Latinus Offering his Daughter Lavinia to Aeneas in Matrimony

Tiepolo painted this around 1753, just back in Venice after three years in Würzburg, where he had covered the prince-bishop's residence with an enormous ceiling fresco spread over its grand staircase. He was the most sought-after decorator in Europe, and a canvas like this carries the manner he brought home, bright and airy and staged like theatre, its figures dressed in silks and armour out of his own imagination rather than any real antiquity. The story comes from Virgil's Aeneid. Latinus, king of the Latins in central Italy, offers his daughter Lavinia in marriage to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who has just landed in Italy after the fall of Troy. For a Roman reader that union was the beginning of everything, the match from which the line leading to Rome itself was said to descend.