Inscribed at bottom center, in pen and brown ink, "E.B. 19 w 59".
The present work is by the Russian-born painter Eugene Berman, who is known for his Baroque-like stage set designs, his imaginary landscapes, and architectural fantasies. In the present drawing, Berman rendered the Colosseum from a bird's eye perspective, eliminating references to the city's actual surrounding monuments. Instead, in the background a pyramid and colonnades are sketched in gouache with an abstracted white finish.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1918, Berman spent several summers in Italy as a young man, establishing a preoccupation with the country's history. During that time he met Giorgio de Chirico, about whom he said, "Through these paintings of De Chirico I understood that ... there is yesterday, there is reminiscence, there is the echo, there is the dream. There is the thing of today which really was yesterday--it will be tomorrow." Like de Chirico, Berman was preoccupied by Italy's architectural past and used a redacted architectural vocabulary to describe it.
Berman spent his last years in Rome, where he died. In the late 1950s he produced several sketches of the Colosseum and during the same time period he used related classical monuments as backdrops in his theatrical designs, for example in the model for Act 2 of Forza del Destino (1952) in the McNay Art Museum (inv. TL2001.24.2).