Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

Turner showed this in 1812, when Napoleon still looked unstoppable and Britain had been at war with France for years. A decade earlier, during a brief peace, Turner had seen in Paris Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Napoleon on a rearing horse, calm and commanding as he crossed the Alps. This is his reply. He reaches back to 218 BC and Hannibal’s army struggling over the same mountains, then nearly buries the whole ancient host under a black arc of storm that curls around a pale sun. You have to search the lower canvas to find the soldiers at all, tiny and scattered as local tribesmen fall on them. Turner was painting a warning wrapped in history, hoping the modern conqueror would end the way this one’s men do here, small under the weather.