The second is the mode of codification of architectural history.

The vectors of approach yielding misinterpretation of Piranesi derived from two phenomena: one is the early nineteenth-century Romanticist reception of Piranesi’s character and work. But Piranesi was misinterpreted both in his day and posthumously. He is numbered foremost among the founders of modern archaeology. He posited crucial theses in the debates on the ‘origins of architecture’ and ‘aesthetics’. In the architectural, historical, and archaeological context of the eighteenth century, Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) played an important role. The third is his portrayal of space, namely, the ambivalence between the spatial order of his maps and its dissolution in his Carceri, ending with a consideration of his progression toward abstraction, both geometric and perspectival. More specifically, it deals with architectural and sculptural ruins as a concept and as the actual product of assemblage: constructing for the former, collecting and making for the latter. The second aspect is his combination of physical fragments, considered through the lens of his Vedute and Diverse Maniere. The first of these aspects is Piranesi’s innovative coalescence of various influences, particularly in his early architectural fantasies, which were inspired simultaneously by new developments in scenographic perspective, the contemporaneous capriccio genre, and the older tradition of pictorially reconstructing ancient monuments. These three aspects are those which generate that ‘special essence’ of a Piranesi print, that certain impression of amalgamation derived from a sum total presented as the assembly of diverse fragments.

Rather, what follows highlights three aspects of eclecticism in his work-presented in loose chronological order-that seem to have had the most bearing on the conceptualization of stylistic heterogeneity in the architecture of the nineteenth century. This particular consideration of Piranesi’s influence is not an exhaustive geography of the haunted wanderings of the artist’s aesthetic ghost.

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