Architectural Capriccio of a ‘camera sepolchrale’ or Burial Chamber and Its Monument, in: Album contenant des souvenirs offert par l’Amitié à P.J. Goetghebuer, architecte, professeur de l’Académie de Peinture, Sculpture & Architecture de l..., ca. 1750

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an artist, architect, archaeologist, polemicist and dealer in prints and antiquities. Today, he is best known as a draughtsman and graphic artist. The artist made more than a thousand engravings that show his thorough knowledge of Roman architecture throughout the centuries. In his work, the buildings are meticulously rendered, but at the same time, the ruins, overgrown with plants, evoke the passage of time in a poetic way. This melancholic approach, which heralds the Romantic era, is found mainly in his imaginary work such as the famous series Carceri (Dungeons). The Architectural Capriccio, which was given to the museum for safekeeping by a private collector, is close to the pictorial world of the Carceri, for example, in the suggestion of the horror vacui and the oppression emanating from the accumulation of architectural elements. This drawing is part of an album of friends that was presented in 1820 to Pierre Jacques Goethgebuer, architect and professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.