Giovanni Paolo Panini Piacenza 1691 - 1765 Rome

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Description

Giovanni Paolo Panini
architectural capriccio with a group of young men in discussion amongst roman ruins, with the pyramid of caïus cestius beyond
signed with initials and inscribed in brown ink, lower left: G.P.P. Roma
pen and black ink and watercolour, within two shades of brown ink framing lines

Provenance

Anonymous sale, Paris, Drouot, 7 December 1990, lot 68

Exhibited

Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Zürich, Kunsthaus, Das Capriccio als Kunstprinzip, 1996-97, pp. 328-9, cat.no. Z 17, reproduced;
Dortmund, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Roma Antica: Römische Ruinen in der Kunst des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1997, p. 211, cat. no. 91, reproduced

Catalogue Note

Panini was one of the greatest exponents of that artistic sleight of hand by which real architectural monuments are combined into a composition that seems for all the world like a topographically accurate depiction of a famous place, but is actually an entirely imaginary capriccio. This was a time-honoured artistic device, employed by everyone from medieval manuscript illuminators to 17^th-century Dutch landscape painters, but the demand for such capricci filled with images of important antique relics rocketed during the 18^th century, as Grand Tourists sought to acquire paintings that captured the essence of the scenes and monuments that they had seen on their travels.

Many of Panini’s grander paintings of Roman monuments were unavoidably closer to accurate topographical views, but in less formal works such as the present drawing, he could let his imagination run free, and surround a major antique monument (the pyramid of Caïus Cestius) with a whole range of unrelated fragments from reliefs, tombs and other sources, as well as figures in pseudo-antique garb.

The magnificent pyramid of Caïus Cestius was a motif used frequently by Panini, and on several occasions in his painted work he combined the monument with an almost identical statue of a standing draped man as is seen to the left of this composition (see, for example, those in the National Gallery, London, the Prado, and the Pontremoli collection, Milan; F. Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del' 700, Rome 1986, cat. nos. 196, 334 and 454 respectively).