The Curve 

In a gallery of the Prado hangs a crowd the size of a small city. Perspective of a Roman Amphitheatre, painted around 1638 by Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo, sweeps its packed tiers into a single vast curve, with tiny figures crossing the arena floor below. Codazzi painted the architecture and Gargiulo the people, and the result is a building that exists to turn thousands of eyes on one spot.

The painting was never merely decorative. It was made for Philip IV's Buen Retiro, a royal pleasure palace on the edge of Madrid, as part of a cycle of ancient Roman scenes: gladiators, chariot races, mock sea battles. The palace staged spectacles of its own, with a great pond for water shows and a purpose-built theatre called, fittingly, the Coliseo. A king was claiming the Colosseum as an ancestor. Little of the palace survives; the park does.

I stayed across the road, as a guest of Marriott Bonvoy, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team's hotel loyalty partner, at the Palacio del Retiro, an early twentieth-century mansion under National Heritage protection that faces the park. Over the race weekend there was the Paddock Club, with its lobster and its close view of the garages, and MATCH Hospitality's Traction Club, with its own corners of the track. Madrid's grand houses, it seemed, were still being lent to the business of spectacle.

Nearly four centuries after Philip IV, Madrid has built another arena. In September Formula 1 raced in the city for the first time since 1981, when the Spanish Grand Prix was last held at Jarama, a drive out into the countryside. The Madring is something else: a 5.4km, 22-turn circuit laid around the IFEMA exhibition grounds on the city's north-eastern edge, centred on La Monumental, a banked corner billed as the longest in Formula 1. Standing beside it, it is hard not to think of the painting: tiered crowds, a sweeping curve, thousands of people arranged around a single drama.

The amphitheatre was a hierarchy in stone, with the emperor's box, the senators' tiers and the common crowd above. A Grand Prix weekend keeps the arrangement; the tiers are now labelled Paddock Club, Traction Club and grandstand. The lounges are places of introduction as much as refreshment, and moving between them over a weekend shows how many ways there are to watch the same race, depending on where you have been seated.

The show also found its protagonist. Kimi Antonelli, the young Italian at Mercedes, won from second on the grid, 4.351 seconds ahead of Max Verstappen, after a virtual safety car cost the pole-sitter, Lando Norris, his lead. It was Antonelli's eighth win of the season, a week after his victory at Monza, and at twenty he carries the streak with unusual ease.

Not everyone was persuaded. Hours before the start, a few hundred residents protested against the race, and several reports found the racing short of overtaking. Every arena has had its sceptics.

The Count-Duke of Olivares, Philip IV's favourite and chief minister and the force behind the Buen Retiro, would have understood both sides. For him spectacle was statecraft: a pleasure palace hung with pictures of Rome declared who owned it.  Strip the Madring of its hospitality, its sponsors and its screens, and it makes the same wager. A city announces itself by staging the greatest show it can find, and a crowd gathers to watch others risk everything at the limit.

The Colosseum's descendants are no longer built of stone, but of asphalt, carbon fibre and loyalty programmes. The curve, the tiers and the roar remain the same, and so does the park across the road.