PANNINI, Giovanni Paolo
(b. 1691, Piacenza, d. 1765, Roma)

View of Rome from Mt. Mario, in the Southeast

1749
Oil on canvas, 102 x 168 cm
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

This is a highly unusual view of the far side of St. Peter's from the southeast, situating the Castel Sant'Angelo near the centre of the horizon. Two centuries before its present-day metropolitan sprawl, Rococo Rome was relatively concentrated in urban scope, allowing for deliciously sudden contrasts between city and country, a paradox fully appreciated by so keen a student of landscape as Pannini.