Giovanni Paolo Panini, 'Rome: The Interior of St Peter's', before 1742

Panini specialised in architectural views and painted about 30 pictures of the monumental interior of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome over several decades. This is a view from the left of the main entrance, looking down the nave towards the east end and high altar. At the far end is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous sculpted bronze canopy, erected between 1624 and 1633 over the tomb of Saint Peter.

The basilica is an enormous building, and the viewpoint Panini has adopted here emphasises its scale and the splendour of the architecture. We look out over the church from an elevated positioned, with figures scattered across the vast tiled floor beneath us, and piers and arches soaring above. Panini has manipulated perspective to create a dramatic effect in his painting: the angle of vision is far wider than the human eye would be able to see in one glance.

Sunlight streams through the upper windows and domes, creating shadows of varying depth across the vaulted ceiling and the aisles, arches and floor. It is these alternating areas of light and shadow, and the combination of vertical, diagonal and curved lines, that lead us deeper into the scene. Panini has beautifully captured the church’s lavish decoration, from the ornate gilding of the ceiling and the elaborate design of the floor to the sculpted figures that adorn the upper arches.

Among the visitors you can see a cardinal in red with his party just right of centre, surrounded by members of various religious orders and lay people who kneel in prayer. Around the dome at the end of the central nave you can make out part of the Latin inscription, which in full reads ‘Of the Heaven, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’, the words of Christ taken from the Gospel of Matthew. The circular emblem set into the vaulted ceiling is inscribed in Latin, ‘Pope Paul V, 1615’, while other inscriptions above the doors at the right refer to Pope Innocent IX, who served during the late sixteenth century, and Pope Innocent XIII, who served from the early eighteenth century.

This painting is large: it measures 1.5 metres high by just over 2 metres wide. It seems to be derived from an earlier version of this scene, now in the Louvre, Paris, which was commissioned in around 1730 by Cardinal de Polignac, French ambassador to the Vatican. The pictures Panini made of St Peter’s Basilica were fine mementos for visiting tourists, but also serve as historical documents recording architectural changes to the building between the 1730s and early 1750s. In spite of Panini’s signature, which appears here on the base of the pier at the extreme left, this painting was probably made with much assistance from his studio.