Roma Antica

interior

This painting shows an imaginary picture gallery hung with views of ancient Roman monuments and furnished with antiquities. In its pendant, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the views are of contemporary Rome and the sculptures date from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The painting s in this gallery are by the painter of the picture, Giovanni Paolo Pannini, who stands in the centre wearing a frock-coat and holding his palette and brush.

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About the Artist

Giovanni Paolo Pannini

1691 – 1765

Giovanni Paolo Pannini (or Panini), Italian painter. He was the first painter to specialize in ruins, treating them as Roman 'vedute' of a special kind. He was working in Rome by c. 1717, but the earliest surviving dated picture is of 1727 (London, Wellington Museum); in 1729 he was concerned in a Fête given by Cardinal de Polignac in honour of the birth of the Dauphin and this began a long connection with France and the French Academy in Rome. Paintings of the Fête are in the Louvre (1729) and Dublin (1731). His views of modern Rome, as well as his capricci based on the better-known ruins, had an enormous vogue among Grand Tourists and examples are to be found in most older galleries. Piranesi, though far more of an archaeologist, was influenced by him, and so was Canaletto.

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