Giovanni Battista 'Titta' Lusieri was one of Italy's great landscape artists,  yet within a few years of his death he had faded into obscurity. Lusieri was a watercolorist in Rome at a time when the medium was rarely embraced by Italians – as a result, he was more popular in Britain than in his home country.

Lusieri was one of the pioneers of 'panoramania', the fetish for panoramic cityscapes that swept through Europe and America at the end of the 18th century. The Panoramic view of Rome and its accompanying views are Lusieri's earliest known works in the genre, representing a key moment in the development of tastes in Western art.