With Gilberto Algranti, Milan;
From whom acquired by the present owner.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is probably not recently restored, but the restoration is serviceable and competent in many areas nonetheless. The canvas is lined. The work seems to be more or less clean. There is a thinness to the paint layer in the sky, but it has been adequately retouched. There is an old vertical break in the center of the sky. There are numerous losses and restorations in the architecture in the upper right. Other restoration can be seen in the center, in the darker colors around the statue at lower center and around the edges. The picture should be varnished, and some of the filling and retouching reexamined. In this case, cleaning is probably not advisable.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This unpublished capriccio is an early work by Giovanni Paolo Panini, who was the pre-eminent painter of vedute in Rome in the second and third quarters of the 18th century. The composition relates to Panini's signed painting formerly in the Crawford collection, London, which is of square rather than horizontal format.¹  Arisi dated the ex-Crawford picture to the mid-1710s by comparison with Panini’s Architectural Capriccio with a Pool and Bathers in the Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomfield, which he dates to 1715-16.² This specific composition however is an original conception, and one which is not repeated by Panini in any close variants. The rather one-sided composition, heavier on the right with the buildings receding and lighter on the left with a more distant view of the pool beyond, might suggest that the painting may originally have had a pendant. It echoes, in reverse, the composition of his Architectural Capriccio with Figures Playing about a Fountain, formerly in the collection of Prof. Costantino Nigro, Genoa.³  That painting was also considered a relatively early work by Arisi and by Brunetti before him; the latter noting the influence of Andrea Locatelli, with whom Panini trained, in both the architecture and figures. 

We are grateful to David R. Marshall for endorsing the attribution to Panini, based on photographs, and for suggesting a date of execution to circa 1715-17, just prior to the artist’s admission to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1718-19.

1. Oil on canvas, 93 by 93 cm.; signed with monogram lower left: G.P.P.; see F. Arisi, Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del ’700, Rome 1986, p. 247, cat. no. 61, reproduced. The painting was recently offered for sale in New York, Christie’s, 23 January 2004, lot 86.
2. Ibid., p. 250, cat. no. 64, reproduced.
3. Ibid., p. 252, cat. no. 67, reproduced.