Gladiator Fight

The obelisk in the background of this huge canvas carries a real inscription, and Paris Bordone reproduced it with care. DIVO CAESARI, it begins, a dedication to the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. The same words are cut into the obelisk that now stands in the middle of Saint Peter's Square in Rome. When Bordone painted this, perhaps around 1560, the obelisk had not yet been moved there. It still stood where the emperor Caligula had set it up in the first century, in the circus on the Vatican hill later finished by Nero, and by the 16th century it rose beside the old basilica of Saint Peter. In 1586 Pope Sixtus V had his architect Domenico Fontana shift it about 260 metres to the square, after 13 months of preparation. Bordone set it behind a fight between gladiators, on a canvas more than three metres wide. The museum puts a question mark after the date, and the picture is first recorded in the imperial gallery in 1730.