A View through Three of the North-Western Arches of the Third Storey of the Coliseum

Eckersberg came to Rome in 1813, a Dane in his early thirties who had just spent two years in David's Paris studio. What he did there had never really been done in Danish painting. He carried his gear up into the ruins and painted them on the spot, in the actual light. This view looks like a plain record of the Colosseum's third storey. It is not quite one. The three arches you look through were separate vantage points, and Eckersberg fitted them together into a single frame that reads as real but was never available to any standing person. The stones are observed exactly. The perspective is quietly invented. He kept the picture small, about the size of a folded newspaper, close enough to check every line against the wall in front of him.