Modern Rome

Modern Rome, painted in 1757 and now at the Louvre, is one of Panini's most ambitious compositions: a monumental gallery picture in which dozens of small framed views of contemporary Rome are arranged on the walls of an imaginary interior, with full-scale figures examining them in the foreground. Conceived as a pendant to Ancient Rome of 1757, the two works together constitute a visual encyclopaedia of the city in its two great phases. Modern Rome includes views of Saint Peter's, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, Sant'Angelo, and other eighteenth-century monuments, each rendered as a convincingly framed painting within the painting. The format — a picture gallery of views — was a conceit Panini had used in his Valenti Gonzaga gallery picture of 1740 and refined here into its most spectacular form. The Louvre pair stands as the culmination of his career and a summation of Roman identity as the eighteenth century understood it.

Panini faced extraordinary technical challenges in this composition: each small interior 'painting' must function as a coherent view at its own scale while also reading as an object — a framed canvas — within the larger scene. He resolved this by varying the lighting direction slightly between the 'inner' views and the outer room, distinguishing picture-space from real-space with subtle tonal shifts.