Giovanni Paolo Panini - Architectural Capriccio With a Preacher in Roman Ruins (c.1740)
- Title: Architectural Capriccio With a Preacher in Roman Ruins
- Artist: Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691-1765)
- Date: c.1740
- Made in: Rome, Italy
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 134 x 97 cm
- Location: Louvre-Lens (Musée de Lens), Lens, France
- Photo credit: 2014 Grand Palais RMN (musée du Louvre) / Mathieu Rabeau
Giovanni Paolo Panini’s "Architectural Capriccio With a Preacher in Roman Ruins" stages an imaginary sermon inside a grand, invented city of antiquity. Towering Corinthian columns, broken archways, and fragments of entablature frame the scene like a stone theater.
A capriccio, from the Italian word for "whim" or "fancy", refers to a genre of painting characterized by fantastical depictions of architecture and landscapes. This art form emerged during the 16th century and gained prominence throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, with Panini, Canaletto and Tiepolo. Panini in particular is known for his vedute and capriccio, imaginery cityscapes, in which he would bring together antiquities and monuments of Rome, such as the Colosseum or the Pantheon. He produced very many paintings which he exported well, triggering a renewed interest in Ancient Rome.
In this painting, Panini picks and chooses from real monuments—triumphal arches, temple fronts, statues, fallen blocks—and rearranges them into a dreamlike composition that could never quite exist in reality. The sky opens in a soft blue above, and the light picks out every carved capital and cracked block, so you feel both the glory and the decay of ancient Rome.
At the heart of this fantasy of ruins is a very human moment: a preacher addressing a small crowd. He stands on a makeshift stone pulpit, while people of different ages and social ranks sit or lean on the fallen architecture around him. Their presence changes how you read the ruins. These aren’t just picturesque remains for tourists; they’ve become a living space again, reused as a kind of open-air church. Panini uses the warm colors of their clothing—reds, golds, blues—to animate the otherwise cold stone and to guide your eye in a gentle zigzag through the composition, from one cluster of listeners to the next.
The painting works emotionally and intellectually also as a meditation on time and continuity - preaching, perhaps the Christian preaching of the early years of Christianity in Rome, unfolding among pagan ruins, faith and everyday life carried on in the shadow of a vanished empire.
Panini’s capriccio invites you to enjoy the fantasy and at the same time to think about how cities, beliefs, and buildings layer over each other, leaving traces that future generations will inhabit in new ways.
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