View of the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine from the East, Rome

Van Wittel's 1707 view of the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine taken from the east presents a perspective less commonly documented in his surviving output — the eastern flank of the monument rather than the western or northern approaches more familiar from his earlier Colosseum views. By 1707 Van Wittel had been in Rome for over thirty years and had built an intimate knowledge of the city's ancient monuments that allowed him to select viewpoints offering genuine topographic information beyond the iconic. The Arch of Constantine, erected in 315 CE to commemorate the emperor's victory at the Milvian Bridge, stands immediately adjacent to the Colosseum and was in Van Wittel's day still largely buried to its base in accumulated debris; his view thus records the arch's early eighteenth-century appearance before the archaeological clearances of subsequent centuries. The painting captures a moment in the slow ongoing process by which Rome's ancient centre was being re-examined and documented by artists working in the empirical spirit that Van Wittel had done much to establish.

Van Wittel places the Arch of Constantine in the foreground right and the Colosseum behind it to the left, creating a spatial layering of ancient monuments that reads as architectural information. The low eastern light suggested by the shadow direction reveals the relief sculpture on the arch's attic storey. His rendering of the Colosseum's outer arcade from the east shows subtle differences from his western-aspect views in the handling of weathering and vegetation.