Der Junotempel in Agrigent

Caspar David Friedrich painted this Greek temple in Sicily in 1828, and he did it without ever setting foot in Italy. He worked instead from a print, an aquatint made after another artist's watercolour, reconstructing the ruined Temple of Hera at Agrigento from his studio in Dresden. The building he drew was already more than 2,000 years old, sacked by Carthaginians and patched up by Romans, and by Friedrich's day it had become a magnet for northern travellers chasing the classical past. Friedrich stayed home and imagined it. He gives the broken columns the same still, solemn light he usually saved for the forests and coastlines of his native Baltic north.