Panini’s Kaleidoscope of Rome

To walk into a museum and observe one or more artworks with the curious eye of a non-expert: that is the task that the Nobel laureate Orhan PAmuk assigns to Mr. PA, his highly stylized alter ego, an avatar forged on the model of Italo Calvino’s PAlomar. We see Mr. PA, sitting on a bench on the second floor of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, gazing at two canvases by Giovanni PAolo PAnini in which – as if by some unconscious Cubist impulse a century and a half ahead of its time – Rome is broken down into a fragmentation of views. What may perhaps be causing him to linger is a fascination with an age-old literary contrivance: the mise en abyme (a story within a story, an embedded narrative, a painting within a painting). Recursively, and appropriately, Mr. PA will return in future issues of FMR, visiting other museums and gazing at other artworks.