Italian Paintings in the Norton Simon Museum with Nicholas Penny: Giovanni Paolo Panini

In celebration of the Museum’s new collection catalogue Italian Paintings in the Norton Simon Museum: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, author Nicholas Penny narrates a series of videos exploring a single painting in depth, and reveals some of the discoveries he made during the course of researching the book.

In this episode, Penny provides a close-up view of Interior of Saint Peter’s, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini from 1735. This imposing painting, created about a century after the basilica’s completion, brings to life the beauty and remarkable grandeur of the building, as well as the variety of people who would have frequented it.