COVE

Giovanni Battista Piranesis was an Italian archaeologiest and archetect from the 1700s. Though he did many other things, he was best known for his etchings of ficticious and intricate prisons. He created these early works filled with mysterious torture devices and fantastical scaffolding. These etchings were later adapted into a novel, Piranesi, written by Susanna Clarke and published in 2020. Piranesi's sketches have become a rich site for archetectural exploration, and Clarke specifically delved into a lot of the themes that we've talked about in tandem with Gothic archetecture and spaces; there is an otherworldliness and intrigue to the drawings, especially when contrasted with Piranesi's other sketches, which were realistic depictions of Rome (which even led to assistance in Rome's growth in fame as well as attention directed towards the Neoclassical art movement).