Fantasy View with the Pantheon and other Monuments of Ancient Rome

Fantasy View with the Pantheon and other Monuments of Ancient Rome, dated 1737 and now at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, belongs to the series of monumental capriccio compositions in which Panini assembled multiple specific and recognisable Roman buildings into a single imaginary space. The Pantheon — one of antiquity's best-preserved monuments — was a particular favourite, its rotunda and portico appearing in many of Panini's compositions. In the Houston work the Pantheon is combined with other well-known monuments to create what amounts to an ideal map of Rome compressed into a single picture plane. The 1737 date precedes by two decades the great gallery paintings of Ancient and Modern Rome at the Louvre, establishing that Panini had been developing the encyclopaedic capriccio format throughout his mature career.

The spatial organisation of this composition required Panini to reconcile monuments of differing scales by adjusting their relative sizes to suggest different distances, while simultaneously making each recognisable enough to be identified by a knowledgeable viewer. The handling of the Pantheon's portico columns, with their precise fluted shafts, displays his most attentive architectural draughtsmanship.