Charles III de Bourbon visitant le pape Benoît XIV au café du Quirinal, Rome

Charles of Bourbon was the young Bourbon king of Naples when, in the mid-1740s, he came to Rome to call on Pope Benedict XIV. The two were already friends and had settled relations between Naples and the Church a few years earlier, and the visit followed the victory of Charles's forces over the Austrians at Velletri, just south of Rome, in 1744. Panini painted the scene in 1746 as a formal record of the meeting, set in the elegant coffee house, a garden pavilion, in the grounds of the papal palace on the Quirinal. He was the great painter of Rome's ceremonies and ruins, and he fills the room with courtiers and liveried servants around the two small central figures who are the reason for it all. Charles would later leave Naples to become king of Spain.