Interior of the Pantheon, Rome (1747): Art, History and Details

Interior of the Pantheon, Rome (1747) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, 1691–1765).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Created as a temple under the Roman emperor Hadrian around the year AD 125, the Pantheon became a Christian church in 609. Significant restoration took place in the early 1700s, a period of renewed attention to early Christian monuments. The site was a major monument of antiquity, an active church, and its portico, visible through the door, held the most important art fair in the city. Panini shows the complexity of this public space by representing foreign tourists, local churchgoers, Roman nobles, and artists mingling under the dome.

Object facts

• Title: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome
• Date: 1747
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, 1691–1765)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 147.5 x 120 x 5 cm (58 1/16 x 47 1/4 x 1 15/16 in.); Unframed: 127 x 97.8 cm (50 x 38 1/2 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1974.39

A detail from the museum

Panini's depictions of contemporary and ancient Rome were popular with foreigners who visited the city on their Grand Tours.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Portland Art Museum. Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. An Exhibition Organized 1956 by the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR: Portland Art Association, 1956.
• Grieg, T. P. "In the Auction Rooms." The Connoisseur CXXX (1959): 137-138.
• Olsen, Harald. Italian Paintings and Sculpture in Denmark. Copenhagen, Denmark: Munksgaard, 1961.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.