The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet

In 1643 a papal diplomat, Cardinal Girolamo Farnese, came home to Rome after years abroad, and he ordered this from Claude Lorrain. The scene is from Virgil's Aeneid: the exiled women of Troy, worn out from following their men across the sea, set fire to their own ships so the wandering has to stop and they can finally settle in Sicily. Up in the top right Claude paints a bank of dark cloud, the rainstorm Aeneas prays for to save the fleet. It is a pointed subject for a man just back from a long, itinerant career hunting Protestant heresy in the Alps, a picture about the longing to stop moving. Claude sets the whole drama in his usual golden harbor light, the burning masts small against a calm morning sea.