The antique theatre in Taormina.

The ancient Greek theatre at Taormina in Sicily — hewn into the hillside with its stage opening onto a view of the coast and Etna — was among the most visited and most painted archaeological sites in Europe, combining the spectacle of classical ruins with a landscape of extraordinary beauty. Peder Severin Krøyer visited Sicily on travels in southern Europe, and his 1901 view of the Taormina theatre captures the ruin in its landscape setting rather than as a documentary reconstruction. Krøyer was by 1901 in declining health — his mental illness would become increasingly disabling in subsequent years — and these Mediterranean journeys were in part recuperative. The theatrical ruin, with its evocation of absent voices and lost civilization, was a subject well suited to his Symbolist-tinged sensibility.

Krøyer renders the Greek theatre and its landscape setting with his characteristic plein-air directness, using the Mediterranean light's intensity to justify a brighter, more saturated palette than he typically employed in Skagen. The ancient stonework is treated with the same atmospheric touch he applied to contemporary Danish subjects.