The early landscape painters drew from the rich mine of romantic travel landscape painting, which developed quite remarkably from the second half of the 18th to the early 19th century. In this type of landscape painting two opposing traditions converged and were fused: the interest of neoclassicism in antiquity and the romantic vision of the ancient world. The romantic painter did not depict antiquity the way the neoclassic artist did. He would stand in reverie before the ancient ruins, the melancholy remains of a “golden age”, irrevocably lost. Greece as seen by the romantics is suspended in a transcendent space, where immobile historical time rules. The gold twilight which envelops its romantic landscapes might be considered its symbol.