Gallery of Views of Modern Rome

In 1912 Winnaretta Singer paid 50,000 francs for this canvas and its pair. Born in New York State, she was an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, and as the Princesse Edmond de Polignac she ran one of the great musical salons of Paris, commissioning new music from Stravinsky, Satie and Manuel de Falla. She died in 1943 and left both paintings to the Louvre, which received them in 1944.

Panini had painted them in 1759 for a French churchman in Rome, the abbé de Canillac, who had twice run the French embassy there as chargé d'affaires. This is the modern half of the pair. The walls of an imaginary hall are covered up to the vault with views of the papal city, its churches, palaces, squares and fountains, Santa Maria Maggiore and Piazza Navona among them. Copies of famous sculptures stand on the floor, and the seated marble figure with the long beard is Michelangelo's Moses. The companion canvas shows ancient Rome in the same way.

When Canillac died in Rome in 1761, the inventory of his belongings valued the two pictures together at 1,000 Roman scudi.