A warship’s bridge and helm captured in the midst of battle. In the centre stands a resolute admiral, hands in pockets, legs spread for stability’s sake, while at the helm below sailors strain to keep the ship on a steady course. One sailor looks ahead determinedly while others appear almost bug-eyed in fright. The seaman bearing a hawser raises his cap in salute to his commander, likely uttering the Venetian cry of victory: ‘Viva San Marco!’ Anton Romako’s Tegetthoff in der Seeschlacht von Lissa depicts a critical moment in a battle of short duration but lasting significance.
The Battle of Lissa was fought on 20th July 1866 close to an island that lies off the coast near Split in modern-day Croatia. The newly founded Italian republic was at war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire over sovereignty of the city state of Venice and its navy was tasked with landing troops on Lissa in order to secure a foothold in the eastern Adriatic. A mutton-chopped, 39-year-old, Venetian rear admiral, Wilhelm von Tegetthoff stood in their way.
Tegetthoff had already performed heroic deeds on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1864, he had commanded a small force of warships that had sailed all the way to the North Sea to successfully break a Danish blockade on the Prussian coast. The Battle of Heligoland, the last fought entirely by wooden warships, had ensured the imperially-allied Prussians emerged victorious in the Second Schleswig War.
Two years on, Prussia was now the enemy but without its own navy had co-opted the Italians into the fight. Although only five years in existence, the Regia Marina, which had been formed out of the regional navies of Naples, Sardinia and the Papal states, was significantly larger than the Austro-Hungarian navy. However, the Italians had no shipyards that could yet build iron ships, so they had strengthened their fleet with acquisitions from abroad. Its most powerful units, Re d’Italia and Re Portagallo, had been built in America, while the gunboat Palestro was one of several French-built ironclads. Moreover, the Regia Marina had just come into possession of a Thames-built battleship – the ‘steamed ram’ Affondatore. This all-iron ship, whose name translates as ‘the sinker’, was equipped with 5-inch belt armour and an iron spur projecting 2.5m from its bow.
The steamed ram had its progenitors in the American Civil War. The Battle of Hampton Roads had demonstrated that wooden ships were extremely vulnerable to ramming by any iron-hulled vessel. During this battle, the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia had rammed and sank two Union warships of wood, and would have sunk a third had the similarly armoured USS Monitor not intervened. This had led naval architects to incorporate the feature in all subsequent iron warship designs, and navy chiefs to reappraise a tactic not seen since Roman times. It was confidently predicted by a Times correspondent that Affondatore could defeat the entire Austro-Hungarian fleet single-handedly. However, although the vessel looked fearsome on paper, she had been delivered to the Regia Marina only days before the battle, and her crew had not been worked up to any kind of fighting efficiency.
To oppose a dozen Italian ironclads at Lissa, Tegetthoff could muster only seven, including his flagship Erzherzog Ferdinand Maximilian, a broadside ironclad of 5,000 tons. He was outnumbered in wooden warships too, his most powerful unit being the 94-gun ship-of-the-line Kaiser. Tegetthoff knew he would also be at a disadvantage in terms of the number and accuracy of his guns, many of which were not rifled, but he believed strongly in the Nelsonian tenet that ‘men fight, not ships’, and by adopting the Confederate tactics at Hampton Roads, or in his own words the ‘ramstosstaktik’, believed he could fight on more even terms.
Approaching Lissa aboard the Re d’Italia on the morning of 20th July, the Italian fleet commander Admiral Persano made a fateful decision to transfer his flag to Affondatore while in the middle of positioning his squadron in line-ahead formation. This led to a gap developing between his first and second divisions and left the ram isolated on the disengaged side of his battle-fleet. Tegetthoff, meanwhile, had formed his ships in a chevron formation with his seven ironclads in the leading wedge to better protect his wooden ships behind.
In Nelsonian fashion, Tegetthoff drove his ships directly at the Italian line, deliberately allowing his T to be crossed. This risky tactic subjected his ships to heavy fire from the enemy line, leaving his own unable to effectively reply until they had breached it, and several were badly damaged during this phase of the battle. In the initial confusion, attempts by the Austrians to ram the enemy all in ended in failure. However, turning his ships about, Tegetthoff’s men managed to deal the Palestro a glancing blow. This left the ship incapacitated and she later exploded. Erzherzog then rammed Re d’Italia causing a fatal 18ft breach in the hull, after which the Italian flagship sank swiftly with most of her crew. Another ramming was contrived by Kaiser on Re Portagallo, although this left the wooden ship more damaged than the ironclad, destroying her mainmast and bowsprit. Nevertheless, Tegetthoff’s bold melee tactics succeeded in evening the odds, and after the Austro-Hungarians disengaged, the demoralised Italian commander, who had kept his prize ship largely clear of the furious one-hour engagement, showed no desire to pursue them.
In sinking two Italian ironclads without losing any of his own, and in thwarting planned Italian troop landings on Lissa, Tegetthoff undoubtedly scored a tactical victory, although his actions were ultimately not enough to keep Venice within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it was bartered away in the subsequent peace treaty. Somewhat erroneously hailed as ‘a victory of iron men on wooden ships over wooden men on iron ships’, the battle cost Persano his career and his military honour. Tegetthoff in contrast was promoted to vice-admiral and became hugely influential in Austro-Hungarian naval reforms until his untimely death five years later. His ‘rammstosstaktik’ was equally short-lived, as rapid advances in naval gunnery made armour vulnerable even at longer ranges. In fact, the ram bow was to prove more deadly in peacetime than in war, not least when the British battleships Camperdown and Victoria collided during Mediterranean Fleet manoeuvres in 1893, drowning over 350 seamen.
The Battle of Lissa took place in the midst of a techno-paradigm shift; from wood to iron, from broadside to casemate and turret gun arrangements. Romako’s depiction of this event also represents something of a paradigm shift. Formerly, most naval paintings surveyed a battle from the periphery, focusing more on the actions of ships than those of the men on deck. Romako’s perspective is in contrast narrowed to the heart of the battle; the bridge of the Austro-Hungarian flagship; and the momentary emotions of her crew. As one historian elucidates:
“This bold spatial reduction is accompanied by compressing time into a split second. In a depiction in which battle and victory, action and outcome become one, the episodic character, which had previously dominated, gives way to an emblematic, abbreviated pictorial language and dispenses with the entire decorative apparatus of traditional history painting.” [1]
By condensing a battle into a split-second, Romako’s painting offers something rarely seen in previous naval paintings – suspense. And the unusual perspective that places the viewer’s back to the action deprives them of a literal reading of events. Naturally, when this painting was first exhibited in the Vienna Kunstlerhaus in 1882, the event was still fresh in the minds of the audience. And this foreknowledge is perhaps what freed the painter from conventional literalism.
After completing the above canvas in 1878-80, Romako produced another. The second version is slightly more bellicose, with the officer on the left brandishing a sword and the second sailor from the left standing more centrally over a single wheel wildly waving his cap. Neither work was well received. Considering the artist’s family connections, it is perhaps surprising he did not produce many other nautical paintings. His brother Joseph von Romako was Director of Austrian Naval Construction and had been one of the architects of the Erzherzog Ferdinand Maximillian and several other major units of the Austro-Hungarian fleet.
[1] A. Hussein-Arco, (2010) Anton Romako: Admiral Tegetthoff in the Naval Battle of Lissa, Hirmer Publishers.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 