The Battlefield at Marathon

This visionary portrayal of a battle was one of Rottmann’s last works. It reproduces — although more succinctly and with greater symbolism — the Marathon fresco of 1848 (encaustic on stone, Neue Pinakothek, Munich). However, this work does not in any sense depict the historical event of the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. when the Greeks decisively defeated the Persians: it has become a battle between the elements, a struggle between light and darkness. Rottmann had already transposed the events onto a cosmic level in his studies, a charcoal sketch on card and a watercolour study from 1841, and the fresco also shows the battle as an elemental struggle. In the 1820s Germany had been swept by enthusiasm for Greek resistance to Turkish rule, which struck a chord in the German consciousness of the time. In 1832 Prince Otto of Bavaria was declared King of Greece and a series of frescos on Greek history was planned for the arcades in the Hofgarten in Munich. In 1834–35 Rottmann, in order to research this work, travelled to Greece, then impoverished despite its proud past. Just as that journey perhaps destroyed Rottmann’s vision of Greece, so the failed 1848 revolution destroyed the German dream of a just state. As a review from 1849 in the Kunstblatt shows, Rottmann’s contemporaries already saw this glowering “Marathon” picture by the ageing artist as a “political landscape.”