Vista do apogeu da Grécia

The scene is an imagined view of ancient Greece at its height, a great marble temple still under construction, workers and citizens spread across a sunlit landscape, the whole thing meant as a picture of a civilisation at its cultural peak. The design is Schinkel's, the Berlin architect, who painted the original in the 1820s. This large canvas is not that original. It is a careful copy made in 1836 by August Ahlborn, a younger painter. The copy now matters more than it once did, because Schinkel's version was later lost, so Ahlborn's is the fullest surviving record of how the composition looked. It hangs today in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the museum that also holds Schinkel's own surviving paintings.