Robert Krause (born April 23, 1813 in St. Petersburg, † December 21, 1885 in Munich) was a 19th-century landscape painter. Robert Krause lived as a child first in Russia (St. Petersburg and Moscow), then in Vienna, Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe. In 1824 his parents moved to the castle in Weistropp, between Meissen and Dresden, which his uncle Jacob von Krause, a wealthy merchant and patron, had purchased and furnished with art treasures, including paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Murillo (?), van Dyck, Mengs, and sculptures by Thorvaldsen, now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Inspired by these environments, Robert Krause painted large landscapes by the age of 14. After embarking on his first Grand Tour to Italy and Paris (1829-1831), his father died. From April 1833 to March 1834 Krause was a commercial clerk at the Huth, Grüning & Co. firm in London, from July 1834 at the Valparaíso branch and occasionally in Lima. For this purpose, from March to July 1834, he sailed from Gravesend, near London, to round Cape Horn. On this voyage, a navigational error nearly cost him his life off the Falkland Islands. In 1837 Robert Krause gave up his profession as a merchant and devoted himself entirely to painting. In 1837/38 he crossed the Andes to Argentina together with Moritz Rugendas. During the journey from Mendoza to San Luis, Rugendas suffered severe head injuries in a nighttime fall from his horse. Krause saved his life, abandoned the next trip and returned to Chile with him. He recorded this trip and the accident in his journals. These served the Argentine writer César Aira as a starting point for his novella Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero. After other excursions, Krause embarked for Mexico at Valparaíso in early October 1839, crossed North America from there to Niagara Falls, and returned from Boston to Hamburg in July 1840. In August 1840 he reached Dresden with numerous studies and sketches in his luggage. From 1843 to 1845 he lived again in Paris and from 1845 to 1847 in Baden-Baden, where he met his wife. After their marriage they both moved to Italy. Here he lived in Ariccia in 1847/48, in Rome in 1848, in Sorrento from autumn 1848 to autumn 1849, then again in Rome (until autumn 1851).After the death of his daughter, he moved to Munich (from 1851 to 1853). During his summer stay in Weinheim in 1853, his wife had a fatal accident. He then moved to Düsseldorf, where he lived from 1853 to 1859, leaving his two children in his care.

Krause was a member of the artists' association Malkasten from 1856 to 1862 and co-founder of the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft from 1856. He was a friend of Carl Friedrich Lessing, who painted a portrait of him in 1858. From 1859 he lived in Munich. From there he traveled to Italy even more often. From June to November 1885 he visited his son Paul, who was a government adviser in Constantinople, and there he met his daughter-in-law and granddaughter Angelina Krause. Together with his son he traveled through the Pontic mountains near Trapezunt (Trabzon). After his return, he died in Munich in December 1885 from a chronic liver disease and was buried in the northern cemetery on December 24.

Villa Gordiani and Tor de' Schiavi: Villa Gordiani is an archaeological park in Rome, located at the third mile of the Via Prenestina, containing the remains of a vast patrician villa, traditionally identified with that of the imperial Gordiani family, which gave three Roman emperors of the third century, Gordian I, Gordian II, and Gordian III. The complex is mentioned in ancient sources; according to the Historia Augusta (Gordiani, xxxii.1-3), it had a portico of two hundred columns, with fifty columns of Caria marble, fifty of red porphyry, fifty Phrygian and fifty Numidian. In addition to the other structures, such as the basilicas, ancient sources record the baths as among the finest in Rome and without equal in the empire. The area is traditionally identified with an estate of the Gordiani family, and thus the structures, and particularly the patrician villa, are identified with third-century possessions of this family. In the Historia Augusta (Gordiani, 20.32) it is reported that three basilicas centenariae, that is, 100 feet long, were built in this complex. The patrician villa, still buried in almost its entirety for preservation reasons, seems to be the oldest nucleus of the archaeological park, even predating the settlement of the imperial Gordiani family. It has not been possible, however, to date it accurately partly because the building was subject to several remakes and extensions over time and partly because a systematic and thorough study of the villa has never been entirely conducted. Of later date to the villa, datable between the 2nd and 4th centuries, are the columbarium, cisterns and vestibule. The monumental entrance to the villa, facing Via Prenestina, is an octagonal hall, probably dating from the Diocletian-Constantine I period (late 3rd century-early 4th century), when there was work to add monumental parts. The cistern, from the 2nd century, is two-story, with two tanks with vaulted ceilings. On the right side of Via Prenestina, at the corner with Via Olevano Romano, is a columbarium datable between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, discovered in 1958. The place-name Tor de' Schiavi derives from the family of Vincenzo Rossi dello Schiavo, who in 1571 came into possession of the area, formerly belonging to the Colonna family, whose troops, in 1347, moved from here to Rome to fight against Cola di Rienzo.