Who Creates Our Image of a City?

I am standing in one of the upstairs rooms at Shapero Rare Books on New Bond Street, natural light pouring in around two large folio volumes resting on cushions before me. Carefully turning the pages of Francesco Panini’s book, I stop at a most familiar view. It is Piazza del Popolo, the ‘Piazza of the People’ located at the northern edge of Rome’s historic centre, just inside the Aurelian Wall. 

Taking in the ‘views’ of Panini’s Rome in his Vedute delle Quattro Principali Basiliche e Monumenti di Roma nel XVIII Secolo.

I had crossed the square almost every day while living in Rome, on my way to and from the academy where I was staying in the Borghese Gardens and, at first glance, much of the scene is strikingly familiar. The near-matching façades of Santa Maria in Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli still command the piazza, much as they do today. The space around them, though, would have felt markedly different in the eighteenth century, when Francesco Panini, architect-turned-landscape artist, was making his engravings in the 18th century. Piazza del Popolo had not yet acquired its present elliptical form, until the early nineteenth century when Giuseppe Valadier remodelled it, sweeping away the cramped and irregular square that Panini had known and creating the broad curves, fountains, and lions around the obelisk that define it today. In Panini’s view, Rome is less ordered, the monumental and the everyday shoulder-to-shoulder.

As I turn the sizeable pages, each leaf measuring almost half a metre across, I arrive at the eastern valley dominated by perhaps the most iconic building of the ancient world. Byron’s famous lines come to mind: ‘While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls – the World.’ Byron captured a sentiment preserved by engravings such as Panini’s. Without the willingness to look upon our noble past and reflect, and indeed to measure ourselves up against it, we are nothing. It is as Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations: ‘Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too’.

Other familiar scenes abound throughout Panini’s volume: St Peter’s Basilica looming over the great circular piazza, the stoic Pantheon rising behind the fountain of Piazza della Rotonda, the Colosseum still dominating the landscape, and the churches and monuments that still dot the landscape of Rome today. My own nostalgia collapsed time, connecting me with eighteenth-century tourists and armchair travellers who had looked upon these same views with much the same longing.

In 1765, Francesco Panini began publishing the series of views that would become Vedute delle Quattro Principali Basiliche e Monumenti di Roma nel XVIII Secolo. Rather than working alone, Panini supplied drawings to some of the most accomplished engravers then working in Rome, among them Carlo Antonini, Francesco Polanzani, and Giovanni Volpato, who translated his designs into the copperplates from which the prints were made. It was a collaborative process, but the vision behind them was recognisably Panini’s: Rome presented on a monumental scale, its churches, ruins, and piazzas carefully composed to impress upon the viewer the magnificence of the city.

Francesco Panini (1738–1800) had grown up surrounded by precisely this way of seeing Rome. His father, Giovanni Paolo Panini, had become one of the most celebrated painters of the eighteenth century through his sweeping architectural views, scenes of Roman ceremonies and extraordinary capricci, in which real and imagined ruins were assembled into theatrical visions of antiquity. Francesco worked closely in his father’s studio and became his principal assistant, absorbing not only his technique but an entire visual language in which Rome itself was the protagonist. After Giovanni Paolo’s death in 1765, Francesco continued that tradition in his own right.

Panini manipulated scale and perspective to heighten the experience of looking at Rome. Human figures shrink beneath vast façades; piazzas open dramatically before the viewer; columns, domes, and ruins dominate the sheet. The people wandering through these spaces are important partly because of how small they appear. They give us the measure of the architecture. Panini was showing eighteenth-century viewers a recognisable Rome, but also teaching them how to see it: as a city whose physical remains seemed to dwarf the individual and connect the contemporary visitor to a past of almost unimaginable scale.

Panini was working at precisely the moment when Rome had become one of the great destinations of European travel. For the wealthy young men, and, increasingly, women, who undertook the Grand Tour, Italy was its intellectual and cultural climax, and Rome its essential stop. Visitors came to encounter the city they had already met through classical literature, Renaissance art, and histories of the ancient world. The journey was intended to educate, but it was also a performance of taste.

A flourishing industry grew around these visitors. Artists, antiquarians, printmakers, and dealers supplied travellers with objects through which Rome could be taken home. Portraits might show their owners posed among antiquities; fragments, casts, and newly excavated objects entered private collections; while vedute, carefully composed ‘views’ of the city, offered something more portable. Their usefulness did not end with the journey itself. For those who had travelled, such volumes could reactivate the city in memory. For those who had not, they offered a form of imaginative possession. Rome could be encountered at a distance, leaf by leaf, church by church, fountain by fountain, its ruins, piazzas, and monuments made available for repeated inspection. The veduta was at once a souvenir, a surrogate experience, and a means of carrying the city home.

Panini’s folios belonged to this world. The copy offered by Shapero Rare Books is particularly rich, containing forty plates from the original series and a further thirteen added at the rear, making fifty-three double-page engravings in all. Added by a later owner to enlarge the book’s vision of Rome, these additional sheets extend the visual journey beyond Panini’s own sequence. They take in subjects as varied as the obelisk later raised above Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, the Vatican, and the palace and gardens at Tivoli where the emperor Hadrian spent most of his time. Other surviving examples of Panini’s Vedute are notably smaller: the Calcografia Nazionale catalogue records thirty-seven engravings, while the Getty copy contains only twenty-seven. 

Comparable Roman ‘views’ by artists such as Jean Barbault (1718-1762) were eagerly bought up. Barbault’s Nouveau Recueil de Vues des Principales Eglises Places Rues et Palais de Rome Moderne, published in Rome in 1763, offered its owner forty-four large, engraved views of the city’s churches, squares, palaces, fountains, and bridges. If Panini revelled in Rome’s monumental scale, Barbault’s approach was often more topographical, and an attempt to record the appearance of the modern city as it was encountered by those moving through it.

Barbault was himself an outsider looking in. Born in France, he spent much of his career in Rome, where he moved within the circle of artists that included Piranesi, Duflos, and Le Geay, and contributed to Piranesi’s own Vedute di Roma and Antichità romane. His views therefore emerged from a highly competitive world in which artists were shaping the way an international audience came to imagine the city. 

Barbault’s volume belongs to the first edition of 1763, and its forty-four plates retain the sharpness and delicacy that made such books desirable objects in their own right. His designs were cut by Domenico Montagu and a group of engravers whose work gives the architecture a remarkable clarity without emptying it of life. A later edition, published in 1773 by Bouchard, dispensed with the captions and was not printed to the same standard.

To own rare volumes such as these is to preserve more than a sequence of handsome images. Turning their pages, I was struck again and again by the familiarity of what I saw: the sweep of a piazza, the profile of a church, the mass of a ruin still recognisable after more than two centuries. The city has changed, of course, but not so completely as to sever the nostalgic connection Rome’s travellers share with those of the past. The Panini and Barbault folios are objects of beauty, certainly, but also material evidence of the long history of looking at Rome, and of the impulse, shared across generations, to keep some part of the city close.

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Dr Jess Venner is an award-winning ancient historian, archaeologist, and author, and recipient of the prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford. She holds a number of academic posts and honours, including the Rome Award at the British School at Rome, an Honorary Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, and Associate Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. She is the author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii and has written and presented widely on the ancient world, appearing in The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, HistoryExtra and on NPR. Through @lifeinthepastlane_, she shares expert history content with an audience of more than 300,000, reaching millions weekly. A former antiquarian bookseller, she retains a particular passion for rare books and the histories they preserve.