Apotheosis of Aeneas

In 1764 Tiepolo finished the ceiling of the throne room in the new royal palace in Madrid, and the next ceiling he took on was the guard room, the hall of the halberdiers who stood watch for the king. For it he went to Virgil. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, rises toward a Temple of Immortality with winged figures of Victory and Justice, while his mother Venus arrives with the armour the god Vulcan forged for him. This canvas, 67 centimetres tall, is one of the oil sketches in which Tiepolo worked that design out before the fresco was painted. A second sketch for the same ceiling belongs to Harvard, across the river in Cambridge, and the two museums date them differently, Boston to about 1762 and Harvard to around 1765. The Boston one came as a gift from the collector Edward Jackson Holmes in 1927.