ABSTRACT
The capriccio was, at the same time, a game. It was a game to be played seriously by those who came equipped with the knowledge and connoisseurship to understand the painter’s intent. They often involved recondite imagery, recognizable fragments of notable works of architecture and art, and part of the fun was finding them in unfamiliar locations, whether juxtaposed in novel ways or in a romantic landscape different from their actual context. Panini’s follower Hubert Robert’s sanguine drawing of the Column of Trajan shows behind it the dome of Soufflot’s S. Genevieve (the Panthéon) in Paris: a knowing reference to the fact that the domed church of Ss. Nome di Maria was designed by the French architect Antoine Derizet, and so in Robert’s view Paris and Rome are elided in ways that speak of the rivalry and interdependence of the two cities. Of course the imagery of these views can be appreciated on the surface by anyone for its beauty-of color, of light, of painterly rendering of materials-but to recognize the pieces of which they are composed is to excite a particularly “Roman-tic” fascination with the culture of the classical past or present.
