A Haunted Form

A LONELY ARCADE of ornate classical columns leads from the beautiful sky of a tranquil day to an elaborate but rationally ordered interior. In this light-filled space elegantly dressed men are surrounded by canvases show­ ing ruined buildings or fragments from classical sites or paintings and statues also from antiquity. Among the many admired objects, the eye picks out a few at a time: the Farnese Hercules and the Dying Gladiator are visible in the left foreground, the Laocoön is on the right, along with a statue far more famous in Panini’s day than our own—Silenus with the Infant Bacchus. Down the central arcade heading out, the Apollo Belvedere and the Borghese Gladiator are visible, accompanied by numerous other noted works. Near the center of the image, connoisseurs contemplate a rare example of antique painting—the “Aldobrandini Marriage”—while artists gathered near the Dying Gladiator look up, perhaps momentarily distracted from their studies. On the fancifully imagined walls, famous sites have been transformed into paintings—the Colosseum, the Pan­ theon, and various triumphal arches from the Forum among them. Recent years have seen renewed popular affection for Giovanni Paolo Panini’s 1757 Views of Ancient Rome, a piece, like its companion, Views of Modern Rome, designed to evoke in some measure nostalgia, but also pleasure at the elegant conceit of an abundance of beauty elegantly dis­ played.1 At once souvenirs of a voyage and fantasies of a perfect collection of admired art, these works of Panini, of which several versions exist, all painted for foreigners, may be understood to occupy an important point of transition between the soon-to-be-outmoded culture of the Grand Tour and the emergence of a dream that was to preoccupy later eras, that of the perfect museum. For a vision of clarity and organization such as that which covers Panini’s canvas to come into being, however, as much needs to be left out as invented. To experience all the admired works of ancient Rome together is an evident impossibility. Indeed, to transmute the Colosseum into a size comparable with that of the Pantheon is just one of the flamboyant and necessary falsifications required in order to gather all these admired objects into an assimilable form. We might go further and propose that the straightforward quality of Panini’s work © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.