ABSTRACT
Piacenza-born Giovanni Paolo Panini’s (1695-1764) earliest documented work was in fresco, and something of the sense of scale that that medium demands underpins the ample scale of his vedute and capricci. The successor to the Dutch born Gaspar Van Wittel as the premier vedutista of eighteenth century Rome, Panini may also be the most consistent, and impressive, practitioner of the capriccio of that or any century. And, indeed, these two genres, one documentary, the other imaginary, went hand-in-hand in the eighteenth century. But while Panini’s views of Rome often celebrate the living city, many times representing important ceremonial events filled with noble actors and throngs of spectators, his capricci evoke an elegiac ruined Rome, analogous to the Roman Forum (then known as the Campo Vaccino, or Cow Pasture, a semi-wild field of fragments) but more intense-whether more compact, or more expansive, or with the frisson of impossible juxtapositions. Panini’s topographic documentation, even of the ruins, partakes of a cool light that is distinct from the ochre glow and hazy distances of his imaginary landscapes, His sense of energy, or drama, in his documentary views also led him sometimes to embellish reality-most famously in the case of a royal visit to the Pope’s Coffee House in the Quirinal gardens, a rather severe building by Ferdinando Fuga that Panini felt compelled to enliven, doubling the pilasters and augmenting the skyline. In each case a desire for plausibility, a masking of artifice, goes hand in hand with a calculated, scenographic approach to composition, since the goal is not verisimilitude per se, but beauty-both visual and intellectual. The plausibility depends on his imaginary landscapes’ seeming similarity to the real landscapes of the Forum or campagna that his audience knew well.
