Lest you think the Kids These Days get all their information from TikTok memes and YouTube influencers, you should see how they handle an older media trend: 18th-century Italian engravings.
For a January winter term course at Middlebury College, 10 undergrads — Nick Anderson, Maya Dolan, Kyra Dybas, William Dyer, Jude Kuykendall, Sofia Marcktell, Elsa Marrian, Tyler Martinelli, Farren Stainton and Ariana Troutman — teamed up with professor and associate dean Pieter Broucke to curate “Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Visions of Grandeur,” on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, through December 7.
Piranesi (1720-1778) was a renowned Venetian printmaker and architect. The exhibition is mainly prints and a few drawings encompassing different aspects of his output: architectural plans, sketches, romantic landscapes and fantastical creations. Most are from Middlebury’s collection, with a few on loan from other institutions. It is divided into 10 thematic sections, both in the gallery and in an extensive website documenting the project and the students’ research. From longer papers, they refined their information into short curatorial texts, which appear on wall labels for each piece alongside the students’ names.
Broucke has been interested in Piranesi for many years, since attending architecture school in his native Belgium. He has offered other curation labs before, so when Middlebury recently acquired an ancient Roman urn that Piranesi restored and embellished, alongside an engraving he made of the object, it seemed like the perfect fit for a class and exhibition.
Winter term classes are only four weeks long, Broucke said, so the students had to ramp up quickly, “because, I mean, Piranesi, important as he is, is not a household name.” They read biographies and catalogs to get up to speed and went on a field trip to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City to learn from a print specialist. They even went to a commercial gallerist, Broucke said, who talked about the market for historical works and prints — something he thought important for a curatorial class and which isn’t often taught in standard art history. “We came out of the art dealer, and the students said, ‘Well, can we buy a work?’”
Though most prints were well out of their budget, the students persevered and found, through a London dealer, a map of Rome that Piranesi had embellished with illustrations. It was in poor condition and hence had a very low price, relatively speaking — Broucke declined to give an exact number but said it was a fraction of the cost of other Piranesi prints, which can go for tens of thousands of dollars. The museum was able to acquire it with the help of donors and put a few hundred dollars into conservation. “It’s an amazing object,” Broucke said, “and it’s really, really great to have it in the exhibition but also for Middlebury to have that map.”
Other standouts are prints from Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons” series, a kind of M.C. Escher-esque fantasy interior of stairs and endless spaces; a tiny (about 3.5 inches square) ink drawing of a set design for a play; and two detailed depictions of Roman columns that are more than 8 feet high.
Aerial views of the Colosseum and of the Baths of Titus are also essentially fantasies — something the students discussed when planning where to place them in the exhibition. “We didn’t put them with the views of Rome because they’re not really real views — I mean, you need to be in an airplane to see those things, so they’re completely constructed images of what he thought the Colosseum would look like from above,” Broucke said.
The exhibition moves the viewer through Piranesi’s concerns, from the debate about whether Roman or Greek architecture was better to the importance of the Grand Tour of antiquities as a rite of passage for the 18th-century elite to the relationship between nature and history. Students worked closely with the museum’s designer to create a space that’s architectural and minimal, contrasting with the engravings’ lavish style.
“Students, you know — they don’t have a lot of experience, but they sometimes have very good ideas,” Broucke said. “And it’s worth listening to them.”
“Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Visions of Grandeur,” on view through December 7 at Middlebury College Museum of Art.
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
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