Architectural capriccio with Figures and Antiquities

Giovanni Paolo Panini

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giovanni Paolo Panini was a painter and draftsman who specialized in architectural scenes of Rome, both topographical and invented. He was hired by the Académie de France in Rome to instruct the young French art students in perspective. He worked closely with Charles Joseph Natoire, the director of the Académie. The proposed purchase is a rare example of a work executed in two hands, with architecture by Panini with figures and accents by Natoire. Natoire’s estate sale lists several drawings described as ‘by Panini with figures by Natoire,’ and this sheet may well have figured among them. Collaborations between artists flourished in the milieu of the French Academy in the 1760s and 70s.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art