Vedute di Roma 

This etching, "Vedute di Roma", by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), depicts the ruins of ancient Rome. Piranesi's detailed and dramatic style, often using dramatic chiaroscuro and exaggerated perspectives, was highly influential in the development of Romanticism. This print, like many of his works, presents the ruins with a sense of melancholy and grandeur, evoking a sense of the past's magnificence and its inevitable decline. Piranesi's etchings of Rome were widely circulated and helped to popularize interest in classical antiquity.