The first challenge for Panini scholars is that they don't know if his name is Panini or Pannini, but they're mostly sure he was just one guy, with many areas of artistic practice, and that he probably did not invent a grilled sandwich.

The variation of the artist's name parallels a variation of the artist's medium, and an absence of biography gives us little more than the works for telling a story. Like Warhol and da Vinci, Panini was a Catholic artist successful in many different professional fields. Panini's areas included fresco painting, interior design, architecture, portraiture, the veduta or landscape, and probably a number of other things, like fundraising, mingling, and writing polite letters.

Panini, "a painter of architectural capricci and vedute, was the heir to the Bolognese Baroque tradition of quadratura, or illusionistic architectural painting." The words are unique: the capricci are architectural fantasy paintings, depicting a scene with the use of impossible visual perspectives, exaggeration, and other cartoonish techniques, and the vedute are "views" or landscapes, like those of Canaletto. Quadratura created "fictive space" through painting on the interior of a building. Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas uses quadratura to make it look like you are outdoors. Quadratura was also practiced by Veronese and Andrea Pozzo.

If you're a geometry nerd, it's good to note that one of the methods of quadratura is anamorphosis, which is an artistic use of affine transformations, which scale, translate, transform, reflect and rotate spaces while maintaining relationships between points, lines, and planes.

Like Bernini, after his studies, Panini eventually became principal of the Accademia di San Luca, which has existed for over four centuries. His first signed work is an undated depiction of the "flight into Egypt," held by a private collector in Genoa. His last signed work is The Colosseum (1764; Prague, N.G., Šternberk Pal.).