Ancient Rome

In 1758, Giovanni Paolo Panini pulled off something that no architect ever could. He took the whole of ancient Rome — its temples, its arenas, its marble gods — and fit it inside a single room. The room never existed, of course. Panini was working in the capriccio tradition, a genre with a long history of bending reality for artistic effect. But there is nothing casual about what he built here. Every painting on those walls, every sculpture on those pedestals, was a curated choice. The Pantheon appears more than once. The Colosseum looms in the mid-distance. The Laocoön is there too, on the far right — a sculpture so powerful it reportedly left Michelangelo speechless when it was first rediscovered. Heavy drapery hangs at the top of the canvas like a theatre curtain caught mid-rise. A big archway opens into a second hall beyond the first, and then, presumably, another beyond that. The human figures dotted throughout — sketching, gesturing, leaning in to look — are tiny against it all, which is probably the idea. The man in the white robe in the middle is thought to be Count de Stainville, who later became the Duke of Choiseul. He spent years in Rome as the French ambassador, walking through the ruins and galleries like he owned the place. Who knows, maybe this painting was his sort of way to remember those times.