Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneas

In Book Four of Virgil's Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas has spent a winter at Carthage as the lover of its queen, Dido, helping to build her city while his ships sit idle. Jupiter sends the messenger god Mercury down to remind him that his future lies in Italy. This is the first of the Carthage scenes Turner showed at the Royal Academy in 1850. In the catalogue he printed lines from his own manuscript poem, the Fallacies of Hope, saying that beneath the morning mist Mercury waited to tell Aeneas of his neglected fleet. The god himself is almost impossible to find. Tate, which holds the painting, suggests he may already have melted into thin air, the way Virgil has him vanish. Aeneas stands at the left, attended by Cupid and wrapped in a cloak of Tyrian purple. In Virgil's poem that cloak is a present from Dido.