Giovanni Paolo Panini’s real and imaginary views of the ancient and modern monuments of Rome have long been celebrated for their striking inventiveness and unrivalled grandeur. Panini’s bold and innovative vision, his confidence in the rendering and placement of architecture, his command of perspective, the elegance of his figures, the clarity of his colors, and his precise draftsmanship resulted in works which proved immensely popular with Romans and visitors to the Eternal City alike, and also influenced many artists of the subsequent generation.

Panini initially trained in his native Piacenza, working with the quadraturisti Giuseppe Natali and Andrea Galluzzi, who specialized in the decoration of walls and ceilings with trompe l'oeil architectural schemes, as well as with the stage designer Francesco Galli Bibiena. In Rome, Panini spent the 1710s and 1720s primarily engaged in painting decorative frescoes in the illusionistic manner he had learned in Piacenza. He was enormously successful, securing the patronage of Pope Innocent XIII, for whom he decorated an apartment in the Palazzo Quirinale. A number of influences can be felt in his easel paintings of the 1730s and 40s, which marked the apex of his busy and prolific career. Panini’s adept rendering of minute detail took cues from the works of Gaspare Vanvitelli, another master of Roman vedute painting, while his inclusion of lively figures full of vitality and dynamism evidences a debt to Salvator Rosa. The capricci of Giovanni Ghisolfi, meanwhile, inspired Panini to depart from the mere depiction of real sites and scenes to the creation of fantastical new ones borne solely of his imagination.

The present canvas situates several famous ancient monuments in a sophisticated capriccio. Although the artist offered accurate depictions of individual monuments, he rearranged them into a composition of his own design. At left is the remarkably well-preserved ancient Roman temple known as the Maison carrée ('square house') in Nîmes, while in the central distance appear the arches of the Pont du Gard near Nîmes. In the right background are the ruins of the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli. The structure's elegant, circular form repeats, rotated and from a different angle, in the right foreground. Amidst antique sculptural and architectural fragments, the Borghese Vase rises in the left foreground, bearing the artist’s signature and the work’s date. As noted by Ferdinando Arisi in his monograph on the artist (op. cit.), the painting, inscribed with the date of 1739, was made during a period of particular creative fervor on the part of the artist, when he produced many of his best works.

A pendant, A Capriccio of Roman Ruins with the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the Colosseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, and the Farnese Hercules, also signed and dated 1739 (ibid., no. 278), was made to accompany the present painting. The two works were in the Carstairs collection in the early twentieth century, and they were purchased as a pair by Leger Galleries in 1972. Subsequently, the two works were separated and entered different private collections, but they were reunited in 1995 when the owner of the present painting purchased it at Christie’s, London, having acquired the pendant already at Christie’s in 1991 (loc. cit.).

Two drawings for individual figures in the present painting are in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (inv. nos. 17550 and 17560). Of these, the figure of the woman near the center of the composition also appears in a painting today at the Yale University Art Museum, New Haven (ibid., no. 274, illustrated); the figure of the man with a cane had been used in 1735 in a painting now in the collections of Newfields, Indianapolis, but in the opposite orientation (ibid., no. 231, illustrated). The relief with the satyr and nymph in the lower left corner also appears in three other works by Panini, in the Cassa di Risparmio, Piacenza, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and in the Gamba collection, Florence (ibid., nos. 264, 266 and 272, illustrated). A pair of late replicas of the two pictures were sold in 2013 (Dorotheum, Vienna, 17 April 2013, lot 581) and another pair, executed with studio assistance and in a square format, are in an American private collection. Panini also recombined motifs from both paintings in a single canvas, dated a decade later than the present work and formerly in the Palkse collection (ibid., no. 392, illustrated).