The Flight of Aeneas from Troy

Barocci spent his career on altarpieces and saints, and apart from portraits this is his only secular subject. It came about because of an emperor. In the late 1580s Rudolf II, in Prague, asked him for something other than a devotional picture, and Barocci sent him Aeneas carrying his old father Anchises out of burning Troy, the household gods clutched in the old man's hands. That first canvas left Prague in 1648 and was later lost. This second version is signed and dated 1598 in the lower left corner. It was made for Giuliano della Rovere, who probably gave it to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew who built this collection. The pose of Aeneas comes from a Raphael fresco in the Vatican, and the round temple behind is Bramante's Tempietto in Rome, restyled as an ancient building. Some 20 years later the young Bernini carved the same subject in marble for Scipione.