Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius Fleeing Troy

In the second book of Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan prince Aeneas lifts his old father Anchises onto his shoulders and leads his family out of the burning city, his small son Ascanius holding his hand and following, the poet says, with steps that cannot keep up. Mattia Preti, working in Rome in the early 1640s, changes one thing. Here Ascanius runs ahead and shows the way, a figure in the foreground that mirrors his father. The museum explains the change through Rome itself. The city's founders were to come from Ascanius's line, so the painter gives the boy both the danger of the moment and the future still to come. On the right Aeneas's wife Creusa looks back, a sign of her fate, since she will be lost in the flight. Behind them Troy burns in a dark landscape, put to fire and sword by the Greeks. Critics have compared the group with Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble of the same three figures, carved around 1619 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The art historian Roberto Longhi first recognised the canvas as an early work by Preti in 1916.