Admiral Tegetthoff in the Naval Battle of Lissa I

On 3 July 1866 Prussia crushed the Austrian army at Königgrätz in Bohemia, and the very next day Vienna offered, through French mediation, to give up Venetia, its last Italian province. Fighting at sea continued. On 20 July, off the Adriatic island of Lissa, the Austrian flagship Erzherzog Ferdinand Max rammed the Italian ironclad Re d'Italia, which sank within three minutes. Austria won the battle, and Venice passed to Italy that autumn regardless.

This is the flagship's bridge in the seconds before the impact. Rear Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff stands at the centre, and beside him Romako placed the ship's captain, Maximilian Daublebsky von Sterneck, who carried out the ramming and later rose to command the whole Austrian navy. Romako worked on the picture between 1878 and 1880, several years after Tegetthoff's death in 1871, on a tall, narrow wooden panel less than a metre high.