Why Piranesi's greatest works weren't his famous prints but rather the books for which he made them A draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly inventive Imaginary Prisons. Yet Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor argue that his single greatest art form-one that combined his obsessions most powerfully and that he pursued throughout his career-was the book. Piranesi Unbound provides a fundamental reinterpretation of Piranesi by recognizing him, first and foremost, as a writer, illustrator, printer, and publisher of books. Featuring nearly two hundred of Piranesi's engravings and drawings, including some that have never been published before, this visually stunning book returns Piranesi's artworks to the context for which he originally produced them: a dozen volumes that combine text and image, archaeology and imagination, erudition and humor. Drawing on new research, Piranesi Unbound uncovers the social networks in which Piranesi published, including the readers who bought, read, and debated his books. It reveals his habit of raiding the wastepaper pile for cast-off sheets upon which to draw and fuse printed images and texts. It shows how, even after his books were bound, they were subject to change by Piranesi and others as pages were torn out and added. The first major exploration of the lives of Piranesi's books, Piranesi Unbound reimagines the full range of the artist's creativity by showing how it is inextricably bound to his career as a maker of books.

Beginning in the 1730s, Heather Minor tells us, Rome "began to resemble one huge construction site," with a series of ambitious and expensive new building campaigns that transformed the face and substance of the city. From renovations of the Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano and the restoration of the Arch of Constantine to the creation of the Capitoline Museum and the establishment of the papacy's Calcografia, the push for reform not only renewed papal and Church identity but also revived Italian culture as a whole. Based on extensive archival research and full of fascinating stories about the often stormy theological and intellectual debates central to the attempts at reform, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome brings to life the personalities of architects, theologians, and intellectuals and links the extensive architectural programs with powerful shifts in the intellectual climate of the time.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was one of the most important artists eighteenth-century Europe produced. But Piranesi was more than an artist; he was an engraver and printmaker, architect, antiquities dealer, archaeologist, draftsman, publisher, bookseller, and author. In Piranesi’s Lost Words, Heather Hyde Minor considers Piranesi the author and publisher, focusing on his major publications from 1756 to his death in 1778. Piranesi designed and manufactured twelve beautiful, large-format books combining visual and verbal content over the course of his lifetime. While the images from these books have been widely studied, they are usually considered in isolation from the texts in which they originally appeared. This study reunites Piranesi’s texts and images, interpreting them in conjunction as composite art. Minor shows how this composite art demonstrates Piranesi’s gift for interpreting the classical world and its remains—and how his books offer a critique of both the Enlightenment project of creating an epistemology of the classical past and how eighteenth-century scholars explicated this past. Piranesi’s books, Minor argues, were integral to the emergence of the modern discipline of art history. Using new, previously unpublished archival material, Piranesi’s Lost Words refines our understanding of Piranesi’s works and the eighteenth-century context in which they were created.