General Makrygiannis commissions Demetrios Zografos to document the Struggle in painting

“When I came to Athens, I hired a painter, a foreigner from the West, and I asked him to paint the fights. I did not know his language. He did two or three, they were not good, I paid him, and he left. Then, I brought in from Sparta, a fighter, Panagiotis Zografos was his name…. He and I walked the hills, and I showed him our positions, our fights, the leaders of the armies, the Turkish army, the Greek army…”
This excerpt from the Memoirs of Makrigiannis transpires the aesthetic and narrative difference between Turkish-occupied Greece and the West. Vernacular art, with its simple, bold style and mostly descriptive nature, was in full contradiction with the illusional technique of depiction, which was used in the West since the Renaissance.
Panagiotis Zografos (Apr. 1790 - after 1843) was from Sparta, and he was a chieftain during the Revolution of 1821. Very little is known about his studies and his work. He was a painter of religious icons which explains the influence of the Byzantine artistic style on his mannerism.