3-008-781 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition - "A Martyr in the Reign of Diocletian", by E. Slingeneyer, 1862. Engraving of a painting. 'The sunlight which floods the circus or amphitheatre, except where shaded by the velarium or canvas awning, and the ray which falls through the chink of the opening cell-door, arc represented with a truth which must surprise and afford pleasure to the spectator. But who will not be more struck and profitably impressed with admiration at the calm, marvellous fortitude and trust in Heaven expressed in the figure of that sleeping Christian youth holding the emblem of his faith, which he will raise aloft in his dying confession - asleep while the wild beast, which, with a refinement of cruelty, is placed in a cage of the same cell, roars and hungers for him, and while tens of thousands of his own species are gazing for him with equal blood- thirstiness...We cannot discover anything in the restored amphitheatre, represented in our Engraving, to identify it as that of the Flavian edifice at Rome, the ruins of which are now known to us as the Coliseum'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.