The Spiral Staircase of the Farnese Palace at Caprarola

A young French painter in Rome in the 1760s did not always need to invent his grand architecture. Some 50 kilometres north of the city, at Caprarola, stood the five-sided palace of the Farnese family, and inside it a spiral staircase designed by Vignola in the 16th century, climbing three floors around paired stone columns. Hubert Robert painted it in 1764, near the end of his long stay in Italy, on a canvas about 25 by 34 centimetres. He filled the steps with ordinary life. A woman carrying a baby comes down on the left, a man in blue leans over the balustrade beside a red cloth thrown across it, and a row of heads looks down from the landing above. Small pictures like this sold well in Paris. This one went through three auctions in six years, from 1773 to 1779, and passed through the collection of Randon de Boisset, a financier and one of the great Paris collectors of the day.