By the sixth century, even if it still hosted the occasional animal hunt and was kept partially in working order, the Colosseum was almost certainly in a dilapidated state. Without regular upkeep, dilapidation gave way to ruin. Its surviving structure was an obvious and easy target for those who wanted building materials, whether on a small scale (heaving off a block of travertine for use as a doorstep) or in order to provide the stuff of some of the grandest building schemes of the papal court. For most of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the Colosseum was not so much a monument as a quarry.
To describe this activity as ‘robbery’ is to give the wrong impression. For the most part, there was nothing illegal or unofficial about the removal of this stone. The Colosseum’s succeeding owners (a motley crew, which included feudal warlords, the local Roman council and various organisations of the Catholic Church) regularly gave or sold permission for ‘quarrying’. Papal records up to the seventeenth century repeatedly include the formula ‘a cavar marmi a coliseo’ (‘to quarry stone from the Colosseum’). The scale of the removal is now hard to contemplate. One entry in the records notes that in just nine months in 1452 under Pope Nicholas V 2522 cartloads of stone were removed; it was apparently intended for use in lime-making in his schemes for the Basilica of St Peter’s. Only a few years before, in 1448, one of the most learned humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, had ruefully observed, not without some exaggeration, that most of the Colosseum had been turned into lime. The same point was made rather more wittily in a well-known quip about the Barberini family’s plundering of the monuments of classical antiquity, in particular the famous temple known as the Pantheon: ‘Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini’ (less neatly in English, ‘What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini have done’). Papal records from the seventeenth century show Pope Urban VIII allowing this same family (of which he himself was a member) to take fallen travertine from the Colosseum for the building of their Palazzo Barberini.
Earthquakes and other natural disasters no doubt helped in this process of quarrying; with each new tremor more building material would become easily available. But, however it fell down, the great missing stretch of the main perimeter wall of the monument ended up in the architectural masterpieces of renaissance Rome. Apart from its luck in withstanding earthquakes, the surviving northern wall of the perimeter seems to have been preserved partly at least in the interests of papal ceremonial: it lay directly on the road from the church of St John Lateran (to the east of the Colosseum) to the centre of the city, one of the main routes for religious processions. Rather than plunder this impressive backdrop, they allowed the dismantling of what was then the back of the monument to the south.
There is something satisfying as well as slightly sad in the thought of stone from Vespasian and Titus’ amphitheatre having a second life in the steps of St Peter’s or the Palazzo Venezia (from whose balcony Mussolini famously addressed the crowds in the square below). Part of the attraction of the city of Rome is exactly this type of use and re-use, and the way the ancient city is literally built into the modern city that followed it. Yet there is an unsettling irony in some of the connections here: not least is the fact that several of the buildings whose design was inspired by the Colosseum were actually built with stone taken from the Colosseum. If the process had continued there would have been little left to inspire.
Ruins are not just plundered, however; they are also colonised. At the same time as stone was being removed from the site by the cartload, other parts of the building were being taken over for all sorts of domestic and commercial use. Some of this was the predictable kind of squatting. From the sixth century there are traces of animal stalls and shacks and haylofts (something of a well-deserved come-down, we cannot help thinking, for those parts of the building through which senators had once glided without having to cross the path of the lower orders). This kind of occupation continued for centuries, documented in legal records of ownership which refer to small houses, gardens, courtyards and boundary walls nestling in and around the building, and to their owners as blacksmiths, shoemakers, lime-pit workers and so forth. It was here that one early sixteenth-century artist found inspiration for an image of the Nativity, turning this shanty village into a convincing recreation of the humble stables of Jesus’s birth. But it is now hard to recover much substantial evidence of these medieval settlements. The problem, as usual, is that most of the post-classical material was removed by archaeologists in the nineteenth century, who had eyes only for the classical amphitheatre and its decoration (though occasionally they mistook a medieval wall for an ancient one and preserved it!). What is left are some scattered fragments of pottery, glass and metals, and the traces of inserted partitions, patched-up floors and the predictable troughs and mangers. This farmyard air (and smell) continued well into the eighteenth century when – the grandiose industrial schemes of Sixtus V having come to nothing – a manure dump, for use in making saltpetre, was established in 1700 in the north corridors of the Colosseum. The dump remained there for a century, seriously corroding the stonework in the process.
~~The Colosseum -by- Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
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