1754
ink
From the collection of National Gallery of Art
Dominant colour
The Gothic Arch is a 1754 ink by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Romanticism work, held at National Gallery of Art.
This sketch shows a chaotic pile of crumbling stone arches and broken columns. The shapes twist and stack wildly, like ruins after an earthquake. Tiny figures wander through the mess, dwarfed by the tangle of heavy stone. The artist used a technique called etching to create these sharp, layered lines. The ink was scratched into metal plates, then pressed onto paper to make the image. Next, check out etching to see how artists like Piranesi made prints like this.
Giovanni Battista (or Giambattista) Piranesi (Italian pronunciation: ; also known as simply Piranesi; 4 October 1720 – 9 November 1778) was an Italian classical archaeologist, architect, and artist, famous for his…
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