Claude, 'Landscape with Aeneas at Delos', 1672

The story of Aeneas is based on Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid although this scene comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VI: 335 and XIII: 630). Aeneas, prince of Troy, dressed here in an orange cloak, has left his native city and arrived with his father, son Ascanius, and companions on the island of Delos, home of the sun god Apollo. Anius, the King of Delos, dressed in white, gestures to an olive and palm in the centre of the painting, two trees sacred to Apollo. His mother, Latona, clung to these trees while giving birth to Apollo and his sister Diana (Metamorphoses, VI: 335–6). At the top of the classical building to the right is an image of Apollo and Diana killing the giant Tityas, who tried to attack their mother.

The domed temple of Apollo in the background is based on the Pantheon in Rome, the city Aeneas later founds and where he settles with his family. The three golden eagles on the entrance of the temple may allude to Apollo’s father, Jupiter, and the Roman Empire, which adopted the bird as its emblem. Claude combines the real with the imaginary. Grand buildings with entrances supported by columns stand in front of round towers and ruins – architecture he saw in and around Rome. Many of Claude’s noble patrons chose to trace their ancestry to ancient Rome, linking themselves to the grandeur of classical antiquity and to Virgil’s heroic characters. According to an inscription on a drawing of this composition by Claude – part of the Liber Veritatis, a collection of the artist’s drawings after his paintings – this scene was painted for ‘Monsieur Dupassy’, an unknown Frenchman.

This episode was rarely painted during the seventeenth century but it appealed to Claude, who painted it as the first of six scenes from the story of Aeneas in the last ten years of his life. There are aspects of this composition that often appeared in Claude’s paintings either as small details or as the main subject: the shepherd and his goats in the centre and a seaport in the distance with boats arriving or departing. Claude’s skill as a painter of landscapes can be seen in the way he uses trees and buildings to suggest scale and perspective, and a subtlety of colouring – the blue mountains merge with the sea and hazy, softly-lit sky.