Capriccio with St. Paul's and Old London Bridge

During his London years in the 1740s, Antonio Joli produced a small group of vedute and capricci that merged real London landmarks with invented architectural settings. This Metropolitan Museum canvas from 1748 combines the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the distinctive medieval houses of Old London Bridge — both real, familiar features of the pre-modern city — within a capriccio composition that also incorporates invented classical elements. Old London Bridge, built in the twelfth century and lined with shops and houses for most of its history, was demolished in 1831, making Joli's painting a rare early record of its appearance from the river. St Paul's Wren dome, completed in 1710, was then relatively new and would have struck Joli as a suitably monumental reference point equivalent to Rome's ancient landmarks. The work would have appealed both to English patrons nostalgic for a recognisable cityscape and to Continental collectors who saw it as an Italian-inflected interpretation of an exotic northern capital.

Joli frames the real London landmarks through or alongside invented classical architecture, a capriccio technique that elevates topographic record. The dome of St Paul's is rendered with architectural accuracy while its surroundings are loosened into the atmospheric blue-grey tones typical of his London views.