François-Marius Granet

Private collection, France;

From whom acquired by Galerie François Teissedre, Paris;

From whom acquired by the present collector, by 2009.

The Frenchman François Marius Granet painted this depiction of the Temple of Minerva Medica soon after his arrival in Rome. The domed ten-sided nymphaeum offered the young artist the opportunity to study the city’s architectural roots, but on an approachable scale. Denys Simon-Joseph-Alexandre-Cléments, who served as Granet’s teacher and mentor in the Eternal City, counseled the younger artist to hone his skills on exactly such a structure, one that used an imperial architectural vocabulary, but was not on the monumental scale of the Colosseum. Granet spent almost two decades living and working in Rome, where he specialized in the production of such scenes to meet the demand of local collectors and foreign tourists alike.