Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) referred to himself as an architetto—an architect—but it was through his talent for etching, not his built work, that he would come to influence much of the modern world. This was thanks in no small part to his audience, the legions of Western Euro­peans who voyaged to Rome on the “Grand Tour.” To this moneyed and educated clientele, Piranesi sold thousands of prints—some depicting visions of antiquity, some grand urban vistas, and some, most famously, dystopian imagined prisons replete with torture devices. In these disquieting images, history and fiction collide, creating a dreamlike realm that would continue to transfix audiences for centuries to come.

Victor Plahte Tschudi’s Piranesi and the Modern Age says little about Piranesi’s life; a number of biographies have already been written. Tschudi’s subject is, rather, his afterlife—the innumerable ways in which his works have shaped generations of writers, filmmakers, photographers, historians, and, of course, architects, with an emphasis on the years after 1900. Among the book’s virtues is that it is also a work of historiography: it traces how a series of interpretations of Piranesi, advanced by different figures to serve sometimes opposing agendas, have taken hold over the past century, each fundamentally reframing his historical importance. If Pira­nesi’s works are “obviously unchanging,” Tschudi writes, “the narratives in which these components make sense are constantly reinvented.”