View of the Arch of Constantine with the Colosseum

This 1754 view of the Arch of Constantine with the Colosseum, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is one of Canaletto's rare Roman subjects, painted during or just after his London years and based on drawings from his early Roman visit around 1719–20. The Arch of Constantine (315 AD) and the Colosseum together constituted the most evocative pairing in Roman topography — the arch celebrating the emperor who legalized Christianity standing beside the amphitheater where early Christians were traditionally supposed to have died — and they were among the most painted subjects in the Grand Tour veduta tradition. Roman vedute were almost exclusively associated with Giovanni Paolo Panini, who had built his entire career on Roman architectural subjects; Canaletto's occasional Roman views stood apart from Panini's work in their Venetian clarity of light and precise architectural rendering, a contrast that highlighted the two painters' fundamentally different approaches to the same tradition. The Getty Museum, established through J. Paul Getty's collection and enormously expanded through subsequent acquisitions, holds this as part of its significant group of European old master paintings in the collection of the world's wealthiest art institution.

The ancient arch is presented in strong lateral light that emphasises the relief sculpture in its upper zone. Canaletto renders the ancient stone with the same precise attention to texture and light he brought to Venetian marble. The Colosseum's massive curved bulk in the background is handled with careful atmospheric recession that places it convincingly in depth.