1747
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Interior of the Pantheon, Rome is a 1747 unspecified by Giovanni Paolo Panini, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see the inside of the Pantheon in Rome—sunlight streaming through the big round skylight, people chatting, praying, or just standing around. Panini painted this in 1747, when the building was both a church and a tourist spot. He fills the space with tiny figures: nobles in fancy clothes, visitors sketching, even a dog sniffing the floor. The mix shows how the Pantheon worked as a public place, not just a monument. Look up more paintings of Italy, 18th century to see how artists pictured its famous sites.
Created as a temple under the Roman emperor Hadrian around the year AD 125, the Pantheon became a Christian church in 609. Significant restoration took place in the early 1700s, a period of renewed attention to early Christian monuments. The site was a major monument of antiquity, an active church, and its portico, visible through the door, held the most important art fair in the city. Panini shows the complexity of this public space by representing foreign tourists, local churchgoers, Roman nobles, and artists mingling under the dome.
Panini's depictions of contemporary and ancient Rome were popular with foreigners who visited the city on their Grand Tours.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Giovanni Paolo, also known as Gian Paolo Panini or Pannini (17 June 1691 – 21 October 1765), was an Italian Baroque painter and architect who worked in Rome and is primarily known as one of the vedutisti ("view painters").
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