Frondose arcate : Il Colosseo prima dell'archeologia

Milano: Electa, 2000. Paperback. NF. Color-illustrated wraps with white lettering on black spine. 115 pp. with color and duotone images throughout. Text in Italian. With contributions by Italo Insolera, Denis Coutagne, Bernard Terlay, Simoan Ceschin, Giulia Caneva, and Francesco Scoppola. Catalogue of an exhibition held in Museo nazionale romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome, Dec. 18, 2000-Feb. 18, 2001. "For many centuries, before archaeologists and engineers cleaned it in the nineteenth century, the Coliseum was covered with plants and trees. For a long time there were gardens and gardens, and a great variety of vegetation grew in the shadow of the arches or climbed on the walls. Plants of all kinds, fig trees, elms, peri, olives and cherry trees found their habitat in the amphitheater, where even the sheep grazed in the arena. In many cases (eg in 1727), permission was granted to collect hay and herbs growing in the monument.The arches and the ruins had become an enchanted garden full of flowers and shades. The romantic travelers of the eighteenth century found the Colosseum extremely suggestive, as if nature had reapplied the place. Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Thomas Cole, Henry James and many other artists gave way to the fascination of ancient, evocative ruins. In the nineteenth century, painters were especially in love with the picturesque aspects of the Colosseum. An exhibition held in Rome ("Frondose Arcate") underlined, among others, the work of French painters Jean-Antoine Constantin and Francois-Marius Granet who were active in Rome between 1777 and 1830." - The Colosseum.net. (Inventory #: 162612)