Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Inside the Colosseum
Franz Ludwig Catel (German, 1778–1856)
c. 1823
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 100.4 × 137.5 cm (39 1/2 × 58 1/4 in.); Framed: 125 × 161 cm (49 × 63 in.)
- Culture
- Germany
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Chauncey B. Borland
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
A shaft of sunlight illuminates a group of figures dwarfed by the monumental architecture of the Colosseum, the ancient amphitheater in Rome. The building had fallen into disrepair for centuries until restorations began in 1822, the year before Franz Ludwig Catel made this painting.
In the foreground, a figure identifiable as architect Giuseppe Valadier bows slightly while presenting plans to the red-stockinged Cardinal Ercole Consalvi at left. In the background, two workers carry a sack filled with rubble from the Colosseum’s depths, visually representing the labor involved in the project.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
