The Theater of Marcellus, from the Piazza Montanara
Robert Macpherson British, Scottish
Not on view
Like geological strata laid bare to reveal the earth's development, the walls of the Theater of Marcellus bear witness to the various transformations of the ancient Roman monument. Begun by Julius Caesar and completed about 12 B.C. by Augustus, despoiled in the fourth century, fortified in the eleventh, and converted into a palace in the sixteenth, the theater housed apartments and the shops of artisans by the mid-nineteenth century. Macpherson's photograph presents the antique theater in fragmentary form, partially shrouded in shadow--less a field for archaeological investigation than for philosophical meditation on the weight of history on the lives of Rome's modern citizens.
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