The View Painter & the Eighteenth Century. 2

Panini & Veduti in Rome

Giovanni Panini, sometimes Pannini (1691/1765) was an Italian painter born in the Piacenza who was trained in the tradition of stage designers at Bologna. By 1711, Panini had arrived in Rome where he became the “pre-eminent painter of real and imaginary views of the city.”¹ He was also the first painter to to make a speciality out of painting ruins, which connects him with Frances’s greatest ruin painter Hubert Robert who painted the Louvre both intact and ruined to reflect the impact of time upon art. Panini also did a lot of paintings of public festivities and ceremonies; these were sometimes events of historical importance. As a member of the French Academy in Rome, Panini also taught perspective, hence his influence was as strong with French as much as Italian artists. Pannini most famous creations are his capricci, or witty, visual inventions of famous buildings and works of ancient art. These show structures and sculptures like the Pantheon (above), Colosseum, Trajan’s Column, the Farnese Hercules and Flora set in an imaginary setting. In 1765 Panini was commissioned by the Duc de Choiseul , the French Ambassador in Rome, to paint “an imaginary palatial gallery stocked with the greatest treasures of ancient Rome.² The Duc also commissioned Panini’s gallery of modern view which was filled with paintings by the vedutisti.

1The Oxford Dictionary of Art Ibid, 369.

2Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press, 1982), 84.