ABSTRACT
For, without question, the Louvre version-with its crowds, its spectators, and, in particular, its urban buildings-accentuates a fact that has long been a part of Romulus’s legend: that the women were abducted in the midst of a spectacle, variously glossed, as we shall see, as either a ludus (a ceremonial game) or an actual play. And yet it accentuates it vis-à-vis a particularly modern twist. The Met painting presents us with what scholars have called “generic” Roman buildings such as the basilica and mausoleum, while the space in which the maidens and their foreign abductors are gathered is arguably a circus or elliptical opening, typical of that used for chariot races and other athletic events. In the Louvre painting, we undoubtedly have “antique” elements as well. Christoph Frommel suggests that Poussin much more closely followed Livy’s account in the Ab urbe condita by returning to “a closed, Vitruvian forum with temple, basilica, and palazzi,” as well as a rostrum on which Romulus stands.1 Yet while Poussin may have been striving to be faithful to Livy, he is also following a book written some 1600 years after Livy, and one that had already proven to be profoundly influential for the sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury stage: Sebastiano Serlio’s Secondo libro di prospettiva, first published in 1545. For with its central arch, its perspective view down the street, and its doublestoried buildings inhabited by “grandi personaggi,” the setting of Poussin’s Louvre painting demonstrates its continuity with Serlio’s illustration for the tragic “scene” recommended to Renaissance dramatists and set designers (Figure 6.3).
