Gallery of Views of Modern Rome

Count the framed pictures crowding these walls and you get somewhere north of fifty, all of them views of Rome as it looked in the 1750s: St. Peter's and its great colonnade, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps, church facades and palace courtyards. The gallery itself never existed. Giovanni Paolo Panini invented the whole soaring, frescoed hall as a stage for his own work, then filled the floor with marble sculpture including Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and Michelangelo's Moses. It is essentially a showroom, a painted catalog of everything a wealthy visitor might want to remember about the city.

Panini made this for the Grand Tour trade, and specifically for French diplomats in Rome. The best known version was commissioned around 1757 by the Duc de Choiseul, France's ambassador, and it came with a twin showing Ancient Rome, all ruins and antique statues, so the pair could be hung together as a before and after. The well dressed gentlemen chatting in the middle are collectors and connoisseurs, and the figure gesturing toward the canvases is thought to be Panini himself, playing salesman in his own imaginary shop. His style sits at the tail end of the Baroque, all theatrical red drapery and precise architectural perspective, a skill he taught for years at the French Academy in Rome. Look for the workmen at lower left, still hauling paintings into place, as though the display were being assembled while you watch.