The Colosseum (19 page)

In fact the monument was repeatedly ‘carried away’ in a different and less damaging sense. From the Renaissance onwards, it provided a model for classicising architects. Not only was it drawn, redrawn and reconstructed on paper, it was
recreated in stone – particularly the characteristic sequence of the different architectural orders on its perimeter wall. The stamp of the Colosseum is to be found in the design of many an Italian
palazzo
. As early as 1450, the renaissance architectural guru Leon Battista Alberti incorporated motifs from the building into his Palazzo Rucellai in Florence. In Rome a century later, Antonio da Sangallo, who had himself made detailed drawings of the Colosseum, replicated details in his design for the Palazzo Farnese. Sangallo’s father had already taken the orders and articulation of the Colosseum as the inspiration for the courtyard of the Palazzo Altemps (just off the Piazza Navona, and now open to the public as a museum of Roman sculpture).

By the nineteenth century, imitation was as much about function as form. If the ghost of a Roman amphitheatre lies somewhere behind every circular concert hall, the very idea of the Colosseum as a place of popular Roman entertainment is paraded in all the venues world-wide that were built with that name. From South Dakota to Tokyo, there are literally thousands of sports facilities, music halls and theatres graced with the title ‘Coliseum’ (the spelling gives away the nineteenth-century origin of this fashion). Many of these show no trace whatsoever in their design of their Roman origins. But the London Coliseum – now the home of the English National Opera, but which started life in 1904 as a more down-market variety hall – is full of allusions to Rome, even specifically to the Colosseum itself. There are mosaics on the floors; the original carpets carried the distinctive logo of the Roman state: ‘SPQR’ (‘Senatus PopulusQue Romanus’ or ‘The Senate and Roman People’); sculptures on the exterior feature some, admittedly docile, lions; and the decoration of
the ceiling includes a
trompe l’oeil
version of the famous awning used to keep the sun off the spectators in the Colosseum and other amphitheatres. Sir Oswald Stoll, whose brainchild it was, is supposed to have hoped that it ‘would be as worthy of London today as the ancient amphitheatre of Vespasian was of Rome’. As always with these wondrous monuments of international renown, part of their fame and familiarity stems from the fact that they have spawned replicas and creative imitations far beyond their original home.

It is now impossibly complicated to trace the precise stages by which the Colosseum was transformed in popular imagination and in popular use from a temple of demons and an arena of necromancy to a romantic ruin, a memorial of gladiatorial combat and Christian martyrdom, and an archaeological monument. In detail, its whole history since antiquity is a series of bright ideas, dead ends, failed schemes and repeated re-interpretations and re-appropriations. But the key to understanding what has happened to the Colosseum over the last millennium or so and the apparently wildly conflicting ways that it has entered Western culture is to pare those details down to their essentials. Since the end of antiquity, there have basically been just four main interest groups claiming the Colosseum for themselves: robbers and re-users; Christians; antiquarians and archaeologists; and – surprising as it may now seem – botanists. The monument’s history has been largely determined by the struggles of these partisans; its changing image has been the consequence of the dominance of one interest over the others.

ROBBERS AND RE-USERS

By the sixth century, even if it still hosted the occasional animal hunt and was kept partially in working order, the Colosseum was almost certainly in a dilapidated state. Without regular upkeep, dilapidation gave way to ruin. Its surviving structure was an obvious and easy target for those who wanted building materials, whether on a small scale (heaving off a block of travertine for use as a doorstep) or in order to provide the stuff of some of the grandest building schemes of the papal court. For most of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the Colosseum was not so much a monument as a quarry.

