The Colosseum Seen from the Southeast

Van Wittel's Colosseum view from the southeast, held at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, is one of several versions he produced from this general angle, which offered a perspective on the monument's curve that was simultaneously more revealing of its structure and less familiar than the standard western views. The Fogg canvas of around 1700 entered an American academic collection, a path taken by many Italian vedute during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as American museums built their European holdings. The southeast approach to the Colosseum brought into view the massive buttressing arches added in the medieval period to stabilise the weakened structure — a feature Van Wittel documented with the same factual interest he brought to intact ancient elements. His painting thus captures the Colosseum as a layered historical object: ancient Roman construction, medieval intervention, and early modern vegetation all visible in a single view. This attitude to the monument as historical evidence rather than purely aesthetic object was characteristic of Van Wittel's empirical approach.

The curvature of the Colosseum's southeast section is established through careful gradation of lighting across the arcade bays, which grow successively darker as they turn away from the light source. Van Wittel renders the medieval buttressing in a slightly different stone tone from the ancient travertine, distinguishing the two building phases. A strong foreground shadow cast by an unseen structure to the left frames the composition.