The romantic ruins
By the 19th century increasing numbers of Grand Tourists were venturing south of Italy to explore Greece and the Levant. This included the young Benjamin Disraeli in the 1830s and Henry Tozer, who published the accounts of his travels in Researches in Highland Turkey of 1869. One of the first artists attracted to the area was Edward Dodwell who as early as 1804 had paused on Corfu and had drawn the landscapes of the island and the views to Butrint.
In 1819 the French artist, Louis Dupré, visited Butrint in the company of the British High Commissioner to Corfu, in order to meet Ali Pasha of Tepelena. He was clearly unimpressed with the fortifications; The fortress, if one can really apply that term to such a miserable tower, is armed with three cannon of mixed calibre… However, the artist took the opportunity to paint the aging Ali Pasha during a duck-hunt at Ksamili. This famous picture depicts Ali Pasha reclining in his brightest coat while being rowed through the reeds.
For others the romanticism of the ruins obviously had a greater appeal. Henry Cook and Captain De La Poer Beresford, in the 1850s, both detailed the Triangular Castle and other towers in prints and lithographs aimed for commercial sale.
As part of a series covering Corfu, the British lithographer Cook produced two prints. The first, entitled ‘The Aga’s House’ depicted (with a little artistic licence) the Venetian Triangular Castle, while the second, called ‘The Robber’s Castle’, shows a view westward along the Vivari Channel with a small watchtower on the rocky northern bank serving as the castle.
An equally romanticised version of the Triangular Castle was included in a series of lithographs of 1855 by De La Poer Beresford called ‘Scenes in Southern Albania.’ The coloured lithograph depicts an empty rocky landscape save for a rather ruined Triangular Castle. A watchtower on a rocky out-crop draws the eye toward the Vivari Channel and Lake Butrint, but of Butrint itself there is little trace.
The best-know artist to draw Butrint was the painter Edward Lear. Already in 1848-49 Lear had undertaken an arduous journey through Albania, immortalised in Journals of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania, but at that time he did not visit Butrint. This he did instead in the 1850s, during his residence on Corfu. Rather than picturesque ruins, Lear’s drawings and paintings capture the grandeur of the landscape. The romantic aspect that his works convey is in the meeting of unspoilt nature and foreign customs.
On the 8th we went early to Delvina, which is immensely picturesque: it seemed odd enough to come all at once again into the use of divans and round tables and cross legs! But the wonderful picturesqueness of Albania is as new and beautiful as ever: and after the eternal, though lovely cities of Corfu, I must say we found it very refreshing.
Edward Lear in a letter to his sister Ann, August 1856
