Monsignor de Canillac’s macchina for the Festa in Piazza Farnese to Honour the Marriage of the Dauphin of France and the Infanta of Spain in 1745

Abstract

Giovanni Paolo Panini’s unfinished Festa in Piazza Farnese to Honour the Marriage of the Dauphin of France with the Infanta of Spain, recently exhibited at the Getty Museum in the exhibition Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe, was made for the commissioner of the festa, Monsignor de Canillac. It shows the macchina as executed, which differed in a number of ways from the print by Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain, a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome, which was published in advance of its construction. Because the festa was delayed, the first macchina of the festival of the Chinea for Prince Colonna, which took place in the same piazza, was scrapped and replaced by on..