Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Italian engraver and architect, is best known for his etchings of ancient and baroque Rome and grandiose architectural constructions of his own imagination.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born on Oct. 4, 1720, at Mojano di Mestre near Venice, the son of a stonemason. His early training in Venice under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, an architectural engineer, gave Piranesi a grasp of the means of masonry construction--scaffolding, winches, hawsers, pulleys, and chains--that stayed with him the rest of his life. His understanding of the vocabulary of classicism came largely from Andrea Palladio's book on architecture; his knowledge of architectural renderings he drew in part from Ferdinando Bibiena's book on civil architecture (1711); and his manner of placing buildings on a diagonal, sharply foreshortened, probably came from contemporary Venetian stage design.

In 1740 Piranesi went to Rome as a draftsman on the staff of the Venetian ambassador, Marco Foscarini. In...