Architecture

Giovanni Paolo Panini’s "Architectural Capriccio With a Preacher in Roman Ruins" stages an imaginary sermon inside a grand, invented city of antiquity. Towering Corinthian columns, broken archways, and fragments of entablature frame the scene like a stone theater.

Pieter Neefs’s "Interior of Antwerp Cathedral" is like stepping into a Gothic architectural fantasy tour representing the Cathedral of Our Lady (in Dutch, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal) in Antwerp, Belgium. The representation is extraordinarily precise.

Domenico Ghirlandaio’s "Birth of Mary" is a large fresco in the Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, painted around 1485–1490. It shows the moment aafter Anne has given birth to Mary, set not in biblical Palestine but in what looks like an elegant late-15th-century Florentine bedroom. Anne, the mother of Mary, reclines in a grand wooden bed, propped up against rich blue textiles, while attendants bustle around her.