Page 67 - Beholding Liberty!

PERISTYLE
I.1.17
Johann Carl Christoph Wilhelm Joachim Haller von Hallerstein (1774-1817) View of Mount Parnassos, ca. 1810-17
watercolour on paper, 58 x 127 cm
Hellenic Parliament Art Collection, inv. n. 845
THE GERMAN ARCHITECT and archaeol- ogist Johann Carl Christoph Wilhelm Joachim Haller von Hallerstein, after having studied the monu- ments of the Italian peninsula, came to Greece in 1810 to conduct archaeological research. In Ath- ens, where he arrived in the company of the ar- chaeologists and artists Jakob Linkh, Peter Oluf Brøndsted, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg and Georg Koës, he met the architects Charles Robert Cockerell and John Foster. He devoted himself to the study of Athenian monuments, then excavated and studied the temple of Athena Aphaia in Aegina
and the temple of Apollo at Bassae of Phigaleia, in the Peloponnese, and later in Milos. He died at Ampelakia in Thessaly.
In one of his many tours of continental Greece, he produced this image of Mount Parnassus and the natural landscape before it. The lush vegetation in the foreground introduces the gaze to the moun- tainous mass that dominates the horizon; the two figures of armed Greeks in the tree shade popu- late the composition, offering a sense of scale. The idyllic beauty of the landscape reflects the contem- porary taste for the picturesque.
THE AWAKENING OF HELLENISM From Archaeoloatry to Philhellenism 67