View of the Flavian Amphitheater, Called the Colosseum

When Piranesi first came to Rome from Venice in 1740, he entered the studio of Giuseppe Vasi, the foremost engraver of city views, or vedute, in Rome. In Vasi’s workshop, Piranesi learned quickly, and made significant advances in his etching technique. By the late 1740s, he was making the large-scale vedute that he is most famous for today. Over the course of thirty years, from around 1748 until his death in 1778, Piranesi produced a series of 135 prints called the Vedute di Roma. Though these views of ancient and modern Roman buildings were sold as individual sheets to scholars, tourists, and artists to serve as souvenirs of their travels, surviving puncture marks suggest that they were often bound together with other prints in album form.

Piranesi produced several large vedute of the ancient amphitheater known as the Colosseum, including this print from the early 1760s. Here, the artist renders a bulging closeup of the northern outer wall in a distorted perspective that emphasizes the monument’s massive volume. In spite of this dramatic treatment, the structure and its details, including the orders of the columns that flank the arches on each level (Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, with Corinthian pilasters on the upper or attic story), are clearly legible. The patches of vegetation that grow on the surface of the monument and hang from its archways emphasize its status as an ancient ruin.