Aeneas in the Underworld

In the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas goes down alive into the world of the dead to find his father Anchises. His guide is the Sibyl of Cumae, a priestess of Apollo, and what gets him past the ferryman Charon is a golden bough, broken from a tree and carried as a gift for Proserpina, queen of the underworld. Antwerp painters around 1600 took to the story eagerly. It let them fill a small picture with fire, shadow and crowds of souls, a taste for infernal landscape they had inherited from Hieronymus Bosch, and Jan Brueghel the Elder painted his own version in those same years. This one is on copper, about 27 by 41 centimetres, a support on which paint stays bright and the finest detail holds. The museum dates it to around 1600, which would make Frans Francken the Younger barely 20 when he painted it.