A capriccio is a painting of a place that does not exist, built from buildings that do.
The artist takes monuments, ruins and palaces that stand in different spots, or that were never built at all, and sets them side by side in a single scene. No traveler could ever have stood in front of it.
The name is Italian for a whim or a fancy, and its plural is capricci. In painting it came to mean these invented views, a popular kind of landscape in the eighteenth century.
Italians also called such a picture a veduta ideata, an imagined view. The word veduta alone meant the opposite, a faithful portrait of a real place, painted as it stood.
The surest way to understand such a picture is to look at one closely. Giovanni Paolo Panini, a painter based in Rome in the eighteenth century, made many of them for the travelers who came to see the city. His Roman Ruins with Figures, from about 1730 and now at the National Gallery in London, shows the whole method in one canvas.
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At first sight, the canvas looks like a corner of ancient Rome, full of broken monuments. Yet only one of them copies a real building, the crumbling pyramid.
Its model is the tomb of Caius Cestius, a Roman official who had his grave built in the shape of an Egyptian pyramid. The real tomb still stands, one of the best preserved ancient buildings in the city.
Everything else is Panini's invention: the broken columns, the statue on its chipped plinth, the damaged sarcophagus and, in the lower left corner, a carved frieze with a wolf. The wolf is the emblem of Rome, after the legend of the twins Romulus and Remus nursed by a she wolf, so even the invented pieces point to the city.
Viviano Codazzi's Rome
Panini, though, did not invent this kind of picture…
What You'll Discover
How a capriccio differs from an exact view.
How Panini rearranged the Roman Forum.
What Guardi did to a Venetian archway.
The bridge Venice chose not to build.
Why Hubert Robert painted the Louvre in ruins.