Since the 18th century, the Piranesi name has been synonymous with the city of Rome and the artistic economy of the Grand Tour. Despite this fame, the name of Laura Piranesi remains relatively unknown even to specialists. Women of the past were engaged in all levels and aspects of the art market, but their contributions have been obscured or deliberately marginalised by patriarchal systems lionising individual genius over collaborative labour practices. In many ways, Laura Piranesi’s biography reads as a primer on how the lives and contributions of historical women artists have been lost within these systems, her work concealed behind the name of a famous male family member and the collective labour of a workshop with her oeuvre limited by the constraints of marriage and an early death.

Laura Maria Gertrude Piranesi was born in Rome in 1754 as the eldest child of the famed printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) and Angela Pasquini (c. 1730-?). Scholars such as Heather Hyde Minor and Rita Bernini have recently worked to locate her in the archives, enhancing the scant biographical information published on the artist. In the late 1760s and 1770s, when L. Piranesi was developing as an artist, her family workshop leaned heavily into the premium souvenir trade for Grand Tourists visiting Rome, selling prints as well as antique fragments and classical pastiches. Currently, twenty-one views of the monuments of Rome have been attributed to L. Piranesi’s hand, each just slightly larger than a picture postcard, measuring no more than about 20 centimetres wide. These free-hand etched architectural portraits display her own unique style while capitalising off the genre for which her family were best known.

It is likely that L. Piranesi was trained by her father, who may have been inspired to educate his daughter after meeting the young Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) during her time in Rome, with the elder Piranesi educating the Swiss artistic prodigy in perspective. L. Piranesi is singled out by early sources for her talent, and she appears to have been the only Piranesi sister to master etching. While brothers Pietro and Francesco ran the workshop after their father’s death, all the Piranesi children did their part to support the family enterprise. Although she entered a convent as a young woman, Laura’s younger sister Suor Maria Agnese Piranesi wrote on behalf of her family to the Swedish royal court, thanking the King’s antiquarian for the monarchy’s patronage.

Inheritance from a spouse or family member was one of the primary ways that historical women gained professional power and leadership in family workshops. In the late 18th century, Italian law dictated that despite L. Piranesi’s seniority and experience, the enterprise would be inherited by her younger brother Francesco. Within a month of their father’s death, Francesco orchestrated Laura’s marriage to Josef Anton Schwerzmann (1754–?). No records have been found to indicate that Laura continued etching after her marriage. Previous scholarship on the artist has speculated that her death may have occurred as early as 1785 and as late as after 1799, when members of the family relocated to Paris. Recent archival discoveries have conclusively documented the young artist and mother’s death to have occurred in 1789 after an unnamed illness, at only 35 years of age.