Capriccio (Italian: 'whim' or 'caprice') in visual art refers to a fanciful or fantastical composition — typically a landscape or architectural scene that combines real buildings, ruins and monuments arranged in imaginary configurations. Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1745–61) are the most celebrated capricci: vast, illogical stone structures with staircases leading nowhere, inhabited by tiny figures overwhelmed by scale. Goya adopted the term for his Caprichos series of etchings (1799) — 80 satirical prints combining social observation with nightmare imagery. The capriccio tradition licenses the imagination to rearrange reality according to its own logic, producing images that feel simultaneously familiar and deeply disturbing.