The predecessor of this type of decorative architectural painting can be found in 16th-century Italian painting, and in particular in the architectural settings that were painted as the framework of large-scale frescoes and ceiling decorations known as
'quadratture'. These architectural elements gained prominence in 17th-century painting to become stand-alone subjects of easel paintings. Early practitioners of the genre who made the genre popular in mid-17th-century Rome included
Alessandro Salucci and
Viviano Codazzi. These artists represent two different approaches to the genre: Codazzi's capricci were more realistic than those of Salucci, who showed more creativity and liberty in his approach by rearranging Roman monuments to fit his compositional objectives. The 'quadratture' frescoes of
Agostino Tassi and the urban views of
Claude Lorrain and
Herman van Swanevelt, which he saw in Rome, may have stimulated Viviano Codazzi to start painting capricci. A well known proponent of capriccio was the artist
Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691–1765). This style was extended in the 1740s by
Canaletto in his etched
vedute ideali, and works by
Piranesi and his imitators. Later examples include
Charles Robert Cockerell's
A Tribute to Sir Christopher Wren and ''A Professor's Dream'', and
Joseph Gandy's
1818 Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane. The artist
Carl Laubin has painted a number of modern capriccios in homage to these works. Further fantastical expansions can be seen in the
Capricci, an influential series of
etchings by
Gianbattista Tiepolo, who reduced the architectural elements to chunks of classical statuary and ruins, among which small groups made up of a cast of exotic and elegant figures of soldiers, philosophers and beautiful young people go about their enigmatic business. No individual titles help to explain these works; mood and style are everything. A later series was called
Scherzi di fantasia – "Fantastic Sketches". His son
Domenico Tiepolo was among those who imitated these prints, often using the term in titles.
Goya's series of eighty
prints Los Caprichos, and the last group of prints in his series
The Disasters of War, which he called "caprichos enfáticos" ("emphatic caprices"), are far from the spirit of light-hearted fantasy the term usually suggests. They take Tiepolo's format of a group of figures, now drawn from contemporary Spanish life, and are a series of savage satires and comments on its absurdity, many only partly explicated by short titles.
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters is the best known. == Notable capriccio artists ==