Perspective View of a Roman Amphitheatre
Ca. 1638.Muguruza P1 Escalera 3
This painting was one of four views of ancient Roman life commissioned around 1638 for the Buen Retiro Palace, Madrid. Two of the other works depict a Roman circus and a Roman gymnasium respectively, while the third, now lost, was recorded in 1701 as The baths of Diocletian with a fleet of galleys, which may be a misidentification of a view of a sea-battle stadium, or naumachia. The paintings are first documented in 1701 as hanging in the Pieza de Vesas Manos (Gallery for Royal Obsequies) in the Buen Retiro. All were painted by Viviano Codazzi, a painter from the Bergamo area first recorded in Naples in 1633, who painted the architecture, and his regular collaborator, the Neapolitan painter Domenico Gargiulo, who painted the figures.
The commission was apparently to depict scenes of four important Roman entertainments: gladiatorial combats, chariot racing, athletics and (probably) staged sea battles. During the sixteenth century much energy had been expended by antiquarians and printmakers on visualising the sites of such entertainments. For gladiatorial combats the task was relatively easy, since the principal Roman amphitheatre, the Colosseum, was and still is in large part intact. Simplified versions of such reconstructions were gathered together in a book of woodcuts first published by Giacomo Lauro in 1612. In the case of the Colosseum, Codazzi referred either to a somewhat crude plate in Lauro, or to one of the series of engravings from which it derives that originated with prints by Girolamo Fagiuolo, published by Antonio Salamanca in 1538. The engravings adopt the convention of showing a perspective view from the outside in the right half, but with a quarter of the walls removed to reveal a view of the interior and a ground plan of the removed section. In order to emphasise the interior, Codazzi used only half of the composition, so that we are shown only one of the building’s exterior bays. The whole has been stretched laterally a little, so that the curve of the upper part of the amphitheatre, seen from within, becomes the dominant compositional element.
Codazzi enlivens the schematic nature of the sectioning by representing unevenly projecting blocks of masonry, as if the building is not so much ruined as in the process of being disassembled. The engravings reconstructed the upper storey as a platform raised upon two vaulted passages and open to the sky, but here Codazzi follows one of two variant reconstructions published as a woodcut in Book III of Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva (1540). In the left background Codazzi has included a representation of the Tor de’ Conti, a medieval tower near the Colosseum.
Gargiulo populates the structure with thousands of tiny spectators, which serve to give an impression of vast scale, and marks the place where the rim of the area has been removed with a ring of standing or seated spectators. Within the arena various combats are taking place simultaneously, mostly the slaughter of wild beasts, known as the venatio, which was the principal activity of such amphitheatres.
Úbeda de los Cobos, A., El Palacio del Rey Planeta. Felipe IV y el Buen Retiro, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2005, p.196-199
