Capriccio names the sculptor's and printmaker's license for fantastical invention — Piranesi's impossible prisons are its defining statement.
An Italian term for a fantastical or imaginative composition that combines real and invented architectural, sculptural, or landscape elements without regard for topographical or historical accuracy; in decorative sculpture, the term denotes compositional license taken beyond strict iconographic or structural programs.
Etymology
From Italian capriccio ("whim, caprice"), likely derived from capra ("goat," suggesting a goat-like skittish leap of the imagination). The term entered French as caprice and English as "caprice"/"capriccio," retaining in the visual arts its specific sense of fantastical architectural or ornamental invention.
Sculptor Notes
In the visual arts, capriccio denotes an imaginary scene assembled from real architectural or sculptural fragments recombined without regard to their actual location or scale — ruins, monuments, and orders juxtaposed for pictorial or dramatic effect rather than topographical truth. Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione ("Imaginary Prisons"), first published in 1750, is the eighteenth century's definitive statement of architectural capriccio in print: vast underground vaults, staircases leading nowhere, and oversized structural machinery assembled into spaces that are structurally plausible in their individual parts yet impossible as a whole.
For the sculptor and stone carver, the capriccio matters less as a print genre than as a license granted within decorative programs: the grotesque — strapwork, chimerical hybrid creatures, foliate masks, and fantastical architectural miniatures carved into cartouches, consoles, and overdoors — is sculpture's own capriccio tradition, permitting invention where figural or narrative programs do not. Baroque decorative sculpture in particular depends on this distinction: the disciplined iconographic program of a high altar or funerary monument's principal figures coexists with a surrounding field of capriccio ornament — scrolling acanthus merging into masks, swags dissolving into shells — where the carver's inventive freedom is greatest.
This distinction is practically useful on the bench. A commission's figural and architectural elements are usually fixed by patron, program, or precedent; the ornamental surround is frequently where the carver is given, implicitly or explicitly, capriccio license. Recognizing which register of a commission is fixed and which is open to invention is part of reading a decorative program correctly — a skill as relevant to a stone mason finishing a Gothic Revival porch as to a Baroque stuccatore working a ceiling.