The Burning of Troy

Around 1600 Adam Elsheimer, a young painter from Frankfurt, arrived in Rome, and one of the first things he made there was this night scene, painted on a sheet of copper less than 50 centimetres wide. The story is Virgil's. Troy has fallen to the Greek trick of the wooden horse, and Aeneas escapes the burning city carrying his old father Anchises on his back, followed by his small son Ascanius and his wife Creusa. In the poem Creusa is lost in the confusion and never reaches the gate. Aeneas and his father are in the left foreground, the mother and child to the right, and far back among the flames, a little left of centre near the top, you can find the horse itself. The museum ties the picture to a Flemish speciality, landscapes of fire against a night sky of the kind Jan Brueghel the Elder painted, which Roman collectors were buying eagerly in those years.