Columns of Olympian Zeus

Vikentios Lantsas - one of the first professors at the newly-established School of Fine Arts in Athens - concerned himself par excellence with archaeological landscapes, a genre which enjoyed a particular vogue in the mid nineteenth century. Under the influence of Romanticism, Greek antiquities, as an embodiment of the idea of the free spirit which characterised ancient Greek thought and found its complete expression in the struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, were objects of special artistic interest. The works of the painter-travellers who had flooded into Greece served for Greek artists as points of reference for their own cultural identity, while whatever had to do with the ancient world (ruins, monuments, temples) was a confirmation of cultural continuity.