To describe this activity as ‘robbery’ is to give the wrong impression. For the most part, there was nothing illegal or unofficial about the removal of this stone. The Colosseum’s succeeding owners (a motley crew, which included feudal warlords, the local Roman council and various organisations of the Catholic Church) regularly gave or sold permission for ‘quarrying’. Papal records up to the seventeenth century repeatedly include the formula ‘
a cavar marmi a coliseo
’ (‘to quarry stone from the Colosseum’). The scale of the removal is now hard to contemplate. One entry in the records notes that in just nine months in 1452 under Pope Nicholas V 2522 cartloads of stone were removed; it was apparently intended for use in lime-making in his schemes for the Basilica of St Peter’s. Only a few years before, in 1448, one of the most learned humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, had ruefully observed, not without some exaggeration, that most of the Colosseum had been turned into lime. The same point was made rather more wittily in a well-known quip about the Barberini family’s plundering of the monuments of classical antiquity,
in particular the famous temple known as the Pantheon: ‘
Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini
’ (less neatly in English, ‘What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini have done’). Papal records from the seventeenth century show Pope Urban VIII allowing this same family (of which he himself was a member) to take fallen travertine from the Colosseum for the building of their Palazzo Barberini.

Earthquakes and other natural disasters no doubt helped in this process of quarrying; with each new tremor more building material would become easily available. But, however it fell down, the great missing stretch of the main perimeter wall of the monument ended up in the architectural masterpieces of renaissance Rome. Apart from its luck in withstanding earthquakes, the surviving northern wall of the perimeter seems to have been preserved partly at least in the interests of papal ceremonial: it lay directly on the road from the church of St John Lateran (to the east of the Colosseum) to the centre of the city, one of the main routes for religious processions. Rather than plunder this impressive backdrop, they allowed the dismantling of what was then the back of the monument to the south.

There is something satisfying as well as slightly sad in the thought of stone from Vespasian and Titus’ amphitheatre having a second life in the steps of St Peter’s or the Palazzo Venezia (from whose balcony Mussolini famously addressed the crowds in the square below). Part of the attraction of the city of Rome is exactly this type of use and re-use, and the way the ancient city is literally
built into
the modern city that followed it. Yet there is an unsettling irony in some of the connections here: not least is the fact that several of the buildings whose design was inspired by the Colosseum were
actually built with stone taken from the Colosseum. If the process had continued there would have been little left to inspire.

Ruins are not just plundered, however; they are also colonised. At the same time as stone was being removed from the site by the cartload, other parts of the building were being taken over for all sorts of domestic and commercial use. Some of this was the predictable kind of squatting. From the sixth century there are traces of animal stalls and shacks and haylofts (something of a well-deserved come-down, we cannot help thinking, for those parts of the building through which senators had once glided without having to cross the path of the lower orders). This kind of occupation continued for centuries, documented in legal records of ownership which refer to small houses, gardens, courtyards and boundary walls nestling in and around the building, and to their owners as blacksmiths, shoemakers, lime-pit workers and so forth. It was here that one early sixteenth-century artist found inspiration for an image of the Nativity, turning this shanty village into a convincing recreation of the humble stables of Jesus’s birth. But it is now hard to recover much substantial evidence of these medieval settlements. The problem, as usual, is that most of the post-classical material was removed by archaeologists in the nineteenth century, who had eyes only for the classical amphitheatre and its decoration (though occasionally they mistook a medieval wall for an ancient one and preserved it!). What is left are some scattered fragments of pottery, glass and metals, and the traces of inserted partitions, patched-up floors and the predictable troughs and mangers. This farmyard air (and smell) continued well into the eighteenth century when – the
grandiose industrial schemes of Sixtus V having come to nothing – a manure dump, for use in making saltpetre, was established in 1700 in the north corridors of the Colosseum. The dump remained there for a century, seriously corroding the stonework in the process.

