View of the Dardanelles

After training in Rome with Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Luigi Mayer traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean with Sir Robert Ainslie, British ambassador to Constantinople. Mayer created a large number of watercolors depicting the sites they visited. A very similar view of the Dardanelles, with only some minor differences from the present composition, is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (inv. SD.656).