In 1828 Carus travelled to Italy as a companion to Prince Friedrich August of Saxony. He published his travel memoirs as a book in 1835 and captured them in an image in this work, of which several versions exist. In the soft light of evening, it shows Raphael and Michelangelo gazing from a hill onto Rome and St. Peter’s. Carus combines a real landscape and atmosphere with two long dead artists idealized by Romanticism and a building on which both collaborated but which neither ever saw completed.