Today the Colosseum is stripped bare, a mere skeleton of its former self. Today its mostly brown brick, but what did the facade of the building look like in antiquity? Was it brown or white or what? Is there any evidence of exterior plastering to give it a white sheen?
Quote:Today the Colosseum is stripped bare, a mere skeleton of its former self. Today its mostly brown brick, but what did the facade of the building look like in antiquity? Was it brown or white or what? Is there any evidence of exterior plastering to give it a white sheen?
It is not completely stripped bare. The northern and western outer walls are still standing. They were made of travertine. I think the colors were a bit more whiter than today's grey.
Today's colours are the result of over a hundred years car pollution.....staining etc and acid attack on the monuments of Rome and other cities is seriously shocking....one has only to look at the 'pristine' plaster casts of Trajan's column taken in the late 1800's and compare them to the original, now damaged to the point of parts being unrecognisable, by way of example.
The Colosseum would have appeared gleaming white in Travertine marble when relatively new, and was surrounded by whit Travertine marble pavements as well..... and the exterior parts were still so when Turner painted it in the mid-nineteeth century...
I do remember being in Roma in the 90s when the City authorities had given it all a bit of a clean up and it did not look so bad when floodlit at night, however it is indeed very sad that modern pollution is having such an effect on this and so many other mouments.
Here in Rome we commonly use travertine for our buildings up to now , just for some parts of them of course and not wholly. When new , it is gleaming but soon it gets down.
A lot of renaissance buildings, made from travertine and being dark due the centuries, are cleaned in these times and they became again shining , as the colosseum was.
Sometimes it was painted too.
A travertine frontispiece , new and shining, is truly a great view, but normally for we romans.