Provenance:
William Holbech (c. 1699 – 1771), Farnborough Hall, Warwickshire, acquired or commissioned from the artist in 1734; and by descent to
Ronald Herbert Acland Holbech, OBE (1887 – 1956).
Savile Gallery, acquired from the above in 1929.
Knoedler & Co., New York, acquired from the above in 1929.
John Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, acquired from the above in 1929.
Sara Barnes Roby (1907 – 1986) Foundation, New York, by descent from the above.
Asbjorn R. Lunde, New York, acquired from the above in 1973; and by bequest to
The Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, New York, in Sept. 2017.

Literature:
International Studio, New York, vol. 95, March 1930 (illus. p. 58).
‘Ars in Urbe’, in Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University, vol. XX, no. 3, April 1953, n.p. (no. 6)
Art Digest, New York, vol. 27, 1 May 1953 (illus. p. 12).
N. Coe Wixom, in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, Nov. 1975, p. 265 (illus. fig. 3).
F. Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del 1700, Rome, 1986, p. 341, no. 221 (illus.)
D. Marshall, Revisiting Canaletto and Panini at Farnborough Hall, Melbourne, 2005, pp. 4-5, 7, fn. 20-21 (illus. p. 6).
A. Laing, ‘Giovanni Paolo Panini’s English Clients’, in D. Marshall, S. Russell and K. Wolfe, eds., Roma Britannica: Art Patronage and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Rome, London, 2011, pp. 115-20 (illus. p. 117, fig. 9.2 [misprinted in text as 9.1]).

Exhibited:

New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Museum, Ars in Urbe, 10 April – 17 May 1953.
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on loan, 29 April 2013 – 9 June 2014.
Williamstown, MA, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, on loan, 4 July 2014 – 4 July 2015.

This iconic view of the interior of the Pantheon is one of Panini’s most accomplished and popular compositions. Trained as an architect and a painter of stage scenery, Panini painted multiple versions of such views of popular Roman monuments for visiting Grand Tourists. He first addressed this subject in 1732 in a signed and dated view looking towards the Piazza della Rotonda through monumental Corinthian columns, sold at Sotheby’s in 2015 (for $5,317,000). A signed version of similar size, with an identical vantage point, is in a private collection in Milan. A horizontal version of the view, which cuts off the uppermost section of the ceiling, is taken from a very similar perspective and is in a private collection in Rome; it is neither signed nor dated. A much larger version of this view, whose provenance was confused with that of the ex-Sotheby’s picture by Arisi, is in the Statens Museum fur Kunst in Copenhagen. A broadly similar version, signed and dated 1735, is in the Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna.

In the present composition, signed and dated 1734, the columns have been eliminated and the view taken from a position nearer the oculus. Panini has adroitly manipulated the perspective to depict a broader interior view than is actually visible from a single vantage point. The space is occupied by clergymen, soldiers, and visitors at prayer. Two later treatments of the view, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (unsigned) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (signed and dated 1747), follow the model of the present picture in omitting the Corinthian columns.

The Pantheon was commissioned by Marcus Agrippa during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and it was later rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian between 264 and 125 AD. In 609 AD it was consecrated by Pope Boniface IV as a Christian church, officially known as Sancta Maria ad Martyres but more commonly referred to as Santa Maria Rotonda. The coffered concrete dome remains to this day the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The diameter of the dome measures approximately 43 meters, roughly the same as its height. At its centre is an opening about 10 meters wide, known as an oculus, through which light streams into the church. A number of Italian Kings and Queens are buried in the church, as well as the artists Raphael and Annibale Carracci. Tiny figures peering through the oculus add a playful element. In Panini’s own day it was one of the great tourist attractions in Rome, and the existence of multiple versions – unique and differentiated pictures, rather than rote copies – testifies to its popularity.

In his 1981 article ‘A View of the Piazza del Popolo, Rome, by Giovanni Paolo Panini’, Edgar Peters Bowron expands on the importance of figures in Panini’s compositions relative to similar views by his friend and contemporary Vanvitelli (The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum Bulletin, vol. V, no. 6, Jan. 1981, pp. 37-52). He writes: ‘If the primary requisite of a good topographical landscape in the eighteenth century was its accuracy, the purchasers of such works were nevertheless interested in the way the scenes recalled their own experiences of foreign travel. Panini shrewdly perceived the interest of his audience in seeing itself depicted in his canvases….The variety of figures Panini painted into his compositions reminds us how dry and serious these topographical renderings would be without them. They also remind us what an exciting and cosmopolitan place Rome was in the middle of the eighteenth century’ (op. cit., pp. 51-52). Panini made a number of studies from life which he used and re-used in his compositions – for instance, a study for the two Carmelite monks in white robes who appears at the lower left of the present view.

One traveller who surely knew the above to be true was William Holbech, who commissioned or acquired this version of Rome, the Pantheon directly from Panini during his own Grand Tour. According to the Brinsley Ford archives, Holbech arrived in Rome by 12 November 1733 and departed for Venice in March 1734, where he commissioned two Canalettos before returning to England. He must therefore have acquired the Panini in the early months of 1734, and he may even be the gentleman in a fine blue coat standing with a group of visitors directly beneath the oculus – as Nancy Coe Wixom observes in her 1975 article, ‘Portraits, particularly of dignitaries who commissioned the work, are quite common in Panini’s paintings’ (op. cit., p. 267). An antiquary who visited Holbech’s estate, Farnborough Hall in Wiltshire, sometime around 1746 observed a number of antique sculptures ‘all brought from Rome with two pictures, one of the Rotunda [The Pantheon] and the other of diverse buildings by Panino [sic]’ (fn 20; BL, Add. MS 6230, pp. 31-32). The very Italianate display of pictures at Farnborough, surrounded by elaborate stucco-work, was unusual in England and evidently inspired by the displays Holbech had seen during his Grand Tour. His discerning eye, and evident understanding of the market – buying views of Rome from Panini, the preeminent painter of such images, and vedute from Canaletto in Venice – led him to assemble an impressive collection, which was dispersed by his descendants in 1929.