Ideal Landscape with Temple of Juno, Agrigento

Paintings by Jakob Philipp Hackert are often praised for their naturalistic illustration of Italian landscapes. Yet appearances are deceiving. In his workshop, Hackert composed the supposedly realistic depiction from set pieces and drew on different situations. This ideal landscape shows a view into the garden of the castle park of Caserta near Naples. The ruin on the left of the picture, however, represents the Temple of Juno in Agrigento, Sicily. As animating elements, Hackert added a small herd of cows and two resting shepherdesses in the foreground. It was not at all Hackert’s intention to reproduce reality, but to perfectly compose an "ideal image" of a landscape.