Not all the occupation in the Colosseum was quite so down-at-heel. In the middle of the twelfth century part of the building was taken over by the so-called ‘Frangipane Palace’. The Frangipane were one of the families of warlords who dominated Rome at the time. Like several others, they established their fortresses (‘palace’ is a misleadingly domestic euphemism) in such ancient buildings as still stood: the Colonna family took over the Mausoleum of the emperor Augustus, the Savelli the Theatre of Marcellus. It is a tradition which has not, in fact, entirely died out: there are a number of expensive private apartments, even now, in the upper floors of the Theatre of Marcellus. In the Colosseum, the Frangipane occupied a substantial portion of the eastern side – about thirteen arches in extent – on two levels. They had an extensive residence in other words, even if, we suspect, rather draughty; and for Carlo Fea, in the famous early nineteenth-century dispute (
p. 138
), they were the prime suspects for inserting the substructures in the arena, which he believed to be medieval. The Frangipane lost control of the Palace in the mid thirteenth century to the rival Annibaldi family, who eventually sold it in the 1360s to the Christian ‘Order of St Salvator’. During their ownership, the Annibaldi are said to have entertained the poet and humanist Petrarch in the Colosseum in 1337; and they would, of course, have had a ringside seat at that bullfight in 1332. Although disused by the sixteenth century, traces of this palace are still visible on site.

What eventually, albeit slowly, brought this re-use of the Colosseum to an end were the activities and pressure of two other groups with an interest in the building. Since as early as the fifteenth century, antiquarians had objected to the despoiling of the ancient monument. Poggio was not the only intellectual to complain of the Colosseum disappearing in the builders’ carts and we shall soon turn to look at the increasingly powerful effect of this archaeological voice. But of more immediate impact in changing the culture of the Colosseum were the interests of the Christians – or rather (as, strictly speaking, almost everyone involved in this part of the Colosseum’s story, from the plundering popes to the Frangipane, were Christians) that growing sense among some members of the Christian community that the Colosseum was a building of special religious significance. The place where, as they believed, so many saints and martyrs had died ought to be a hallowed place of worship, and certainly should not be tainted with bullfights, squatter occupation and piles of manure.

CHRISTIANS

On the outer face of the east wall of the Colosseum there is an inscribed plaque, put up on the orders of Pope Benedict XIV in 1750; it replaced (as it states) an earlier text painted on the walls of the building in 1675, which after nearly a century had faded. Written in Latin, it celebrated the sacredness of the Colosseum in these terms:

The Flavian amphitheatre, famous for its triumphs and spectacles, dedicated to the gods of the pagans in their impious cult,
redeemed by the blood of the martyrs from foul superstition. In order that the memory of their courage is not lost, Pope Benedict XIV, in the jubilee of
1750,
the tenth year of his pontificate, had rendered in stone the inscription painted on the walls by Pope Clement X in the jubilee of
1675
, but faded through the ravages of time.

This was the high-water mark of the cult of the Christian martyrs in the Colosseum. The inscription was intended permanently to define the monument as the site of the Christian victory over paganism. The year before, in 1749, Benedict had pronounced it sacred ground, dedicated to the Passion of Christ, and threatened punishment for any desecration.

There is, in fact, as we saw in
Chapter 4
, not a shred of contemporary evidence that any Christians were ever martyred in the Colosseum for their faith. A number of Christian accounts of the lives and deaths of the saints, written from the fifth century on, attempt to fill out and embellish the historical details by claiming that they were killed ‘
in amphitheatro
’. But there is no reason to suppose that the Colosseum is always meant or, when it is, that the location is anything more than plausible guesswork. More to the point, although it seems to us inconceivable that this tradition should have been completely forgotten through the Middle Ages, the standard medieval view of the building certainly did not link the Colosseum with the fate of the saints. Although other shrines associated with martyrs were keenly venerated, there is no sign of any religious appropriation here. Significantly, the pilgrim-guide to the
Wonders of Rome
picks out, for example, the Circus Flaminius (another Roman spectacle arena) as a place of
martyrdom, while the Colosseum appears as a ‘Temple of the Sun’.

The cult of the martyrs seems to follow directly on the reassertion by renaissance humanists of the original function of the building and their study of the classical texts that threw light on the shows and their setting. A notable fifteenth-century image in silver gilt of the martyrdom of St Peter pictures him outside the distinctive form of the Colosseum – anachronistically, as Peter was put to death years before it was built. By the seventeenth century the martyrology of the place had become a minor industry: long lists of names and dates were published, recording all those (and ever more of them) supposedly martyred there.