ABSTRACT
Most cultural historians will agree that a theoretical discussion of architecture's encounter with pictures ought to take into account, at least somewhere along the line, the oeuvre and legacy of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the eighteenth century's ruiniste par excellence. Piranesi is a central figure where architectural pictorialism is concerned, and to omit him from such a discussion would be to dismiss some of art and architectural history's best critical work. The links between Piranesi's carceral image and Enlightenment penal philosophies are hardly straightforward. But it is nonetheless crucial to recognize that the gradual institutionalization of those philosophies in the first half of the nineteenth century becomes exceedingly relevant to a discussion of Romanticism's Piranesi. Where the Romantics were most perceptive, then, was not so much in their recognition that infinity was one of Piranesi's more meaningful pictorial devices, but rather in how they came to register the wider epistemological terrain that infinity, as conceptual category, steadily began to invade.
