’s works in this way, as opposed to their original works, calls attention to their different approaches to media. Piranesi’s architectural views and his referential networks require complex interactions with the spaces of the printed, illustrated book. Digitally representing not only Piranesi’s images but also their interconnections (in his maps), composite layers (in his layered images), and verbal references (in his annotated views) suggests new insights about eighteenth-century Rome, the birth of art history as a discipline, and the graphical representation of knowledge. Below, his works are (gradually being organized and) divided according to either their primary subject (prisons, fancies) or their genre (map, view, layered image).

Additionally, his works are accessible through about thirty themes, from authorship to water, from citation to the sublime, that appear throughout his images. As “tags,” these themes enable yet another approach to, as of early 2024, his Views of Rome and, by the end of 2024, the first volume of his Roman Antiquities.  

Contents of this path: