In the initial viewing, Piranesi’s The Grand Piazza is more likely to be about light and shadow, object and perspective, or other artistic abstractions, than about historical, literary, or biographical events that other artists of Piranesi’s day depicted. The architectural subject of the drawing is the Grand Piazza in Venice, a large public square faced by the historical dwellings of many famous Venetian figures. What is interesting about the relationship between the title and the visual space depicted, however, is that any comparison between this drawing and photographs of the Grand Piazza will indicate the fact that he viewer’s perspective is very nearly under the Piazza itself, standing under the bridges across the canal, below even the piers of the gondolas. And so the title becomes highly ironic, considering the social stratification of 18th-century Italy, that a picture entitled The Grand Piazza (literally the grand place or square) would be drawn from the perspective of one who does not walk on the piazza itself, but is more comfortable traveling near the watery sub-strata of the Venetian canal system.