Art: Inspiring Ruins

The plump, periwigged sightseer was too excited to sleep; Edward Gibbon spent his first night in Rome waiting for dawn. When at last it came, Historian Gibbon recalled later, “I trod with lofty step the ruins of the Forum: each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Cicero spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye.” Last week visitors to Detroit’s Institute of Arts could see what Gibbon saw, as painted by his 18th Century contempo rary, Giovanni Paolo Pannini. The institute had just acquired Pannini’s splendid, solemn View of the Colosseum (see cut) and View of the Forum.

Born in Piacenza (in North Italy) in 1691, Pannini went to Rome at 26 to learn figure painting in the style of Salvatore Rosa. After classes, he would stroll out from the Eternal City for long looks at the ruins which ringed it like a crum bling shell. Tumbling, ivied walls in scribed with ancient names and victories, pillars overlooking the wilderness or sprawled broken like dead giants in the grass, and marble steps descending into the sod inspired the “Views” for which Pannini became famous. Perhaps his the spaciousness and sparkle of Canaletto and Guardi, whose pictorial celebrations of declining Venice were equally in demand. But for nostalgic elegance Pannini’s Roman Views rivaled anything Venice could produce. Without Pannini, wrote art critic Herman Voss, “a branch of art which is charming in itself would have been deprived of real perfection.”

The French Ambassador to Rome, Cardinal de Polignac, was the first to take Pannini under his wing. He commissioned the grateful painter to portray him standing in St. Peter’s. Later Pannini painted Charles III of Spain in the same setting. Sometimes, even after his reputation was assured, the artist would not refuse to turn an honest penny by decorating a villa, or whipping up cardboard clouds, fountains and triumphal arches for a sumptuous private fete. But apart from these somewhat theatrical preoccupations, most of Pannini’s 74 years were spent among the monuments of a greater age, which he sometimes peopled incongruously with tiny, ineffectual figures dressed in the gay fashions of his own time.

It took Gibbon’s imagination to flood Pannini’s wide, quiet ruins with the roaring tide of history: “As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter . . . the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.”*

*Gibbon was off to an inaccurate start: the monks were singing in the Temple of Juno.