Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome

In 1757 the comte de Stainville, soon to become the duc de Choiseul, was ending his time as French ambassador to the pope, and he wanted to take Rome home with him. Panini, the city's most celebrated view painter, built him an imaginary gallery. The ambassador sits at its centre among statues by Michelangelo and Bernini, and every wall is covered with Panini's own views of the modern city, St Peter's Square, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and dozens more. Choiseul ordered four such pictures, and Panini signed and dated this one on a block of stone at lower left. Its later travels are almost as crowded. In 1792 it was sold to Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the merchant who had housed Benjamin Franklin at Passy during the American Revolution. His son James became an American citizen and settled in upstate New York, and through the family the painting passed to a William Davis, who sold it in 1834 to the Boston Athenaeum, the city's private subscription library. The Athenaeum lent it to the museum from 1876 and sold it there in 1975.