The center painted with an evening view of the square and Royal Palace at Naples (built 1600-1602 by Domenico Fontana) after an engraving by Sellier after a drawing by Jean Augustin Renard facing page 78 in Voyage pittoresque de Naples et de Sicile by Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non (1727 – 25 November 1791) – French painter and printmaker.
During his trip to Rome, Saint-Non met two already famous French painters, Jean Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, with whom he traveled along Italy. Their friendship led to the cooperation for the ambitious project of depicting all the main monuments of Southern Italy and Sicily. Between 1781 and 1786, with the assistance of many contemporary artists, he realized the Voyage Pittoresque ou description des Kingdom de Naples et de Sicilie, a five volume work published annually. As a result of a great typographical effort, the work is a collection of Sain-Non’s traveling notes; the graphic part is made up of 542 engravings and etchings, created by the most important artists of the period. The work is immediately successful, for the book became a new typographical model for the following publications. From an artistic point of view, the views, landscapes and antiquity keep the Romantic pictorial style of Fragonard, Robert, Desprez and all the other artists who took part in this monumental project. The re-issue, between 1795 and 1798, of the pictorial plates, witnesses the great success of this project.