Capriccio with Classical Ruins and Buildings

Around 1750, when Canaletto painted this invented sprawl of classical ruins, Europe had fresh reasons to dream about ancient Rome. Diggers had been working the buried town of Herculaneum since 1738, and in 1748 they broke ground at Pompeii, both of them smothered by Vesuvius some 17 centuries earlier. Wealthy travelers on the Grand Tour now pushed south to Naples to watch real Roman rooms come out of the ash, and they wanted paintings of ruins to carry home. Canaletto gives them ruins that never existed, arches and columns and half-standing temples arranged for the eye. Unlike his Venetian views, there is no real building here to check it against, only weathered stone, a clear sky, and a few figures wandering among the columns.