Ancient Rome

Every wall of this imaginary gallery is packed with pictures of ancient Rome, and none of it ever existed. Giovanni Paolo Panini invented the whole room in 1757 as a kind of visual souvenir, a way of gathering the entire city into a single space. Look along the shelves and walls and you can pick out the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine, the Pyramid of Cestius, and Trajan's Column, all rendered as framed paintings within the painting. Scattered between them stand plaster copies of the most famous antique statues a traveller could hope to see: the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules, the reclining river god. It is Rome compressed into a showroom.

Panini made his living from this sort of thing. Working in Rome during the late Baroque period, he specialised in views of ruins and grand architectural fantasies, and wealthy young Europeans on the Grand Tour bought them by the crateful as proof of where they had been. This version was made for the Duc de Choiseul, the French ambassador, and Panini painted a companion piece showing modern Rome with its baroque churches and fountains. The small figures on the floor are the giveaway to the whole idea: a gentleman in the centre gestures at the collection while artists kneel with sketchbooks, copying the copies. Panini was quietly advertising his own trade, and he was very good at it.