Aeneas Telling Dido of the Fall of Troy
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833) · 1815
Dido, queen of Carthage, reclines on a couch and listens as Aeneas, seated opposite her, tells the story of the fall of Troy. One of her arms rests on her knee, the other lies around the shoulders of the child beside her, Aeneas's son Ascanius, or rather the god Cupid who has taken his shape and is slipping the ring from her finger. Behind the couch Dido's sister Anna leans forward, resting on the backrest. The light falls on the queen's pale dress and on the gestures of the hero.
The subject is from the first and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid, at the moment when Dido's love for the Trojan is born. Guérin signed and dated the canvas in eighteen fifteen and exhibited it at the Salon of eighteen seventeen, where it was admired for its softness of colour, a change from the hard lighting of his earlier work. The state acquired it in eighteen eighteen for twenty four thousand francs, and it hung at the Luxembourg museum before coming to the Louvre. Look at the child's hand on the ring: the whole tragedy of Dido, her abandonment and her death, begins with that small theft.
Did You Know? The child nestled against Dido is not really Ascanius but Cupid in disguise, sent by Venus to make the queen fall in love, and he is quietly pulling the ring from her finger.
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