Christ at the Temple

Architectural magnificence dominates over holy splendour in this rather fantastic painting of Christ and his followers. It’s ‘fantastic’ in the sense of fantasy – the statues in this fictional temple must be 10 times human size!

Giovanni Ghisolfi’s idealised, theatrical views of towering classical architecture created a whole new artistic genre. Later, he would exert a major influence on the 18th-century artists Giovanni Paolo Panini and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose work you can see elsewhere in this exhibition.