About the Artwork
Giovanni Paolo Panini was known for his views of celebrated sites in Rome, the city in which he lived and worked. The Colosseum, the elliptical amphitheater in the center of Rome, was undoubtedly the most famous site in the city. In ancient times, it was used for gladiator contests, animal hunts, executions, and even mock sea battles. By the eighteenth century, its travertine and concrete walls had partly crumbled, but it remained the largest standing amphitheater in the world. Panini has cleverly introduced touches of local color - conversing figures, a dog, a woman on horseback - that underline the monument's enormous scale but also its omnipresence in daily Roman life. Panini's companion painting of the Forum, located just west of the Colosseum, is also in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
View of the Colosseum
1735
Giovanni Paolo Panini
1691-1765
Italian
Unknown
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 29 3/16 × 53 inches (74.2 × 134.6 cm) Framed: 38 1/4 × 24 7/16 × 4 3/8 inches (97.2 × 62 × 11.1 cm)
Paintings
European Painting
Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Whitcomb
47.94
This work is in the public domain.
Markings
Signed and dated, on stone fragment, at lower right: I. P. PANINI/ Romae 1735
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Provenance
possibly Duke of Norfolk (Beech Hill, Sheffield, Yorkshire, England)
1947, (Arturo Grassi, New York, New York, USA)
1947-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
For more information on provenance and its important function in the museum, please visit:
Provenance pageExhibition History
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The exhibition history of a number of objects in our collection only begins after their acquisition by the museum, and may reflect an incomplete record.
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Pallas 20 (1947) p. 149
Richardson, E.P. "Two Rome Views by Panini." Bulletin of the DIA 27, no. 3 (1948): p. 55-58.
Richardson, E.P. Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture given by Edgar B. Whitcomb and Anna Scripps Whitcomb to the Detroit Institutes of Art. Detroit, 1954, p. 97 (ill.).
Wunder, R.P. "Two Roman Vedute by Panini in the Walters Art Gallery." Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 17 (1954): pp. 13-26, pp. 13, 16, fig. 5.
Le Vie del Mondo 16, no. 4 (April 1954): p. 370.
Treasures from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit, 1960, p. 102.
Ruins of Rome. Exh. cat., University of Pennsylvania Art Museum. Philadelphia, 1961, no. 60 (ill.).
Arisi, F. Gian Paolo Panini. Piacenza, 1961, p. 148, no. 99 (fig. 150).
Treasures from the Detroit Institute of Arts, 3rd ed. 1966, p. 108 (ill.).
Painting in Italy in the Eighteenth Century, Rococo to Romanticism. Exh. cat., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, et al. Minneapolis, 1970, no. 87a.
Fredericksen, B. and Zeri, F. Census of Pre-19th Century Italian Paintings in North American Collections. Cambridge, MA, 1972, p. 156.
Arisi, F. Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del ‘700. Rome, 1986, pp. 119-20, 346, no. 230 (ill.).
McCormick, T.J. Charles-Louis Clérisseau and the Genesis of Neo-classicism. New York, 1990, pp. 4, 6 (fig. 5).
Arisi, F. "Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1691-1765." 1993, p. 14.
Cornforth, J. "Farnsborough Hall Warwickshire, II: A Property of the National Trust and the Home of Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Holbech." Country Life 190, no. 29 (1996): p. 51.
Wissman, F.W. European Vistas: Cultural Landscapes. Detroit, 2000, pp. 42-43, 46 (ill.).
Rishel, J. and E.P. Bowron. The Splendor of Rome: Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century. Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts. Philadelphia and Houston, 2000, pp. 419-421, cat. 268 (ill.).
Bissell, R.W., A. Derstine, and D. Miller. Masters of Italian Baroque Painting: The Detroit Institute of Arts. London, 2005, pp. 9, 10, 136-137, cat. no. 44.
Derstine, Andria. "The Detroit Institute of Arts and Italian Baroque Painting." In Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron. University Park, 2017, p. 97.
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Credit Line for Reproduction
Giovanni Paolo Panini, View of the Colosseum, 1735, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Whitcomb, 47.94.
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