View of the Roman Colosseum

Cock is thought to have visited Rome in the late 1540s and made the preparatory drawings for his series Views of Roman Ruins that he published in his native Antwerp in 1551. The popularity of prints of the monuments of the city by local Roman artists must have inspired him in this enterprise. His depiction of the Colosseum has been described as more quaint than archaeologically precise. The abbreviated Latin inscription on this etching can be translated as, "View I of the Roman Colosseum, Destroyed by the Barbarians". It was not the barbarians, however, who destroyed it, but rather Rome's inhabitants who had treated the Colosseum as a quarry, carrying off its materials for re-use in churches and palazzos, especially after the southern outer wall fell in an earthquake in the fourteenth century.