Amós de Escalante and the Ruins of Ancient Rome: a Bécquer-esque vision

Amós de Escalante ante las ruinas de la Antigua Roma: una visión becqueriana

Abstract

In this article we examine Amós de Escalante’s depiction of the ruins of the Roman Colosseum in Del Ebro al Tíber (1864), focusing on its aesthetic affiliation with Spanish post-Romanticism and, in particular, the influence of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Through a comparative analysis with Bécquer’s text on the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes in Historia de los templos de España (1857), it is shown that Escalante adopts and reworks a shared poetics of the ruin: one that conceives the remnants of the past not as archaeological objects, but as visionary and moral spaces where poetic imagination restores life and meaning to what has been destroyed. The article identifies the formal devices common to both authors which together create an aesthetic of the sublime and the hallucinatory, wherein the contemplation of ruins becomes a spiritual experience. However, unlike Bécquer’s melancholic ambiguity, Escalante transforms the Romantic vision into a Christian allegory and a providential reading of history, turning the Colosseum into a symbol of redemption and martyrdom. In this way, his writing exemplifies the transition of Spanish Romanticism toward a more confessional and moralizing sensibility within the travel literature of the second half of the nineteenth century.