ABSTRACT
The eighteenth century became the high point of the painter’s architectural capriccio, with artists like Giovanni Paolo Panini specialising in high-status souvenirs for northern European aristocrats to take home from the Grand Tour. The relationship between artists and architects separated as the arts became more specialised but, by that time, the legacy of painted imaginary architectural scenes had established the tradition of the capriccio for painters and architects. The capriccio could be a painter’s idealised world expressed with an architectural scene or it could be an architect’s collection of ideal or own-designed buildings. The painted capriccio from the nineteenth century includes Joseph Gandy’s Tomb of Merlin in 1814 and Thomas Cole’s The Architects’ Dream in 1840 to Carl Laubin’s Almerico to Zeno at the end of the twentieth century. Architects have also made capricci to explore their own ideas. Early in his career in 1757 Robert Adam depicted an Imaginary Landscape with Classical Ruins and Architectural Fragments. C.R. Cockerell published an imaginary Reconstruction of Athens at the Time of the Antonines in 1824 as he began to establish his reputation. From 1836 Augustus Welby Pugin published a number of imaginary Gothic urban views to promote his vision of Christian architecture. This tradition stretches right through to Modernism with Iakov Chernikhov’s engineering fantasy of 1933 and Arata Isozaki’s City Structure of 1964.
