Published to accompany a major exhibition of Piranesi and other Italian artists at the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg (December 8, 2011 {u2013} March 25, 2012), this catalog examines Piranesi{u2019}s early work against a panorama of eighteenth-century artistic life in Rome and Venice, tracing his influence on the Italian architectural drawing of that period. Reproduced for the first time are the rare first states of the engraved series of Piranesi{u2019}s architectural fantasies from Count Brühl{u2019}s album together with works by Giuseppe Valeriani, Pietro Gonzaga, Giuseppe Barberi, Giuseppe Manocchi, and the Galli Bibiena family. Besides two introductory essays, there are texts on the album from the Brühl collection and on the Hermitage collection of Italian architectural fantasy drawings, which is one of the richest in the world. Authors comment the different issues and states of each Piranesi print and interpret the iconography. An appendix publishes the artist{u2019}s biography as written down by Jacques Guillaume Legrand from the words of Piranesi{u2019}s son Francesco. This edition will be invaluable to anyone interested in eighteenth-century Italian art. -- Summary written by John W. Emerich, Bronze Horseman Literary Agency.