Modern Rome

Every picture on these walls is a picture of Rome, and none of this gallery ever existed. Giovanni Paolo Panini painted this imaginary hall in 1757 and packed it with the city's post-classical greatest hits: St. Peter's Square with Bernini's colonnade, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps, along with sculptures like Michelangelo's Moses and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne standing among the visitors. It was made as a companion to a matching canvas called Ancient Rome, which does the same trick with ruins and antiquities. Together they work like a two-volume souvenir album for anyone who had made the Grand Tour, or wished they had.

The commission came from the Duc de Choiseul, France's ambassador to the papal court, who was heading home and wanted the whole city to come with him. Panini was the right man for the job. He taught perspective at the French Academy in Rome and spent his career painting the city's architecture, so stacking dozens of accurate small views inside one convincing invented room was his particular specialty. In the lower left, a small group of gentlemen sits sketching and talking among the canvases, and one of the seated figures is generally taken to be the artist himself. The style is late Baroque edging into Rococo, showy and precise at the same time, and the whole thing is essentially a very elegant piece of tourism advertising.