Architectural Capriccio with the Colonnades of St. Peter's in Rome

By 1760 the young Hubert Robert had been living in Rome for a few years, filling sketchbooks with its monuments. The one he borrows here is real and unmistakable: the great curving colonnade that Gian Lorenzo Bernini built around the square in front of St. Peter's between 1656 and 1667, its rows of Doric columns meant to stand for the arms of the church reaching out to the city. Robert lifts that colonnade out of its actual setting and drops it into a scene that never existed. This is a capriccio, an architectural fantasy, and the taste for such invented grandeur was everywhere in Rome then, fed by Giovanni Battista Piranesi's dramatic prints of the city. The columns are exact; the place they stand in was assembled in his head.