Orientalism | Albanian Janissary

Mavi Boncuk | Albanian janissary, by Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, 1825.

Count Otto Magnus Baron von Stackelberg (Tallinn, 25 July 1786 - St Petersburg, 27 March 1837) was one of the first archaeologists, as well as a writer, painter and art historian. In autumn 1808, he set out on a second Italian trip, this time accompanied by Ernst Heinrich Tölken. On their way to Italy, they encountered Jean Paul in Bayreuth and visited the Schleißheimer gallery in Munich. They reached Rome in 1809 and there met and became friends with the archaeologist and art historian Carl Haller von Hallerstein, the Danish archaeologists and philologists Peter Oluf Brondsted and Georg Koes, the German painter Jakob Linckh, and the then Austrian consul in Greece George Christian Gropius. Bröndsted and Koes persuaded Stackelberg to accompany them on their trip to Greece. They intended to produce an archaeological publication upon their return, for which Stackelberg would produce landscapes.

The trip to Greece was long and adventurous, setting out from Naples in July 1810 and not arriving in the Piraeus until September. At Athens, they were joined by the British architects and archaeologists John Foster and Charles Robert Cockerell. The group carried out excavations at several Greek sites – in 1811 at the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, they removed the fallen fragmentary pediment sculptures and on von Hallerstein's recommendation shipped them abroad and sold them the following year to Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria