The first painting portrays an exterior view of Saint Peter’s as part of the landscape of the quintessentially Italian piazza, while the later unveils the secrets of the interior, exploring the magnitude and majesty inside its doors. Of particular importance, Panini’s Departure of the Duc de Choiseul from the Piazza di San Pietro and Interior of Saint Peter's offer two intriguingly diametric perspectives of the same architectural masterpiece of the Grand Tour. Panini’s “modern views”, consisting of views of monuments constructed in the Renaissance and Baroque period as opposed to antiquity, emerge to prominence within this context. It is in this subcategory that Panini achieved a considerable patronage and received many commissions, most notable among them from the Duc de Choiseul, a French nobleman, who at the time was serving as Ambassador to the Vatican for Louis XV, and Cardinal Melchior de Polignac (1661-1742), another French nobleman of high rank in the service of Louis XV. Within the larger category of vedute, Panini was famous for his quadri di cerimonia, paintings celebrating an event or ceremony. His views, a form of urban landscape intended to capture the beauty and romance of the Italian vistas endemic to the Grand Tour, generally divide into two genres, vedute reale and vedute ideate. Panini only began to produce the vedute to which he owes his fame in the last thirty years of his life, a consequence of the high demand for such works stemming from the fashion at the time of the Grand Tour. In the earlier part of his career, Giovanni Paolo Panini, though a painter, was considered to be working within the field of architecture because of his attention to minute detail, accuracy and faithfulness to perspective.
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