Austreibung der Händler aus dem Tempel

Austreibung der Händler aus dem Tempel (Expulsion of Merchants from the Temple) from 1758, now in the Führermuseum collection, is an unusual biblical subject for Robert, who primarily painted architectural rather than narrative subjects. The temple setting — a monumental classical interior with columns, arches, and dramatic spatial recession — allowed Robert to exercise his architectural imagination within a narrative framework that gave him both justification for the architectural subject and the opportunity to populate it with the animated crowd scene of scattering merchants. Christ's expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple in Jerusalem was a subject with strong Counter-Reformation resonance, linking the purity of sacred space to the corruption of commercial activity — a theme that would have carried different political inflections in the 18th century. Robert's treatment, though ostensibly biblical, is fundamentally an exercise in architectural painting: the narrative is the pretext, the monumental interior is the true subject. The 1758 date places this among his earliest Roman works, when the young painter was experimenting with subjects and formats before settling into the architectural capriccio and ruin painting that would define his mature career.

The painting combines Robert's architectural expertise with narrative action, using the monumental temple interior as both setting and symbolic element in the biblical scene.