Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome

Among the antique statues Panini crowded into this imaginary gallery, three would later stand in the Louvre at the same time. The Laocoön, the priest and his sons wrestling with serpents, is at the right, and the Dying Gaul lies in the middle of the floor. In 1758 one was in the Vatican and the other on the Capitoline. After the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 the French carried both to Paris, where they were shown in the Musée Napoléon until they went back to Rome after Waterloo.

The third is the lunging figure in the background, the Borghese Gladiator, then at the Villa Borghese. In 1807 Napoleon bought it from his brother-in-law, Prince Camillo Borghese, with several hundred of the family's antiquities, and it has stayed in Paris ever since.

The muscular Farnese Hercules on the left travelled too, though not to Paris. In 1787 it left the Palazzo Farnese in Rome for Naples.