Ancient Rome; Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus

Turner showed this at the Royal Academy in 1839 as one half of a pair. This canvas is ancient Rome, imagined at its imperial height, a city of golden marble dissolving into light along the Tiber. Its companion showed the same city in Turner's own day, the Forum reduced to a field of broken ruins. In the foreground the widow Agrippina steps ashore carrying the ashes of her husband Germanicus, a much-loved Roman general who had died far off in the East, and a crowd gathers to mourn. Turner cared less about the archaeology than the mood, and he floods the whole scene with a hazy, almost blinding light. The same year he sent in another picture of something ending, The Fighting Temeraire, an old warship under tow to be broken up.