The March of the Goths

Böcklin painted this in 1881, while he was living in Italy, and its subject reaches far back into that country's past. It shows the Goths on the march, one of the Germanic peoples who, in the last centuries of the Roman world, moved down across Europe and into Italy itself. He paints them as a slow, armed procession crossing open ground, figures out of the deep past rather than a scene from any particular battle or chronicle. Böcklin was drawn again and again to these older, half-legendary worlds, and he gave the ancient wanderings of the northern tribes the same weight he gave to the Greek gods and sea-creatures that fill the rest of his work.